You can snap photos all day with a new camera strap powered by the sun.  As Inhabitat puts it, photography is the art of light, so what better way to enter the artistic environment than by powering your art with the sun.

Wired’s Gadget Lab tested the device and came up with one piece of critical feedback.  The strap’s cables connect directly to the batter port, meaning you cannot have a battery in place as a backup.  This isn’t a challenge when in the sun.  However, when those clouds roll out, it’s time to switch to a more reliable power source.

As film has become virtually obsolete with the digital revolution, so soon, will batteries perhaps.

What can a gecko’s foot teach us about adhesives? After noticing the gecko’s unique ability to run up vertical surfaces and hold onto glass with just one toe, scientists at UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Milisystems Lab are questioning the ways we think about superglue and duct tape.

Animals have developed a plethora of ways to adhere to surfaces in their environment. Scientists once believed that this “stickiness” was accomplished by natural glues composed of sugars and oils in combination with hooked claws and light body weights. However, a closer look with a high-powered imaging and microscopic force sensors revealed that the gecko foot is covered with tiny hair-like structures called setae. These hairs split even further into tips with surfaces as small as 200 nanometers in diameter. The hairs adhere independently of surface polarity using van der Waals forces. They work on hard or soft textures and on dry or wet surfaces, can hold on under water, in a vacuum,  and can  support the entire weight of the gecko with just one toe pad. The gecko manually un-sticks itself with a toe curling motion, which can happen quite quickly as it runs up walls or tree trunks.

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Paradigm shifts require that we start educating our youth on the advantages and importance of green living.  Educating our children is getting easier with new media and technology.  This super-cool toy teaches the science behind fuel cells in an easy-to-understand way.

Your kids (or you) can put together a car powered by water (via fuel cell technology).  As you of course know, fuel cells combine a fuel like hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity.  For a more in-depth description, read this.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, there was no kit that would allow me to build a car that runs on water.  Who knows, that could have made all the difference.

Read the full story here.

Look, I want an electric car as much as the next guy.  My commute is inside of 25 miles, like 99% of us, so distance isn’t an issue.  Neither is recharging, I live in a very progressive state with a row of electric-car charging stations at my favorite grocery store.  I just can’t swallow the price tag of a new car.  Here is one solution I found that may just be how I spend my next few weekends.

Ingredients:

1 Geo Metro

1 Electric forklift

1 Electric motor

a dash of spare parts

a smidge of random batteries

Bake for a few weekends of hard work, and voila!  The result is a medium speed, medium range, cheap-as-heck electric commuter car.  This one was built by 2 DIY’ers in Toronto to get them from point A to point B for little cash, no pollution, no noise.

It’s called: The Forkenswift!

Read more at their website.

With all of the hype about green and energy efficient mobile chargers out there, its hard to sift through what is fact and what is fiction. And anyway, who has time to wait for the sun to charge their iPod?

The next best thing for impatient eco-conscious folks is the YoGen universal mobile charger. YoGen has introduced the first real energy-saving charger compatible for most mobile devices including iPods, iPhones, digital readers like the Kindel, cell phones, navigation units, PDA’s and more.

The best part? A few tugs on the string of this device charges your mobile unit in a few minutes and lasts as long as a charge from an energy sucking wall charger.

And if that wasn’t enough, the YoGen is mobile, so the next time you find your mobile devices are down on the juice when you’re on top of a mountain, or hiking alone in the woods, pull this light-weight baby out and charge away.

Hippie Magazine reports on eco-innovations. Eco Innovations are products, gadgets, inventions, etc. that have been developed to address the ever-increasing threat of climate change. Although some may never make it to the hands of consumers, they are still innovations with the right intention.

Here is one such eco-innovation: vehicle shocks that generate electricity. As is the case with some of the coolest inventions ever, one version of this gadget came from MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Consider the possibilities: refrigeration trucks powered by the bumps in the road, headlights running off of clean(ish) energy… they’re endless!

Researchers in the UK are taking a different spin on the technology – building cogs into the roadway to generate energy from the cars bouncing on them. Some things are just better done in America.

From EcoGeek

We’ve all seen these cool little electric cars driving around.  They aren’t much to look at, but beat the eco-pants off the prius.  They are entirely electric powered and are charged nightly at home.  No mess, no maintenance, no hassle, no extra features.  Although they’re small, the normal pricetag of over $10,000 is kind of hefty.

Ecogeek reported on a program allowing Oklahoma residents to purchase one of these babies, called the COCO, for less than $900.  What a deal!  This is one eco-innovation we’re going to call a political-eco-innovation.  Although the adjusted pricetag is clearly below MSRP, it will stimulate the economy and remove polluting cars from the road.  Rock on OK.

Many companies start with this “We package our products in 20% post-consumer content materials” and end there.  Apple took it about 12 step further by evaluating their products’ environmental impact form sourcing materials to consumer use.

When Apple identified that 53% of their environmental impact is in the use of their products by the consumer.  Instead of just claiming to have “made our products as efficient as possible”, they outline exactly what that means.

They break down energy usage to “milliwatts” and describe how processors stop computing between keystrokes to save minute but important amounts of energy.

Read much more at Apple’s website.

This is the coolest handy eco gadget we’ve come across in a long time. This is an alarm clock that will run for up to 8 weeks on water and a splash of lemon juice. Now that’s a refreshing wake up. Try this added tip, rather than waste a whole lemon when you want to refill it, get a squeeze bottle of lemon juice from the grocery store (the ones that look like lemons). They last forever and should power your new alarm clock for years! Get it here.

Now your kids can be reminded to turn the lights off when not in use with this somewhat creepy little ghost. He turns yellow after the lights have been on for 4+ hours and an angry red when on for 8+ hours. It might scare your kids, but even they need a kick in the environmental pants every once in a while. Read more at Gajitz.