It’s not surprising from the look of the Waugh Thistleton 66-unit scheme for Ramsgate Street in Dalston, London, that it’s intended to be super-high tech: it’s thin, it’s sleek, and it’s got weird crenelations that look all futury. What you can’t see, however, is the helical wine turbine on the backside which will not only provide power for the building (and therefore reduce environmental impact) but reduce cost for the inhabitants, which is important as it’s being constructed in a low-income area. The turbine is expected to provide 15% of electricity required to run the building. Also, it looks incredibly cool and/or sexy (pick two). [GT]

Waugh Thistleton [via Dezeen]

Shopping malls could be in danger of losing their cachet as bastions of gratuitous consumerism and excess if they all go the route of the Ciudad de las Comunicaciones. Located in Madrid, this office complex sports an enormous array of 16,600 solar panels on its 1km long rooftop, giving it the capacity to generate 3 megawatts of energy. Result: savings of 15% on climate conditioning in winter, and 34% in summer, plus an unknown (but non-trivial) amount on lighting. Investment on the project was 21.8 million euros. [GT]

Office complex – Ciudad de las Comunicaciones [via Metaefficient]

If rain approaches Beijing during the summer Olympics in 2008, cloud-seeders will go aloft with silver iodide to force premature rainfall to prevent it from reaching the Olympic grounds. China employs 1,500 weather controllers which have eliminated hail in almost a half million square kilometers of land and created 250 billion tons of rain since 1999. By 2010 China intends to institute a national command center to co-ordinate the China Meteorological Administration with the military forces used to enforce their whims on nature. Apparently Three Gorges Dam was just a side project! [GT]

Chinese Government To Control Olympic Weather

Since most mobile phone power draw happens when the phone is open, it’s logical to want to have it somehow magically be recharging while you talk, perhaps through the rays flung off by a majestic, benevolent, floating sphere that also makes the crops grow. But seriously, with monochrome LCDs it’s semi-feasible to make screens where 75% of sunlight passes through, where it would end up in a solar cell. The thin-film involved is still on the expensive side, but with power consumption skyrocketing as mobiles get increasingly complicated, solar power is a seductive solution. Plus, the iPhone has demonstrated people are (theoretically at least) willing to pay gobs for a phone if they think it’s All That, so all it really takes is Al Gore appearing on Richard and Judy wearing nothing but a thong and a Motorola solar-charge phone for demand to take off. [GT]

Display and solar cell device [via Treehugger]

The idea of putting a solar panel on a briefcase in order to power a laptop is pretty good, but it does tend to make an already clunky carryall even clunkier. The Picard Solar Bag brings some subtlety to…

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It's only logical that where you've got people generating heat, someone's going to want them to generate light. In this case, that means a gym in Hong Kong has hooked up batteries to their exercise machines, so that the…

Ex-defense minister of Canada Paul Hellyer has recently declared that he believes the best solution to global warming is alien technology. He calls on all governments to immediately disclose any alien tech they've been hoarding, for the good of…