Craziest Green Technologies

Our 12 Favorite Green Technologies

With all the excitement surrounding the worldwide push to “go green”, there have been some fascinating innovations that make it easy and even fun to save energy. Thanks to their creativity, we are entering an age where saving energy is almost as convenient as wasting it. Here are 12 green inventions that are helping us make this a cleaner planet.

Solar Powered Cell Phones

German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have created a prototype for the world’s first-ever solar powered cell phone. While full-fledged solar panels are still quite large and expensive, the researchers have integrated smaller, high-efficiency cells into the phones which, they claim, offers a module efficiency rate of 20%. In other words, the phone will stay steadily charged as long as it gets roughly 2 hours of sunlight per day. Failing that, the phone can still be charged via conventional methods.

Power Generating Revolving Doors
Ever feel like a farm animal when you’re passing through those huge glass revolving doors, bunched up next to other people who are probably feeling the same way? Well now, everyone can take heart in the fact that they are helping the environment each time they pass through these doors. The New York design firm Fluxxlab has created a revolving door that harnesses the kinetic energy of the door’s revolution and converts it to usable electricity. In a busy New York City or L.A. office building, this could add up to some serious, carbon-free power!

Ice Energy
With summer right around the corner, homeowners nationwide are dreading the huge spike in electricity bills that air conditioning season will cause. It is a pain virtually all homeowners know. Fortunately, one innovative company has stepped forward with a solution: Ice Energy, with their “Ice Bear” installation. The Ice Bear integrates with your air conditioner, freezing water overnight when the temperatures are lower and the electricity is (in most places) cheaper. During the day, the ice cools the air conditioner’s refrigerant instead of using fresh electricity to do it. The end result: roughly 30% energy savings when the AC is in use.

Bamboo Clothing
Clothing made out of bamboo, you ask? No, it’s not a joke, and it’s actually quite comfortable! Shirts Of Bamboo has found a way to turn this Panda snack into wearable items of clothing, ranging from shoes to bathroom attire to shirts and slacks. The secret to the eco-friendly use of bamboo lies in how fast it grows; a bamboo plant grows several feet per day and matures to full growth in only four years, compared to 25 years or more for average species of trees. Bamboo is also completely biodegradable, which translates to virtually no perceptible impact on the environment. Combine these great benefits with the fact the bamboo clothing is thermo-regulating, anti-microbial and requires no chemicals, and it’s a wonder more people aren’t wearing bamboo already!

Wind-powered bicycle light
Everyone agrees that it’s far safer to ride a bike at night with a safety light that identifies you to motorists. The only problem is the dozens and potentially hundreds of batteries those lights will consume over a lifetime of riding. Luckily, a company called Duck has created a bicycle light that draws its power from the wind resistance you generate! As you pedal furiously into the sunset, the wind spins tiny blades that deliver electricity to a bright LED light via a hidden copper coil. A small, rechargeable lithium ion battery kicks in if and when you aren’t actively pedaling anywhere.

Solar Powered Aircraft
Don’t let the picture fool you: we can’t (yet) harness enough of the sun’s energy to get this plane off the ground. What these solar panels can do, however, is provide enough juice for the pilot to conduct his pre-takeoff diagnostics and checks. The panels also send a continuous flow of power to the plane during the flight, which translates to less fuel being consumed per flight. The savings will be huge when major carriers start incorporating solar technology into their commercial flights!

The Eco-Kettle
Most of us look forward to that fresh morning brew when we wake up and stretch out in the morning. Unfortunately, we also boil twice the volume of water that we actually need to boil our tea or coffee water. Think it’s a trivial amount? Think again: experts estimate that we’re wasting almost 50 light bulbs worth of energy each time we do this. So what’s a green coffee lover to do? Enter the Eco-Kettle, which you fill and regulate the amount of water you use with a measuring button that knows how much water you want. Just specify how much you need – a single cup up to a full jug. By the time you rush out the door with your coffee or tea in hand, you’ll have racked up a water savings of 30%!

