According to a CNN.com article entitled “Honey, the baby’s spacewalking”, some parents with a common video baby monitor system have been able to pick up video of the current space mission from the space shuttle Atlantis. It has NASA and the manufacturer a bit miffed about how it’s doing that, as NASA claims it isn’t the source of the broadcast; regardless, it’s been quite an entertaining mistake for the owners.

My guess, if it really isn’t NASA or the International Space Station broadcasting at a similar frequency back to earth, is probably caused by someone in the area that hacked together a video transmission signal at the same frequency and was streaming the live video from NASA.com. It is quite an entertaining accident, if you ask me, and I’d be interested in knowing what the truth behind the signal really is.

Apparently, electric vehicles, “green” houses, wind power generation, and solar power are not new ideas by any stretch of the imagination.

According to a NYTimes article about Edison, the Magician of Menlo Park envisioned cars running solely on clean electrical power and houses not connected to “the grid.”

Edison worked with Henry Ford to produce running electric vehicles (Who’d have thought that Ford, of all companies would have had one of the first, though almost a hundred years ago and discontinued from production?) and build a model home with all modern luxuries that could be powered off of renewable energy in the ‘burbs of New Jersey. He even went so far as to state “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

If that’s not forward thinking that’s 100 years ahead of his own time, I don’t know what is. It’s too bad we didn’t listen to him until the last 15-20 years.

[via treehugger.com]

What do you get when you combine a few trees, some scaffolding, solar power, water recycling system, ancient and modern technology combined, and a whole lot of creativity? A darn cool tree house…

[Via Digg [Via SciFi.com Tech Blog]]

A new company named Soliant Energy has created a rather ingenious way of minimizing Photovoltaic materials and silicon by rotating to follow the sun and focusing the sun’s rays onto a smaller piece of PV. Using those techniques, Soliant Energy has been able to get the same power output of traditional PV panels from up to 80% less PV surface area and a significantly smaller initial investment. On top if it being more affordable, the design also makes it more ideal for roof mounting than traditional pole-mounted solar panels that track the sun.

I’m going to have to look into these when the product matures more and is finally released to the public. Hopefully, by the time they are released, they become more affordable and more efficient. With solar energy becoming easier to attain for the common man, this could be the shift that this world needs to greatly reduce our reliance on oil.

[Via EcoGeek[Via MIT’s Technology Review]]

Just today I was joking with Lauren that the US should making it illegal to use traditional incandescent light bulbs given our current knowledge of the environmental and monetary savings associated with using compact florescent (CFL) bulbs. Well, ironically, Treehugger.com agrees with me for good reason (thought they beat me to the punch by a few days)!

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