News Checker this week comes from all corners of the globe.
Being independently mobile and flexible with our work environments is becoming even more necessary. The solar desk is another “bright” idea to create instant energy and power provided for working on the move.

Image of the Solar Workspace
Wired magazine has an interesting report on LA and its automobile industry. With the region's growing population, the city will not be able to support itself without future investments in transportation. Read more in their blogs.
More transport troubles in the USA, this time the focus is on New York's public transport system.
Full of solutions, the Dutch as usual have come up with a novel way to deal with rising water levels. Floating Homes. But unlike the usual Dutch house-boats, these homes are able to be both attached to the ground or float upwards of 16 feet. 37 houses along the Maas River in Holland have been designed by Dura Vermeer.
More info at Cleantechnica

Dutch Floating Homes

The Vulcan project is creating waves in the blogosphere. The video created by the team at the Purdue University is actually an interactive map of the United States and the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. The results are surprising.
Finally, Australia is about to build their biggest solar plant near the town of Mildura.
The plant – which is planned to begin generating power by 2010, and be completed 2013 – is looking to provide solar power to some 45,000 homes.

In the future, water and its “by-product” hydrogen will play a vital role in any city’s infrastructure. That’s if the design from Californian Architects Iwamotoscott, for the History Channel’s City of the Future competition is anything to go by.
The competition asked architects to envision and design a city 100 years from now.Iwamotoscott's concept and design for "Hydro-Net" came first in the San Francisco section of the competition. They are now up against the winners from EDAW/Praxis 3/BNIM/Metcalf and Eddy (Atlanta) and Beyer Blinder Belle (Washington). The voting by the public ends Monday, April 28th. All competitors had only one week to envision what their city might look like in 100 years, a mere 3 hours to construct their models, and just 15 minutes to present their vision to the judging panel.If this sounds unbelievable, have a look at our slide show. Here you can see their model and Iwamotoscott’s plans for Hydro-Net, as real as they can be at the moment anyway.

What is Hydro-Net City?

By taking into account the natural evolution of San Francisco, HYDRO -NET actually takes advantage of the rising water levels of the Californian coastline.
A whole new “Aquaculture zone” will be used to grow algae, which in turn will produce the hydrogen fuel used to power the city. This fuel is then stored and distributed through a series of underground tunnels made from “nanotube wall structures”. Tests have shown that carbon nanotubes, 50,000 times narrower than a human hair, can be a promising material for hydrogen storage. Out of this new watery city, emerge tall sinuous towers, where the algae is stored to produce hydrogen.
Traffic consists of hydrogen-fuelled hover –cars, which travel underneath the city. These cars also collect, store and distribute the water and power tapped from liquid and geothermal sources beneath San Francisco.

Pioneer Matthias Hollwich addressed the audience at TED 2008 with a powerful talk on the city of the future - MEtreePOLIS.Hollwich and Marc Kushner formed HWKN together in New York and explore ideas of econic design in their work.As part of the Future City competition for the History Channel, they won the IBM Engineering Innovation Award.Watch the video of their talk here.

The Solartaxi reaches Melbourne, where it is part of the Sustainable Living Festival in the centre of Federation Square. But it is not the only fuel efficient car, nor the only unusual guest! Watch the video to find out more.

Day 2 at the TED "meeting of the minds" started with a bang: Craig Venter gave a talk on "Future Uses of Synthetic and Engineered species“. In a nutshell, he is trying to do nothing less than replace the petro-chemical industry with synthetic bacteria to generate fuels. By designing organisms that chew up CO2 and produce energy, he suggests that biological refineries can be built and consequently solve the CO2 emissions problem and overcome peak oil at the same time. When asked by the audience about the potential risks of bio engineering, he replied that he was worried more about getting the technology out there in time, in order to solve climate issues, than about its potential misuse.
His statement was quite moving, especially when he confessed to being very disappointed with the debate in Davos on the climate crisis - where he had the feeling that world leaders there were not engaged enough when it came to finding real solutions. At TED, he felt the spirit was much more optimistic, that this issue is very important and solutions must be found.
Needless to say, this very bold and impressive concept from one of science's greatest minds stirred up a lot of debate in the coffee break amongst TEDsters.
Image from www.ted.com
Another great highlight was that the topic of sustainability was presented in the evening session. The TED community officially launched the amazing Encyclopedia of Life on www.eol.org . This project aims to become the first complete record of all species on our planet. It was E.O.Wilsons´s TED wish last year, after he won the TED prize 2007 for lifetime achievement. I find the project very inspiring and encourage every member of Club of Pioneers to check it out.The TED talks are going up online bit by bit, so check out www.ted.com to see what great ideas people are sharing here at Monterey.
Day 1

