You might be alarmed to learn a homemade nuclear reactor is being built next door. But what if this form of extreme DIY could help solve the world's energy crisis?

By day, Mark Suppes is a web developer for fashion giant Gucci. By night, he cycles to a New York warehouse and tinkers with his own nuclear fusion reactor.

The warehouse is a non-descript building on a tree-lined Brooklyn street, across the road from blocks of apartments, with a grocery store on one corner. But in reality, it is a lab.

Fusion power is considered the "Holy Grail" by many. It is believed that the power would be cheap and safe. I hope its true. However, until someone manages to do it we will not know for sure.

Currently no-one has found a way of making fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume to run.

Mark is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net. Others on the list include a 15-year-old from Michigan and a doctoral student in Ohio.

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Prices are currently too high for electric cars to become mainstream in the UK, according to Dr Ben Lane from whatgreencar.com, who suggested that a government grant could change things.

Mr Lane added that "more investment in the recharging structure" was also required before the cars would become commonplace. The comments followed news from JD Power and Associates which suggested that global sales of electric cars are expected to reach 940,000 units this year from last year's 732,000 units.

In my mind, there is also an issue of recharging time. I have read articles that suggest battery swap stations to make recharging a non-issue and other articles that suggest ultra large electronic capacitors instead of batteries. The one thing that is consistent in my mind is the effort required to make it work in an everyday sense.

For my life right now with two small kids, there has to be a fast way to charge, good safety, lots of storage for bicycles and other items to get to the park or friends houses. Think about it a little, what has to happen before you will consider an all electric car?

Fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are huge priorities in the aviation industry. Take the Boeing 747, which guzzles somewhere around a gallon of jet fuel per second - it's clear that even a small improvement in fuel consumption can make a huge difference to costs at the end of a long-haul flight. In fact, 6% improvement would be about 600,000 gallons of fuel per year, per 747 aircraft.

The Minix device sits at the tip of an aircraft's wing as a replacement to the vertical or tilted winglets now common on many craft. Its primary purpose is to smooth out and negate the high-pressure spiral vortices that form when a plane is in motion as the high-speed airflow struggles to deal with the complex pressure differences in the area where the wing terminates.

These vortices not only create a significant amount of drag on the aircraft, they create a turbulent and occasionally dangerous pressure wake that can interfere with other planes that pass through the same airspace.

The Minix wing tip can be retrofitted to any aircraft wing and the developer claims that prototype testing has shown a 6% gain in drag efficiency at Mach 0.8 - the typical speed of an airliner.

The concept is to create a bond like a family member by naming the car something familiar like "Ben".

The vehicle is smaller than a Fiat 500 and packs space for four adults. The vehicle is propelled by in-wheel electric hub motors that get their juice from a 300V lithium-ion battery. The 30KW electric motors are coupled with in-wheel active shockers to make your green ride more comfortable.

For a few more pictures and not much more information, follow the related link below.

As you can tell, it has been a slow news week for environmental goodies. As for the oil spill, it is very disheartening and you don't need me re-posting all the updates available web wide.

As for this title, I just read an article that makes the statement that an iPhone can charge an electric vehicle and read the article to try and figure out what they really meant. Clearly this title is misleading.

From the article:
"Take it with you, and it can provide information on your car's battery state of charge, expected completion time, and location of charging stations. Forget where your car is parked, and it can find it for you."

Nowhere does that imply the transfer of power from the iPhone to the car for the sake of "charging" the car. Has iPhone become such a buzzword that people feel a need to use it in descriptions of everything? I really think a stretch like this is evidence to the need for better communication. The device is a phone, the name is to make it personal. I personally carry a my-phone and so do 99% of the people I know. Just because my-phone can give me directions turn by turn, look up charging or filling stations and a host of other good stuff doesn't mean it is a magic device.

Lets focus on getting electric cars, solar power, wind power, geothermal and tidal power as mainstream. These are worth pursuing without any need to squeeze the name of a phone into the mix.