Claudia Escobar is an eccentric Chilean fashion designer or at least that’s what she is demonstrating here with her new creation.

It’s swim wear and clothing made from discarded bits of Scottish salmon skin.

Her Lycra-trimmed, ultra-mini salmon-skin bikini are durable and elastic (how else?). They are also now part of a luxury clothing line and go for £250 (~ $495).

Smells fishy? Who cares?

Though it’s a very green solution we’re not sure how many women will buy this salmon-skin bikini for the summer of `08.

If you’re the “lucky” guy to undress someone who wears one, we’d definitely like to hear from you. What’s it like, how did you react in front of your mermaid?

Claudia Escobar recently returned from a trip to pick up wool from sheep in the Scottish islands. Dare we imagine what her next bikini will look like?

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Osaka’s Sharp Corp has a new residential solar cell panel (polycrystaline) that Sharp says has the highest solar-to-electric conversion rate to date. The new environmentally friendly product is called SunVista and will be released on Jun 18th. The addition of a third main electrode instead of the conventional two is the difference.

Sharp’s conversion rate will be 14.4% compared to the until now best 13.7% of Kyocera.Panels will retail for about $460-990. And Sharp wants to sell 17,000 of them each month!

Let’s see, what’s 17,000 x $600-700?

source

In the do it yourself category we have Ma Yanjun, a farmer in Mizhi county, Shaanxi province in China, that managed to build a solar water heating system using empty beer bottles. The reason he did it, was to allow his 73-year old mother to take a warm bath every day.

Since there was no warm water in the area and he couldn’t afford paying the big bucks for a hi-tech solar panel, Ma had to be innovative and instead of photovoltaic panels he used dozens of beer bottles. He finished work in 2006 and ever since, he attracted the envy of 20 other local farmers, which needed his help and skills.

We don’t care who emptied those beer bottles and want to congratulate Ma for his achievement.

After completing their $6 million capital raise the Australian company, BioPower Systems, is working hard on testing what could be the undersea equivalent of a wind farm that will turn wave energy into clean, eco-friendly, renewable electricity. Using a lightweight design in harmony with the ecosystem, the bioWAVE and bioSTREAM devices will reside beneath the water surface, moving and swaying in tune with the ocean’s forces.

The concept looks great, but I wonder who’s going to do the cleaning after a couple of months of staying underwater. Would it affect the whole process of creating energy? Probably, buy I trust these guys with coming up with a solution.

Here’s a video on NationalGeographing where they test the whole concept.

Though they have their reasons, I can’t figure out why they’ve built such a big umbrella “house”. The project uses modified umbrellas and was put up by Kengo Kuma who did it for the Milan Triennale Museum of design.

The umbrellas are zipped together along their outer edges to form the modular shape you can see in the pictures, and each of them have two extra flaps hanging from the central segment which are used for different compositions. The Umbrella House has a kitchen area, a sleeping mat if you need a power nap and should be great for on-campus gatherings, don’t you think?

via DesignBoom

Not sure what you will think but the pre-historic family we all know, The Flintstones, got arrested in Brussels, Belgium, while driving towards the European Parliament building.

It wasn’t Fred or Wilma to get the penalty, but six Greenpeace activists dressed as cavemen driving the “Flintstone car”, that protested on the influence of the auto industry on proposals to curb carbon dioxide emissions from car. This week the European Parliament will start debating on the legislation that forces down CO2 emissions from cars, with fines on manufacturers that fail to comply.

“Our activists and their zero-emission vehicle are raising the alarm about the influence this dinosaur industry exercises over EU climate policy,” said Greenpeace transport campaigner, Melanie Francis.

Not sure about you but I remember the pedal powered ‘Flintstone car’ driver that got his traffic ticket dismissed, so I hope nothing happens to these six well-intended cavemen.

World’s number 5 oil exporter, Norway has big energy resources and by 2025 it could become “Europe’s battery”.

