Ford Motor Co. was in New York City on Tuesday (in anticipation of the upcoming International Auto Show that starts later this week) to show off its first attempt to go gas-free—the Transit Connect Electric.  Scientific American went for a spin in the all-electric compact van (about the size of a minivan but with much [...]

Cash-strapped General Motors Corp., which is still mulling what to do with its failing gas-guzzling Hummer Division, today showed its greener side when it unveiled Project PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), a compact, battery-operated two-wheeler for two that it’s developing with Segway, Inc., maker of the upright electric  lawn mower–like vehicle that debuted in [...]

One of my first posts for Plugged In involved the electric car. Now, remember: it’s hard to get too worked up about electric cars. They’re better than gas burners, to be sure, but that’s setting the bar pretty low: electric cars are basically coal-burners that continue to enable sprawl and all its problems while being [...]

The television show “Revolution” is getting ready to start, with its plot based on the failure of the electrical grid. That’s nothing new, though — the most recent Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” and Spiderman movie, “The Amazing Spiderman,” came out this summer, each with significant events or  themes involving infrastructure systems. Half of the [...]

The world is trying to remind you to keep your eyes open, to take nothing for granted. Don’t ignore the quotidian: look there for breakthroughs. Consider the electric sky created by a German electric engineering firm to mimic the changing cloudscape of life under the real blue sky. The idea is to improve workers’ senses [...]