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Inhabitat's Week in Green: eco-friendly Christmas trees, Kingdom of Erebor Lego replica and a ring that translates sign language
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. At this time of year, you tend to see lots of cars with Christmas trees strapped to their roofs. But that could become a less common sight due to climate change -- extreme weather events are making life harder for tree farmers, causing tree shortages in the northeastern US. As an alternative, Inhabitat rounded up a list of this year's top eco-friendly faux Christmas trees. In New York, this year's Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is lit up with 45,000 solar-powered LED lights. In the spirit of the season, Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov took some stunning macro photos of snowflakes by hacking a cheap Canon PowerShot. Inhabitat also unveiled its annual green gadget gift guide, and we shared the real story behind the "design" of Christmas (hint: It involves Santa and 'shrooms).
MIT's Copenhagen Wheel turns your bike into a hybrid, personal trainer
You really can't fault MIT's branding strategy here. Debuting at the biggest climate change conference since Kyoto, its Copenhagen Wheel is a mixture of established technologies with the ambition to make us all a little bit greener and a little bit more smartphone-dependent. On the one hand, it turns your bike into a hybrid -- with energy being collected from regenerative braking and distributed when you need a boost -- but on the other, it also allows you to track usage data with your iPhone, turning the trusty old bike into a nagging personal trainer. The Bluetooth connection can also be used for conveying real time traffic and air quality information, if you care about such things, and Copenhagen's mayor has expressed her interest in promoting these as an alternative commuting method. Production is set to begin next year, but all that gear won't come cheap, as prices for the single wheel are expected to match those of full-sized electric bikes. Video after the break.