Solar Powered Dehumidifiers
This decide makes damp, uncomfortable indoor humidity a thing of the past! Using solar energy, musty, choke-inducing air inside your home or office is neutralized with fresh, dry, sun-warmed air from the great outdoors. Best of all, there are absolutely no running costs incurred by using the device, and your carbon footprint will be markedly reduced. Visit the link below to inquire about having a SolarVenti dehumidifier fitted for the outside of your home or office.

Green Roofs
While many cities are engaged in a death match with developers who want to encroach upon their green spaces, some municipalities are thinking outside the box and taking the fight to the rooftops. That’s right, the rooftops! In many cities, the roofs of buildings and office blocks now house gardens, flowers, and even fully-soiled and grown lawns of green grass. While this may sound silly at first blush, green roofs are far more than just an environmental affectation. One financial benefit is lower air conditioning costs, as the green roofs cut down on the heat that gets trapped in the building. Many speculate that over time, green roofs will even improve the air quality in busy cities. It’s a win-win!

Fast, Stylish Electric Cars
What’s the biggest problem with hybrid cars? Face it: while we love the concept of eco-friendly vehicles, we hate how they look! The typical hybrid car is a boxy, futuristic-looking heap of plastic that looks like something George Jetson dreamed up in outer space. The other major drawback is that most hybrid cars are severely lacking in the power department. However, one company is revving their engines in an effort to leave both of these problems in the dust. Tesla Motors, backed by the founders of Google and PayPal, has created an all-electric car that looks like a Mustang and can go from zero to sixty in 4 seconds. The vehicle emits only 1/3rd third the carbon-dioxide pollution of hybrids and can drive 250 miles per charge on its lithium-ion battery.


Water Powered Gravity Clock
This alarm clock from AmbientWeather.com delivers you the time using nothing but water and the natural force of gravity. The secret is a “battery pack” that holds the water required for the clock’s operation for months at a time without being refilled. When you’re running low on power, just add more water straight from the faucet. Other features include an alarm, temperature reading, a timer, and a special gravity sensor which allows you to toggle between functions just by tilting the clock at a different angle (ie, changing its center of gravity.) Best of all: the entire clock is itself recyclable!

Solar Power Harnessing Backpacks
Ever dream of being a walking, talking power generator? Maybe not, but thanks to this new backpack from Voltaic Systems, this dream is becoming a reality. To the naked eye, it passes for a totally normal backpack, but to the trained observer, there are solar panels affixed to it that capture the sun’s energy as you walk across campus, up a mountain, or just about anywhere with sunlight. The best part: the pack is outfitted with standard connections for cell phones, iPods, USB, and more, allowing you to put the 4 watts per hour of sunlight that you capture to use on virtually any device you desire.

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Laser triggers electrical activity in thunderstorm for the first time

Device on mountaintop takes first step toward manmade lightning

WASHINGTON, April 14—A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time, according to a new paper in the latest issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal. They did this by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm.

At the top of South Baldy Peak in New Mexico during two passing thunderstorms, the researchers used laser pulses to create plasma filaments that could conduct electricity akin to Benjamin Franklin's silk kite string. No air-to-ground lightning was triggered because the filaments were too short-lived, but the laser pulses generated discharges in the thunderclouds themselves.

"This was an important first step toward triggering lightning strikes with laser beams," says Jйrфme Kasparian of the University of Lyon in France. "It was the first time we generated lighting precursors in a thundercloud." The next step of generating full-blown lightning strikes may come, he adds, after the team reprograms their lasers to use more sophisticated pulse sequences that will make longer-lived filaments to further conduct the lightning during storms.

Triggering lightning strikes is an important tool for basic and applied research because it enables researchers to study the mechanisms underlying lightning strikes. Moreover, triggered lightning strikes will allow engineers to evaluate and test the lightning-sensitivity of airplanes and critical infrastructure such as power lines.

