But the distinguishing feature of the Fisker brand is that it signals a widening future for fast, exciting, green cars. “There’s no rule written anywhere that a green car has to be ugly,” said Fisker, “or small, or uncomfortable. We have so much power, we don’t need to make the car small.” Indeed, despite its aluminum space-frame structure, the Karma weighs roughly 5,000 pounds.

More Info: http://www.hybridcars.com/vehicle/fisker-karma.html

Toyota has demonstrated a plug-in concept version of the Prius, and anticipates first-year production of 20,000 to 30,000 units in 2012.

Plug-in hybrids provide the benefits of an electric car, while maintaining the same driving range as conventional vehicles. Plug-in hybrid drivers travel in an all-electric mode for the vast majority of common local driving. When the battery’s electric charge is depleted, a downsized gas engine is used to either recharge the batteries (as the car moves), or as the primary source of propulsion until recharging the batteries via a plug.

Plug-in hybrid cars are also known as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or PHEVs. Plug-in hybrid cars that use a gas engine exclusively for recharging batteries—rather than directly powering the wheels—are also called Extended-Range Electric Vehicles or E-REVs.

More Info: http://www.hybridcars.com/plug-in-hybrid-cars

Prius Exterior

Toyota added a slightly sportier feel and more aggressive stance to the 2010 Prius—perhaps to disarm criticism that the Prius looks like a corrective appliance on wheels. The logo shifts from the hood to the top of the point of the grille. The crease in the doors has shifted lower, but a more pronounced angle is added above the door handles. The overall effect is to make the 2010 Prius stand taller—not as rounded and squat—as its predecessor.

The distinct space-age shape of the Prius is still apparent: a deliberate effort by Toyota to maintain the Prius’s essential and iconic appearance. Its large, diamond-cut headlamps and snub-nose front-end are the starting point for the Prius’s quasi-flying saucer appearance. The angled hood seamlessly flows into the windshield, then to a flowing roofline that is sleek and low. Short overhangs and a sawed-off rear section finish off the hybrid’s futuristic hatchback character.

Of course, beauty is subjective, so the Prius continues to receive mixed reviews on outward show. There are many who think the Prius looks gimmicky, if not entirely ugly. But for many hybrid owners, the distinctive look of the Prius sends a message, which declares that we must take steps to reduce our voracious thirst for oil—with all its negative consequences in terms of the environment and geo-politics. For this camp, the Prius is like a middle-finger-on-wheels aimed at Hummers, Suburbans, Escalades, and the like.

In 2006, the toy and game-maker Hasbro added a game token in the shape of the Toyota Prius to the “here and now” version of Monopoly. In other words, the Prius is an official icon of our times.

More Info: http://www.hybridcars.com/compacts-sedans/toyota-prius-overview.html

Larry over at SmithMag.net is running a fun contest in celebration of Blue August. He’s challenging fans of water (and, really, who isn’t a fan of H20?) to come up with six words about this most precious of resources. Be funny, be inspiring, be informative – but don’t be long-winded!

How do you enter? Just hop over to SMITH and leave your six words in the comments of the contest post by 5 PM Eastern on August 31st. You can also Tweet your entries by adding the hashtag #6Wwater. Three winners will be selected, and Smith will announce the winners in a post over on SmithMag.net on September 8th.

And, if you are one of the lucky winners, you’ll win one of SMITH’s popular Spreadshirt t-shirts with your six words immortalized on it.

What will your six words be?

The auto industry has the technology to address these concerns. It’s the hybrid car. There are a lot of hybrid models on the market these days, and most automobile manufacturers have announced plans to manufacture their own versions.

How does a hybrid automobile work? What goes on under the hood to give you 20 or 30 more miles per gallon than the standard automobile? And does it pollute less just because it gets better gas mileage? In this article, we’ll help you understand how this technology works, and we’ll even give you some tips on how to drive a hybrid car for maximum efficiency.

Many people have probably owned a hybrid vehicle at some point. For example, a mo-ped (a motorized pedal bike) is a type of hybrid because it combines the power of a gasoline engine with the pedal power of its rider. In fact, hybrid vehicles are all around us. Most of the locomotives we see pulling trains are diesel-electric hybrids. Cities like Seattle have diesel-electric buses — these can draw electric power from overhead wires or run on diesel when they are away from the wires. Giant mining trucks are often diesel-electric hybrids. Submarines are also hybrid vehicles — some are nuclear-electric and some are diesel-electric. Any vehicle that combines two or more sources of power that can directly or indirectly provide propulsion power is a hybrid. Most hybrid cars on the road right now are gasoline-electric hybrids, although French car maker PSA Peugeot Citroen has two diesel-electric hybrid cars in the works. Since gasoline hybrids are the kind you’ll find at your local car dealership, we’ll focus on those in this article.

