Inhabitat's Week in Green: worlds largest LEGO Christmas tree, turbine powered LEDs and a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green.
This week Inhabitat got into the spirit of the holiday season as we reported that a French firm wants to transform the Eiffel Tower into a gigantic tree, we brought you the world's largest LEGO Christmas tree, and we watched GE flip the switch on the new National Christmas Tree, which is decked out with high-tech LED lights. We also spotted a seriously sweet Star Wars AT-AT walker made entirely from gingerbread, and we shined the spotlight on the amazing life-size light-up ice palaces that rise each year at the Harbin snow festival in China.
Speaking of luminous energy landscapes, this week we took a look at Bruce Munro's stunning new fiber optic LED light installation in the UK and Patrick Marold's gigantic fields of wind-visualizing turbine-powered LEDs. We also learned that a UK crematorium plants to turn waste heat into energy to sell back to the national grid, and we saw researchers develop a new breed of graphene lithium-air batteries that are able to store amazing amounts of energy. We also brought you several dispatches from the field of high-tech fashion as researchers developed a terminator-like contact lens that projects images onto the eye and Lexus turned a set of hybrid parts into haute couture.
The world of green transportation also heated up as we showcased a streamlined futuristic sports car that gets 151 miles to the gallon and we conducted an exclusive interview with the designer of the Fisker Karma, which was just named the car of the year by BBC's Top Gear. Meanwhile we brought you the hottest news from the Tokyo Auto show as Toyota unveiled its color-changing Fun-Vii car and Honda rolled out its gorgeous EV-STER sports car with a twin-lever steering joystick. Finally, Nissan announced plans to release a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle by 2015 and we learned that California's high-speed rail plans are moving full steam ahead despite the fact that the project has tripled in cost.