Pulsed lasers represent a potentially very powerful technology for triggering lightning because they can form a large number of plasma filaments – ionized channels of molecules in the air that act like conducting wires extending into the thundercloud. This is such a simple concept that the idea of using lasers to trigger lightning strikes was first suggested more than 30 years ago. But scientists have not been able to accomplish this to date because previous lasers have not been powerful enough to generate long plasma channels. The current generation of more powerful lasers, like the one developed by Kasparian’s team, may change that.

Kasparian and his colleagues involved in the Teramobile project, an international program initiated by National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and the German Research Foundation (DFG), built a powerful mobile laser capable of generating long plasma channels by firing ultrashort laser pulses. They chose to test their laser at the Langmuir Laboratory in New Mexico, which is equipped to measure atmospheric electrical discharges. Sitting at the top of 10,500-foot South Baldy Peak, this laboratory is in an ideal location because its altitude places it close to the high thunderclouds.

During the tests, the research team quantified the electrical activity in the clouds after discharging laser pulses. Statistical analysis showed that their laser pulses indeed enhanced the electrical activity in the thundercloud where it was aimed—in effect they generated small local discharges located at the position of the plasma channels.

The limitation of the experiment, though, was that they could not generate plasma channels that lived long enough to conduct lightning all the way to the ground. The plasma channels dissipated before the lightning could travel more than a few meters along them. The team is currently looking to increase the power of the laser pulses by a factor of 10 and use bursts of pulses to generate the plasmas much more efficiently.

Lightning strikes have been the subject of scientific investigation dating back to the time of Benjamin Franklin, but despite this, remain not fully understood. Although scientists have been able to trigger lightning strikes since the 1970s by shooting small rockets into thunderclouds that spool long wires connected to the ground, typically only 50 percent of rocket launches actually trigger a lightning strike. The use of laser technology would make the process quicker, more efficient and cost-effective and would be expected to open a number of new applications.

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Cosmic Finger Taps Our Galaxy's Shoulder

The leading arm of gas streaming from the Magellanic Clouds is piercing the disk of the Milky Way. Credit: John Rowe Animations

As if reaching out with a come-hither motion, a giant gas finger emanating from two neighboring galaxies has hooked into the starry disk of the Milky Way.

This extremity of hydrogen gas is actually the pointy end of the so-called Leading Arm of gas that streams ahead of two irregular galaxies called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

The fate of these nearby galaxies, which are impacted by the Milky Way's gravity, has been somewhat of a mystery. The new finger findings suggest that the Magellanic Clouds will eventually merge with the Milky Way rather than zooming past.

Located about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is only one-twentieth the diameter of our galaxy and contains one-tenth as many stars. The Small Magellanic Cloud resides 200,000 light-years from Earth and is about 100 times smaller than the Milky Way.

"We're thrilled because we can determine exactly where this gas is plowing into the Milky Way," said research team leader Naomi McClure-Griffiths of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility.

Called HVC306-2+230, the gas finger is gouging into our galaxy's starry disk about 70,000 light-years away from Earth. In the night sky, the contact point would be nearest the Southern Cross.

Until last year, astronomers thought the Magellanic Clouds had orbited our galaxy many times. This scenario held a gloomy outlook for the clouds, which were said to be doomed to be ripped apart and swallowed by the gravitational goliath.

But then new Hubble Space Telescope measurements revealed the clouds are paying our galaxy a one-time visit rather than being its lunch.

McClure-Griffiths' results, however, are more in line with the previous tale pegging the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds as long-time companions. McClure-Griffiths remarks that this isn't the final word and that both theories are still on the table.

By pointing out the spot of contact between the Leading Arm and our galactic disk, the recent study will help astronomers to predict where the clouds themselves will travel in the future.