The more you learn about your children’s online life and safer online behavior, the better you will be able to protect them from online risks. Take the time to learn about popular Internet applications and technologies which interest your children and consider the following steps for your family:

1. Keep the computer in a common room, not in a bedroom or basement
2. Establish a safe-computing contract with your child using the NetSmartz Internet Safety Pledges
3. Set limits for time spent online and encourage other activities
4. Consider installing monitoring, filtering, and blocking software
5. Teach your child to respect him or herself as well as others both on- and offline

Take a proactive approach and talk to your kids about online safety today! Visit the NetSmartz Workshop® at www.NetSmartz.org. NetSmartz is an educational safety program from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children®.

Poor Sumatran orangutans. They have been the focus of conservationists for years, a battle between wildlife and habitat preservationists and large paper and palm oil companies who use, and destroy, the land that the orangutans call home. So a natural celebration when some were successfully re-introduced into the wild.

Thanks to the Sumatran Orangutan Reintroduction Center, the population in and around the Bukit Tigapuluh forest has rebounded slightly—but with no protected sanctuary, even this new population is being threatened. Asia Pulp & Paper, one of the largest paper companies in the world, was granted license this summer to proceed with a logging operation that will destroy much of the Bukit Tigapuluh forest area—despite a 2008 government agreement to protect Sumatra’s remaining (and endangered) forest areas and the species that inhabit them.

The logging operation will threaten orangutans as well as up to a quarter of the remaining (also critically endangered) Sumatran tigers.

Back then, doctors like second-century Greek physician Galen believed (no kidding) that the liver (not the heart) circulated blood (along with some bile and phlegm), while the heart (really) circulated “vital spirit”(whatever that is).

How could they be so wrong? It gets worse.

Galen hypothesized that the blood moved in a back-and-forth motion and was consumed by the organs as fuel. What’s more, these ideas stuck around for a very long time. How long?

It wasn’t until 1628 that English physician William Harvey let us in on our heart’s big secret. His “An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals” took a while to catch on, but a few hundred years later, it seems beyond common sense — perhaps the ultimate compliment for a scientific idea.

Take the age of the planet, for example.

Back in the 17th century, a religious scholar took a hard look at the Bible and estimated that creation happened around 4004 B.C. (you know, approximately). Add in nearly 2,000 more years to get to the 18th century, when Western, Bible-reading geologists started to realize that the Earth was constantly shifting and changing, and you get about 6,000 years.

Hmm … those biblical scholars may have been a bit off. Current estimates, based on radioactive dating, place the age of the planet at around, oh, 4.5 BILLION years.

By the 19th century, geologists started putting the pieces together to realize that if geologic change was happening as slowly as they thought it was, and if this Darwin guy was at all right about evolution (which was also a slow process), the Earth had to be WAY older than they had thought. The emergence of radioactive dating in the early 20th century would eventually prove them right.

Project Get Ready is a new initiative seeking to help the nation (and Canada!) make the shift away from fossil fuels. Under the project, coalitions in six cities are working with the Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute to develop plug-in vehicle infrastructure. What does that mean? It means government, industry, and citizen activists have teamed up to plan for charging stations, increase the availability and affordability of plug-in vehicles, and figure out the less-obvious details, like permits, necessary for the cars to be operable and practical in each city.

Indianapolis, Raleigh, and Portland were the first to sign on to the project, which has expanded to three other cities that came to RMI ready and willing to work. The idea is to expand beyond communities already concerned with the environment, and to make alternative fuel vehicles more practical for and accessible to the general population. As RMI’s Matt Mattila said, “We don’t want to be educating treehuggers.” Ok, fine, so Portland’s on the list. Predictable. But take heart: so is Indianapolis, Raleigh, Toronto, Denver—and Houston. Yes, the oil capital of the United States is helping its residents wean themselves off oil.

Project Get Ready in Your City?

RMI wants to expand the program to other cities, and will help out any municipality ready to put in the effort. The first step is to form a coalition, and then to design a five-year plan that maps out a city’s goals and how to achieve them. One member of the team should be willing to dedicate a full day once a week, and to take part in monthly strategy phone calls with RMI. Together, the coalition members and RMI figure out how the city can best address the major elements of Project Get Ready (PGR): vehicle acquisition, infrastructure planning, project structure and consumer adoption.

The project is not proprietary; all cities taking part agree to share their plans—successes and failures—with each other. As a city gets started, it can learn what challenges to expect and how other cities have managed to overcome them—such as how to plan for smart charging and create an appropriate framework for time of use in order to avoid maxing out the city’s power supply. Or, it can look to other cities to predict what obstacles it might face that would be unique to their city—finding a different model for public education, because people in Portland, for example, might be more willing than in other cities to go out of their way to participate in such a program.

The PGR teams have been working with all the big auto manufacturers, but also, excitingly, with new car companies as well, such as Bright Automotive and Tesla Motors, to improve the availability of cars on the market—that are practical and use electricity efficiently, and that are also affordable. (To learn more about how a hybrid plug-in works, watch John Lithgow explain them here.)

Visit the PGR website to learn more about planting the seeds for your city to enable and encourage the use of hybrid plug-in cars; there’s even tips for how to find funding. What city will be next? Get ready, get working, and it could be yours.