The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced Wednesday that it is extending for another year its Green Technology Pilot Program to fast-track the evaluation of patent applications for "cleantech," including inventions related to environmental quality, energy conservation, development of renewable energy and greenhouse gas emission reduction. The program, initiated in December 2009, will now [...]

A casual spin last night through the pile of ads inserted inside my local Sunday newspaper made it clear to me that the best possible thing we all can do this week to honor Earth is to shop till we drop. The first screaming banner I saw was this: "Chop Your Food Bill and Protect [...]

Patent applications for so-called green technologies will be put on the approval fast track thanks to a new pilot program announced Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This could mean patent approvals in a year rather than the standard 40-month wait time, giving inventors of alternative fuels, improved carbon capture [...]

Editor’s Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students was traveling up New York’s Hudson River this week on the New Clermont, a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat’s motors. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan’s Pier 84 and was to cover 240 kilometers (at [...]

Okay, I have to be honest with you. I love a city, and a downtown with walkways and tunnels and bus stops that tell me where my buses are via GPS and everything else, but sometimes you can just have more connectivity than you need. Remember the internet-connected toaster, that singed the weather forecast into [...]

Bricks, sticks, and hay are decidedly pedestrian building materials in comparison to a new building that just opened to the public last Thursday in Hamburg, Germany. Ambitious architects have built an apartment covered in a thin layer of living, breathing algae. The building, known as BIQ (for Bio Intelligent Quotient), meets the extremely stringent passive-house [...]

Happy Earth Day, everyone! In honor of the day, here’s a modified re-post of piece I wrote recently for LAist. Figure 1: Photo by poloroid-girl via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr. The great philosopher Kermit the Frog once said, “It’s not that easy being green.” Maybe he was on to something. You can’t walk three [...]