Who needs a 'Do Not Disturb' sign when you've got one of these strange looking garments encompassing your head and laptop area? Much like the Privacy Scarf this woolly jumper will give you all the privacy and concentration you want in public places, not to mention looking making you look like a huge weirdo in the process.

Two technologies that we are unabashedly in love with here at EcoGeek are wind power and lighter-than-air craft. So a system that combines blimps and wind turbines is certain to draw our attention.

With wind turbines, most schemes to increase power have focused on increasing the swept area of the blades and improving their aerodynamic performance. But that's not the only way to do it. The Selsam SuperTurbine is a concept for a multiblade wind turbine for either land-based or off-shore installations. With the smaller swept area of each individual rotor, this turbine promises to be less visually obtrusive than other types of off-shore turbines. A design featuring a simple stalk with multiple sets of rotors all turning a shared axle allows this turbine design to produce more power despite the smaller swept area.

In off-shore installations, the Selsam turbine can also be lowered, or even submerged in violent storm conditions in order to protect the turbine from damage. This ability also makes maintenance and repair work easier, rather than needing to have workers scaling multiple-hundreds of feet to access them. For larger scale generation (over 1 megawatt), the blimp-lofted design would have dozens of rotor sets along the axle in order to turn the generator, and the weight of the axle would be supported by a blimp to lift the far end.

Obviously, a lot of work will have to be done to determine whether this system truly could increase the financial viability of wind power. But for pure inspiration and beauty we have to give Selsam our most enthusiastic thumbs up.

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via: Groovy Green

Japanese tech company Fujitsu are cautiously creeping onto the greentech bandwagon with a couple of concept laptops on display at this week's Japan Design Innovation 2008 trade show, being held for some reason in Milan, Italy.

In keeping with the burgeoning trend towards putting wood in everyone's lap, the first model is the Woodshell, which has a casing made in part from cedar, and which sports a cool retro 70's rec room look.

The second computer is the catchily named FMV-BIBLO NX95Y / D, which apparently features a casing made of some kind of bio-plastic. I say apparently because the info page is in Japanese, and the automatic Google translation spits out sentences like "Development of plant-based plastic that time, some small parts was limited to the adoption of the improved through the ability to adapt to a variety of conditions to the birth of a new plastics plant splendour." Make of it what you will.

No word on when either of these models might become stop being concepts and start being real.