"We think the Leading Arm is a tidal feature, gas pulled out of the Magellanic Clouds by the Milky Way's gravity," McClure-Griffiths said. "Where this gas goes, we'd expect the clouds to follow, at least approximately."

In the distant future, the three galaxies could become one.

• Video: Fly Through the Milky Way and Beyond
• Vote: The Strangest Things in Space
• Image Gallery: Amazing Galaxies

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Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them

This schematic shows the brain regions (green) from which the outcome of a participant's decision can be predicted before it is made. Courtesy John-Dylan Haynes.

You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.

In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.

The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?

"Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.

Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has.

In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine.

Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions.

Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will. For instance, the experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions.

"Real-life decisions -- am I going to buy this house or that one, take this job or that -- aren't decisions that we can implement very well in our brain scanners," said Haynes.

Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.

"We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. "But I don't think it's plausible."

That implausibility doesn't disturb Haynes.

"It's not like you're a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate," he said.

The unease people feel at the potential unreality of free will, said National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Mark Hallett, originates in a misconception of self as separate from the brain.

"That's the same notion as the mind being separate from the body -- and I don't think anyone really believes that," said Hallett. "A different way of thinking about it is that your consciousness is only aware of some of the things your brain is doing."

Hallett doubts that free will exists as a separate, independent force.

"If it is, we haven't put our finger on it," he said. "But we're happy to keep looking."

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Developing long-term relations with robots

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London are leading an international project which is set to advance the relationship between robots and humans, as part of new European project called LIREC - Living with Robots and Interactive Companions.

LIREC aims to create a new generation of interactive, emotionally intelligent, companion technology, that is capable of long-term engagement with humans – in both a virtual (graphical) world, and in the real-world (as robots). The project will also be the first in the world to examine how we react to a familiar companion entity when it swaps from a robot body into a virtual form, for example on a computer screen.

The Queen Mary team are leading a consortium of nine other internationally leading European partners, who intend to develop and study a variety of robots and other autonomous interactive companions during the four-year project.

Professor Peter McOwan, from Queen Mary’s Department of Computer Science, explained: “We’re interested in how people can develop a long-term relationship with artificial creatures, in everyday settings. You may not be able to find a robot that can help you do the dishes anytime soon, but we’re hoping to explore how such friendly future technology could be developed, and start to predict what the intelligent machines of tomorrow might look like, and how we should treat them.”

LIREC will first look at existing technology to study people’s perceptions of robots. This includes entertainment robots like Pleo, which is an interactive toy dinosaur available commercially; and GlowBots - small wheeled robots that communicate with each other and users through colourful patterns of light.

Other robots will include ‘iCat: the Affective Chess Player’ – a robotic game buddy whose behaviour and expressions are influenced by the state of play; as well as the child-sized minimally expressive humanoid ‘KASPAR’, and ‘peoplebots’, which are enhanced by humanoid features.

LIREC will also look for inspiration in creating synthetic companions from studies of the way that humans and pet dogs bond and interact.

The £6.5m grant involves partners from seven countries and will run for four and a half years. The project kicks off on 17/18 April when the research partners convene for the first time.

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Frog Without Lungs Found in Indonesia

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- A frog has been found in a remote part of Indonesia that has no lungs and breathes through its skin, a discovery that researchers said Thursday could provide insight into what drives evolution in certain species.

The aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis was found in a remote part of Indonesia's Kalimantan province on Borneo island during an expedition in August 2007, said David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. Bickford was part of the trip and co-authored a paper on the find that appeared in this week's edition of the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology.

Bickford said the species is the first frog known to science without lungs and joins a short list of amphibians with this unusual trait, including a few species of salamanders and a wormlike creature known as a caecilian.

"These are about the most ancient and bizarre frogs you can get on the planet," Bickford said of the brown amphibian with bulging eyes and a tendency to flatten itself as it glides across the water.

"They are like a squished version of Jabba the Hutt," he said, referring to the character from Star Wars. "They are flat and have eyes that float above the water. They have skin flaps coming off their arms and legs."

