hemp

Hippie's dream car: EV made from hemp

Motive Industries, an automotive design firm in Canada, is developing the most literal of green vehicles--an electric car with a chassis made from cannabis.

The body of the Kestrel, a four-seat electric vehicle, is engineered using impact-resistant biocomposite derived from Canadian grown and manufactured hemp mats.

Its construction takes enviromentally friendly engineering one step further--the hemp fibers in the composite keep the body weight low, which reduces the energy needed to propel the vehicle while offering a renewable alternative to composites derived from petrochemicals. Aptera, a California-based EV start-up, uses silica-based fabric for its composite material that is impossible to … Read more

Drink up with reusable hemp tea bags

When you start looking for ways to conserve and cut down on waste, you can find them in almost every corner. Take tea bags, for example. Even if you've mastered the "reuse it before you toss it" trick, you're still throwing away every tea bag you use.

Now, you could toss the tea bags in your compost crock, but if you're using bags with staples in them, you've got to remove the staples first. And not all bags are made from compostable material. And that string, and the plastic coating on the paper tag--there'… Read more

Hemp speakers--make your own joke

With everything else going green, it should be no surprise that even loudspeakers can be made of some sort of sustainable material. We just didn't think that material would be hemp.

Omega Speaker Systems claims that its "HempCone" drivers offer "improved acoustic properties" superior to paper or plastic, according to Dvice. We'll have to take their word for it (or not), because we don't know what kind of methodology was used to draw those conclusions.

Maybe someone will get a pair to accompany Meridian's $16,000 CD player because, as some might … Read more

Pondering the future of virtual worlds

On Wednesday at Siggraph, I attended an interesting panel (details here) on the subject of "The Potential of End-User-Programmable Worlds."

In addition to the two organizers, the panelists included Paul Hemp of Harvard Business Review, Asi Lang of Linden Labs (the company that runs Second Life), and Vernor Vinge. Vinge is a faculty alumnus of San Diego State University, but better known as the author of "9 or 10 science-fiction novels," as he says. (I asked about that uncertainty; he said it's more about the definition of a novel than his ability to remember what he's written.)

You may have seen some of the recent news about Second Life. Last week, Linden Labs shut down… Read more