Apparently, a year’s worth of human excrement is equal to a measly 2.1 gallons of diesel, but when you collect an entire city’s worth of crap, you get a decent amount of fuel. The poop of 250,000 people is enough to operate 80 buses for 99,750km each, which is no small thing. So in Norway, they’re going to start collecting it and running public transportation on it. Because hey, why not? [Slate via Technabob]

The reason they were using the jatropha plant is because it thrives in arid regions, and doesn’t require fertile land otherwise needed for forests or food farmland. Ideally, they could begin farming the plant in the middle of the Australian desert, although whether they could be mass-produced is still being debated.

Still, it’s great to see an airline taking a real pro-active approach to the problem they’re facing with fuel – ultimately, fossil fuels are destined to run out, so the further we can stretch them and the quicker we can come up with an alternative, the better.

[The Register]

[Physorg via Treehugger]

They are much higher performance and a much more demanding environment. That was just another risk reduction step to prove the aircraft was not leaking fuel and the engines were behaving nominally. We asked them [the pilots] point-blank if they noticed any difference in performance and they said it was a “non-event”. In other words, they couldn’t tell the difference. The aircraft behaved the same.

The test this time started with a 50-minute ground test, pushing the engines to full afterburner. In the flight, the pilots put the F-15 to Mach 2.2, approximately 2,350mph. Hopefully, this experiments will also change the civilian airline industry, all in the name of costs and a cool looking environmentally-friendly brochure. [Defense Tech]

[Robert Q. Riley Enterprises via MAKE]

Fanola, the company says, is a biologically clean product which emits nothing but water vapor and CO2. Heating inserts ensure that the only thing burning in your shag pad, besides the fireplace, will be the flames of love. The fireplace technology comes in a variety of designs, so you can mix and match with every piece of Ikea furniture ever created.

Pricing info was not available, but can you really put a price on staying classy? [Planika Fires via greenupgrader]

The device itself weighs less than one pound and it can “convert (or reform) a continuous stream of hydrogen from fuels like gasoline, diesel, vegetable oil, biodiesel, propane, natural gas, even the glycerol byproduct from biodiesel manufacturing” using an “array of microchannels containing patented catalytic sites.” There are still major obstacles to overcome (the fact that there is no renewable source of energy to produce hydrogen being chief among them), but InnovaTek still plans on using the $500,000 they secured from a deal with Chevron to aid them in their plans to commercially licence the microreactors by 2009. [Gas 2.0]