Bickford's Indonesian colleague, Djoko Iskandar, first came across the frog 30 years ago and has been searching for it ever since. He didn't know the frog was lungless until they cut eight of the specimens open in the lab.

Graeme Gillespie, director of conservation and science at Zoos Victoria in Australia, called the frog "evolutionarily unique." He said the eight specimens examined in the lab showed the lunglessness was consistent with the species and not "a freak of nature." Gillespie was not a member of the expedition or the research team.

Bickford surmised that the frog had evolved to adapt to its difficult surroundings, in which it has to navigate cold, rapidly moving streams that are rich in oxygen.

"It's an extreme adaptation that was probably brought about by these fast-moving streams," Bickford said, adding that it probably needed to reduce its buoyancy in order to keep from being swept down the mountainous rivers.

He said the frog could help scientists understand the environmental factors that contribute to "extreme evolutionary change" since its closest relative in the Philippines and other frogs have lungs.

Bickford and Gillespie said the frog's discovery adds urgency to the need to protect its river habitat, which in recent years has become polluted due to widespread illegal logging and gold mining. Once-pristine waters are now brown and clogged with silt, they said.

"The gold mining is completely illegal and small scale. But when there are thousands of them on the river, it really has a huge impact," Bickford said. "Pretty soon the frogs will run out of the river."

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Scientists invent microscopic operating table for 1mm worm

A tiny operating table has been devised by scientists to carry out nerve surgery on the best understood worm on the planet.

A decade ago the worm wriggled into the history books when scientists announce they have decoded its entire genetic blueprint, marking the first time that the genetic instructions have been spelt out for an animal that, like humans, has a nervous system, digests food, and has sex.

Now a special microchip that can immobilize the one millimetre long transparent worm Caenorhabditis elegans so that scientists can perform laser nanosurgery to sever individual nerves and study their regeneration is reported in Nature Methods, a technique that will be a boon for spinal repair in humans since the worms have many things in common with the scientists who study it.

Using old fashioned methods it took 1500 scientists in 250 labs 15 years and £30 million to "read" every letter of the genetic code of the nematode worm, revealing that the instructions to build a worm is spelt out by 97 million genetic letters corresponding to 20,000 genes.

The effort won Briton Sir John Sulston the Nobel prize for understanding the worm, what he called "a microcosm of humanity in terms of the mechanism inside."

The team that reports the new work says that its basic nervous system and simple behaviours make it an ideal model for studying the fine function of the nervous system, both worm and human. The only problem was how to keep the worm still.

Dr Adela Ben-Yakar and Dr Frederic Bourgeois of the University of Texas and colleagues designed a chip with two compartments separated by a membrane that, under pressure from fluid in the chip, holds a worm perfectly still during surgery and imaging, flattening it too to make things even easier.

The worm can be released to a holding compartment and recaptured at will, and it can work with worms of different sizes. This meant that the authors could successfully cut individual nerves and image the regeneration. This is much kinder, more elegant and useful way to study the worms, they say.

Containing fewer than 1,000 cells and one millimetre in length, C. elegans seems very different from us but is built using remarkably similar principles, such as cell division, differentiation and death. Like us, it develops from embryo to adult, has a gut, nerves, muscles, skin, and around 40 per cent of its genes are closely related to ours.

The worm project began in 1963 when Dr Brenner first set out to unravel the entire genetic recipe of the worm at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), in Cambridge. He was joined there by Sir John in the early 1970s.

Being multi-cellular, yet relatively simple, the worm allowed Sir John and colleagues to work out the fate of cells in development, in which new cells grow and others are culled by programmed cell death.

They tracked the way a single cell divides repeatedly to produce a typical adult hermaphrodite worm, revealing the lineage of every one of its 959 cells. They also showed that 131 cells died during development and how this is controlled by genes.

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Grand Canyon's 55-million-year-old secret

The Grand Canyon may owe its existence to a much older gorge.