So we checked into the TED conference 2008 in Monterrey, California and it´s been a very exciting day 1 already.The sexiest thought leader conference worldwide, this year focuses on nothing less than „the big questions“. Thus, it kicked off by asking simply "Who are we?" followed by the more specific: "What is our place in the Universe?".The quest for human identity was answered in good TED style by an eclectic group consisting of an anthropologist, a musician, a neuroanatomist and an artist, shedding light on how we changed from animals into civilized humans in the first place – and left us with a fair warning, we might loose it all again, if we do not take care of our planet and ourselves a little more than we have done in the past 200 years.Overall, the message of sustainability has been an underlying topic at most talks so far. Peter D. Ward, a Paleontologist, gave an insight into how with rising CO2 emissions our oceans are about to collapse, and that in order to survive we might have to adapt to a more reptilian environment.The issue of the state of the oceans and the scarcity of water was specifically placed onto the agenda by many, including the Coca Cola company, which sponsored a talk on this topic and hopes to make it as relevant in the international debate as global warming is now.The morning had already started with Matthias Hollwich giving a talk on Econic Design at the TED University. We´ll post the talk in the next few days, but you can already check out some of this on our site.
Matthias Hollwich
But sustainability was discussed not just in an environmental sense. Anthropologist Wade Davis told us that today we still have 6000 native languages in the world. But only half of them will be taught to the children born today due to rapid globalization and „modernization“ of our societies. Thus we are also loosing half of our collective wisdom. The evening discussion about the truth in journalism was greatly enhanced by one of those surprise moment that can only happen at TED! When the audience had to wait for the technical difficulties to be solved, comedy superhero Robin Williams jumped on stage and gave a riveting stand up comedy improvisation. Amongst all these great minds assembled at TED, it seems he´s the one who´s also the wittiest...

In Berlin this weekend, (apart from our own “The Editors Invite” event), there is also a trade show all about renewable energy. It’s called Solar Energy 2008 but includes everything from solar mobility to electric Go-Cart racing. Representatives from all sectors of the mobility area are included, including The Trike, Jetcar, The Eco Compact Car and of course the electric Go-Carts!
For a blast from the past, there is even the Electric VW from 1972!Need to work on the move? Or even better, do you want to work outside in the open air? The Greener Grass brought us this snazzy idea of a desk that can power you laptop using the sun’s rays. The Suntable stores the solar energy in a battery , which is then accessible with a power outlet on the side of the table itself.Image from The Greener Grass
London is going even further in trying to prove its green credentials. Ken Livingstone has proposed that owners of vehicles emitting 225 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre will have to pay £25 per day to drive through London. More at Treehugger.
On the other hand, I actually prefer Livingstone's plan to introduce shared urban biking. Although some have described their design as “grannyish”, I always like a sturdy basket on when I ride!
In other cities, where there is just not enough space for more cars, they are starting to build downwards. Dutch engineers have unveiled plans for a £1bn underground city beneath the canals of Amsterdam. The $1.5bn project, called AMFORA was proposed to address the lack of space and the high price of land in the city. It is being discussed with Amsterdam’s council, but construction work is unlikely to begin before 2018.

Image from Zwarts & Jansma
The results of the Greener Gadgets Conference has come out. The winner was the Enerjar , “an easy-to-build, DIY device that accurately measures the power draw of electrical appliances”. The designers were Matt Meshulam and Zach Dwiel. You can see more on Core 77.

It's all about being on the move, and getting there fast.Here at Club of Pioneers we are especially happy with the news that soon we will be able to travel from Brussels to Sydney, in FOUR hours! How soon , we are not so sure about. The LAPCAT, which stands for Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologie, is funded by the European Space Agency and powered by hydrogen. Sounds almost too good to be true. Image of Config A2 from Reaction Engines Staying in the air, Virgin Ltd founder and former climate change denier Richard Branson has announced his intentions to power his jets with pond scum infused biofuel. Last week, Virgin announced plans to test fly a Boeing 747-400 from London to Amsterdam using a blend of about 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent jet fuel.
From Autobloggreen we hear that the amazing Luigi Colani, responsible for biodynamic car designs, (amongst other things), has teamed up with toy makers Corgi to develop a 1/16-scale hydrogen fuel cell car. This RC car will be unveiled in early February at the Toy Fair Nürnberg. It will surely be beautiful.

Image by Volker WeberBut the fastest of all must be Prince Charles, who appeared at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, as a hologram!
A life-size, three-dimensional image of the Prince was projected onto the stage, thus maintaining an extremely low carbon footprint and saved 20 tons of carbon waste. Maybe more conferences, summits and stars should use this new mode of “embodied” transport. Perhaps David Beckham should take note, who has recently been touted as having “the largest carbon footprint in history”.