The island of Utsira, Norway – image by tualatin

A recent study talked about developing sea-based wind parks that would allow access up to 8,000 megawatts of renewable energy, equivalent to about eight nuclear power plants. Exporting green energy would actually help the European Union to attain their goal to get 20-percent of the total energy from renewable sources such as solar, wind, waves or hydro power.

The investment for the wind parks would cost up to $44 billion but if we consider they pump out 2.2 million barrels of oil per day, it will probably take only 6 months to cover it.

Norway has the longest coastline in Europe and using wind power they expect to have “access to up to 40 terrawatt hours of renewable energy in 2020-2025, of which about half would come from offshore wind power.” If the authorities will consider the project and it will be built, it may cut 20 million tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions.

Way to go Norway.

A recent survey on 2,600 participants from the top eight richest cities in the world, Tokyo, New York, Paris, London, Milan, Moscow, Toronto and Frankfurt, revealed  that Tokyoites  “don’t want to sacrifice a convenient lifestyle to prevent global warming.”

Though Japan is at the cutting edge of green technologies, its citizens are the least eco-minded in the world. They came last for considering that “an eco-friendly lifestyle is comfortable”, for studying about global warming and preserving the environment or for buying eco-friendly products. As a paradox, more then 90-percent of them feel threatened by global warming.

On the other side, Parisians and Milanese are supposed to be the happiest to change their habits for a greener planet.

Image from P F C

Scientists have found the (new) oldest tree in the world. It is a 16.4 feet tall spruce, found in Fulu Mountain in the Dalarna province of Sweden, that was carbon dated by Miami researchers to be 9,550 years old.

Under the crown they’ve also found four generations of spruce remains in the forms of cones and wood produced with the same genetic material, that date back 375, 5,660, 9,000 and 9,550 years.

Though spruce trees can create exact copies or clones of themselves multiplying with their root penetrating branches, so far scientists thought it wasn’t such a survivor.

Recent studies conducted in cooperation with the County Administrative Boards in Jämtland and Dalarna showed different and Leif Kullman, Professor of Physical Geography at Umea University, to declared “Our results have shown the complete opposite, that the spruce is one of the oldest known trees in the mountain range”.

The history behind this discovery, also revealed that the tree survived because of the generally cold and dry climate, few forest fires and very few humans. It also pointed out that the ice might have disappeared earlier than thought.

“My research indicates that spruces have spent winters in places west or southwest of Norway where the climate was not as harsh in order to later quickly spread northerly along the ice-free coastal strip. In some way they have also successfully found their way to the Swedish mountains,” Leif Kullman said.

Spruces are the species that can best give us insight about climate change.

Photo credits: Leif Kullman

Not using plastic bags, installing a solar power roof or taking your bicycle instead of your car when you leave to work, is no longer enough to prove that you’re trying to live a greener life and help the environment. And though planning a funeral may be the last thing on your mind right now, if you want to be green till the end, an eco-funeral may be the solution. You need an “eco-exit”.

However, setting up an environmental-friendly funeral is a far more complicated thing than first thought and it’s not the price that makes it complicated, “it’s the choice” says Fran Hall, marketing director for Epping Forest Burial Park.

Eco-funerals may not differ very much from traditional funerals except that they are as green as possible. It uses cardboard coffins that biodegrade within three months, while the body is not embalmed and is dressed with clothes sewn from pure fibers. Alternative transportation methods, like a horse drawn hearse may be used to carry the body to the grave, in a natural setting so that it’s attractive to wildlife and sustainable flora.

There are eco-friendly graveyards like Oakfield Wood, where 1,600 trees and wooden plaques mark the plots where people have been buried.

A new legislation in UK requires the mercury content of plastics and treatments used in coffins, to be reduced starting from 2010 and the eco-coffins already meet these requirements, which made us think that the British may be encouraging growth in environmentally-friendly burials.

What would you choose? Green or traditional?