Visitors are often told that the Grand Canyon formed 6 million years ago, when the Colorado River assumed its current course. But a new study indicates that a large chunk of the Grand Canyon may have taken its shape from a far more ancient gorge, carved out 55 million years ago by a river flowing in the opposite direction.

New dating of the canyon's Upper Granite Gorge suggests that this older, 1,000-metre-deep gorge may have been a rough template for the eastern third of the Grand Canyon. The Colorado River may have later used this same gorge to begin etching out the 450-kilometre-long Grand Canyon.

The results sketch out a dramatic history of the Colorado Plateau, which was pushed up by geological forces as long as 80 million years ago. An old river flowed across the plateau creating this 'proto-canyon', and then many different streams eroded away the top 2,000 metres of the entire plateau, bringing it to its present elevation.

"We're seeing a record of an ancestral Grand Canyon that was incised in rocks above the Grand Canyon and subsequently lowered to its present state," says Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The results will be published in the May issue of Geological Society of America Bulletin ¹.

Dating game

Flowers and her colleagues used a relatively new dating technique that examines levels of uranium and helium isotopes in rock samples containing the mineral apatite.

Because the test is sensitive to temperature, the team was able to estimate that rocks in the Upper Granite Gorge were exposed by erosion to cooler levels near Earth's surface roughly 55 million years ago.

What's more, the rim and the bottom of the canyon seemed to be roughly the same age. This suggested that a canyon-like feature must have existed long before the area was worn down by erosion and the present-day rocks were exposed.

"I was surprised. I didn’t believe the results at first," says co-author Brian Wernicke, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "That canyon has survived all that erosion up until the present day."

An old idea

Many have suspected that ancient rivers flowed across the Colorado Plateau long before the Grand Canyon formed. The area boasts a number of deep 'paleocanyons' that seem to have been carved by ancient waterways. Flowers' "study just confirms what we've been saying for the last 20 years", says Richard Young, a geologist at the State University of New York, Geneseo.

The Grand Canyon's history was revised when a study that dated cave deposits released last month in Science indicated that the Colorado River may have begun incising the mile-deep canyon 20 million years ago².

This new study does not, however, change estimates of the Grand Canyon's age, which is tied to that of the Colorado River. Still some say the apatite results do not necessarily support the idea of an ancient Grand Canyon template.

The dating "is a very coarse tool for identifying the position of a canyon or the shape of it", says geologist Karl Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "I don't think it's fair to call it a proto-Grand Canyon."

The 55 million year-old proto-canyon is likely to have looked very different from the present-day Grand Canyon. But, says Flowers, "the evidence suggests that a canyon of comparable dimension to what we have today must have existed at that time".

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Bahrain World Trade Center Activates Wind Turbines

You may remember that about a year ago we brought you news of the Bahrain World Trade Center, which was designed to have three giant turbines provide power to the building. Well, this past Tuesday, the project was finally completed, with the final testing and installation of the enormous wind turbines which power the building. This week, Bahrain WTC has, for the first time, activated all three 29m-diameter turbines at the same time!

It may not sound like much, but for such a high profile project, this represents a huge step. When we first brought you news of the project, the turbines had just been installed. And for the past year, all have slowly been tested and balanced, to ensure that they were working properly. But as of now, the project team can lay claim to having successfully incorporated a technology which had never been proven on a building, and certainly not at this scale. The three wind turbines are expected to provide around 10-15% of the power for both towers, representing about 3.5% of the total cost of the project.

“Having all three turbines spinning simultaneously represents an historic achievement for this landmark project and Atkins is excited to have been a major player in turning the original idea into reality” said Simha LytheRao Senior Project Manager for Atkins, designers for the project.

+ Bahrain World Trade Center Turbines Spin for the First Time
+ Video of BWTC Turbines in Action

Here’s a clip on the BWTC turbine construction (in Spanish)

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