Inhabitat's Week in Green: pod homes and electric highways
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.
When we first saw the tiny off-grid Ecocapsule pod home, we thought it looked too good to be true -- but last week Nice Architects announced plans to produce the self-sustaining dwelling next year. The Ecocapsule harvests the sun, wind and rain, and it can be easily moved practically anywhere in the world (sort of like a super-futuristic Airstream). Speaking of portable housing, this past week M2C unveiled a series of modular POD tents that can be connected together to create camping communities, and we showcased eight buses that have been converted into amazing mobile homes. Meanwhile, a smartphone-controlled spaceship home landed in Spain, and a team of architects and engineers launched a crowdfunding campaign to build a real-life Lord of the Rings city in England.
Electric vehicles are limited by their range -- but what if they were charged by the roads beneath them? That's exactly what the UK hopes to find out as it begins testing the world's first electric highways that wirelessly charge EVs. Cities are terrible places to drive -- you have to contend with traffic, parking and constant red lights. That's why we love the WalkCar -- a tiny electric vehicle that fits in a tote bag. In Tesla news, we pondered whether the automaker is planning to launch a fleet of self-driving cars to compete with Uber, and we explained why the company is not actually losing $4,000 every time it sells a Model S. And in Italy, a spate of unbearably hot weather is allegedly playing a role in causing cars to literally melt in the streets.
Do you wish you had more natural light in your room? Then check out Lucy, a tiny robot that bounces sunlight into every corner of your house. We also showcased a new high-tech showerhead that cuts water use 70 percent by atomizing it into millions of tiny droplets. In other design news, we're smitten by Arckit -- a collection of architectural building blocks that let you create scale models of practically any structure. In wearable tech, Atelier Teratoma created a funky, wearable space backpack that turns into a portable picnic set. Thoth Technology patented a 12-mile-high inflatable space elevator that could reduce the cost of reaching orbit by 30 percent. And you can add brains and violins to the growing list of objects that can be 3D printed.
