Hastings Borough Council in East Sussex has announced that it is investing in technology to reclaim some of the energy lost in the cremation process. Although the technology is still in its proving stages, the crematorium hopes to have new generators that will capture and reuse the excess heat created by the cremation process to heat and eventually power the facility.

The spokespeople say it's still several steps away from actually using human bodies as fuel; the energy will come from the machines themselves rather than the bodies. But given how much fuel crematoria consume, it seems plausible that bodies could someday help fuel their own cremation process.

Crematorium to use burning bodies to generate electricity [Telegraph via Xenophilia]

Whether you're buying for loved ones, loathed ones, ones you barely know but feel an obligation to get something something for or yourself, it's hard to go wrong with a well-chosen toy as a gift. But it's hard to know just what toys you should be looking at, which is where we come in; we've split our choices into three categories: Play, Display and Making Your Life Better, which is to say things that are useful (or, in one case, useless but kind of essential nonetheless). Click through to see our selections.

For Play
LEGO, action figures and things for you to hit other people with safely. After all, isn't that what "play" really means?

For Display
For some people, toys are things to keep on shelves, on their walls or in boxes. Here're a few ideas for the serious collector.

For Making Your (Or Someone Else's) Life Better
In which we suggest gifts offering education, amusement and/or something to hold onto at night. Yes, even that last one.

Additional research by Alex Eichler.

Why rabbits? The fuzzy critters have actually become a bit of a pest in Sweden; wild and stray pet rabbits alike have ravaged city parks in Stockholm, forcing hunters to think out the population. With all those bunny bodies piling up, it makes sense to put them to good use. So the bodies are shipped to Konvex, a company that turns animal and vegetable oils into automotive and heating oils. But even the reproductively prolific rabbits don't provide sufficient power, so Stockholm supplements their bunny-based power with other animal corpses, including cats and horses.

So does this mean human-derived fuels are next? As Scientific American notes, the jokes have been made. A group of activists called the Yes Men crashed a gas and oil industry luncheon, claiming to be representatives from Exxon Mobile. They then proceeded to deliver a presentation for a mock product called "Vivoleum," a fuel made from human bodies. The audience was reportedly less than amused.

Burning bunnies for biofuel? [Scientific American]

Generally, parking in the sun just means coming back to a boiling hot car. But industrial designer Neville Mars has an idea for harnessing sunlight so it powers your car instead. He suggests installing tree-shaped sculptures in parking lots with giant, photovoltaic leaves to capture solar energy. You can simply park, plug your electrical vehicle into the tree, and return to a cool and fully charged car. It's ultimately more economical and more eco-friendly than building chargers into existing electrical grids, and could even make your parking space more attractive.

Solar Forest [via Inhabitat]

If only the Sunday funny pages were littered with art like this, just think how many budding eight-year-old scientists we could sucker into the environmental cause.

Comic: An Alternative, Alternative Energy [Popular Science]
Google.org Enhanced Geothermal Systems
The Future of Geothermal Energy (PDF)

The Energy Ball's shape takes advantage of the Venturi Effect, which usually measures the pressure created when water moves through a contained space. According to Inhabitat:

This spherical Energy Ball takes those principles and uses them to channel air through its six blades and around its generator. This results in highly efficient turbine that can take advantage of very low wind speeds.

I still think the main advantage of this device, aside from how awesome it looks, is that it doesn't make much noise. So you could easily imagine a suburb powered by these things mounted on roofs, spinning quietly in the breeze.

Home Energy [via Inhabitat]

At first blush, a humpback's fins looks like a pretty shoddy design for an airfoil — its leading edge is knobby and gnarled-looking. But the knobs actually reduce drag over the fin, allowing it to provide lift like an airplane wing only better because it works at lower speeds and higher angles to the wind.

Fish has shown that humpback designed fan blades lower power consumption by up to 20 percent on industrial fans. Now he's running tests on an experimental wind farm in Canada to see how much more power he can generate using wind turbines with fin-shaped blades.

Source: WhalePower via Discovery News

As hot air rises from the base of the AVE it forms a vacuum, sucking in yet more air (which also has to be hot). The rising air also begins to rotate into that familiar and deadly funnel shape. Once up to speed, an AVE building would have a tornado extending miles into the sky, perhaps even altering local weather patterns and causing some extra precipitation.

The main issue is getting a reliable supply of hot air. Michaud says one of the best ways is to build an AVE next to an existing power plant and using the hot exhaust stream to power it. A solar thermal plant could work, too.

But new, innovative ways to renewably generate electricity are always going to have problems getting off the ground (pun, sorry). Especially when one of the world's largest consumers of energy, the United States won't even fund research into a clean-burning coal-fired power plant, or let solar energy companies build on public land.

Source: LiveScience

Al Gore may be the #1 movie star of the neo-green, anti-global warming set, but Hansen's the guy with the scientific chops — so when he talks, Congress listens. Sort of. More like they listen in the 'let's call a hearing, we're somewhat concerned' way, rather than the 'holy shit we'd better do something' way.

Now Hansen's got another shot at a hearing, and he wants the heads of big oil companies behind bars for what he sees as their purposeful attempts to trick the world into thinking that global warming is no big deal:

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

The current concentration is 385 parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement.

He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."

His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."

Anyone who's willing to speak truth to power is OK in my book, but one hopes Dr. Hansen isn't committing political suicide here. Going before Congress with plans to strip out lobbyists' influence and jail the leaders of some of the most profitable companies in America? Noble, but not likely. And maybe you don't want to mention the part about trying to have members of Congress unseated? Telling people 'listen to me or I'm going to have you fired' isn't really a good idea unless you're their boss.

Source: The Guardian, via SciGuy

Unlike today's light water reactors, gen IV nuclear power plants like this futuristic one, in Japan, will be fast reactors that won't have any highly-radioactive Plutonium or Uranium waste to bury deep underground. Instead, these elements will be stripped out of the nuclear waste in a process called "partitioning," and reused. There will be some waste, of course, but it won't have a half-life of several hundred thousand years. Probably more like 1000. AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Here's a schematic for a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor. Also, fast reactors don't produce products that can be weaponized. So countries using gen IV fast reactors, like this one (below) being built in Kalpakkam, India, won't have to worry that somebody might steal a byproduct and stick it in a bomb. Fun fact: experimental facilities like the Idaho National Laboratory in the US have been experimenting with fast reactor technology for over fifty years. Fast reactors were among the first designs tested for nuclear power, but were scrapped because they were too expensive. AP Photo M.Lakshman