Sharp has unveiled a stunning 26-foot-tall Christmas tree made of 43 Aquos LCD televisions, which sizes ranging from 19 to 52 inches. The gigantic TV tree is located in New York's Grand Central Station, where people can not only admire its coordinated decoration animations, created by Japanese video artist Tsuyoshi Takashiro, but also register to win one of the Aquos panels in the tree. If you are a New Yorker and need another reason to go to Grand Central, Sharp will also donate one dollar per registered person to a program that trains people in environmental jobs. [PopSci]

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So modern treehouses aren't new, but the designers of this project in New Zealand have crafted something that blends fantastically with its host redwood tree. The fungus or chrysalis-shaped building—take your aesthetic pick—will be a smallish restaurant built by, of all people, the NZ Yellow Pages. It's currently under construction from laminated pine, plantation poplar and redwood thirty feet up a giant tree in a place north of Auckland. Getting there'll be fun when it's finished though: entry is via a 120-foot high treetop walkway. [Contemporist via Born Rich]

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I think that, in any tough situation, there's a kind of normal way a person can react and a completely angry, psycho, absurd way a person can react. The normal way is the best way about 99.99% of the time. Example: A waiter brings you the wrong drink, so you politely ask for another. Result: You get the drink you wanted without traces of type 1 herpes. See? Everybody wins.

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For artist Alex Metcalf, the inner workings of trees has been a lifelong obsession. So, after he graduated from design school he utilised his artistic skills to create the "Tree Listening Installation"—a project designed to educate the public about what happens inside a tree. The system he created allows visitors to listen to a live performance of a tree sucking up nutrients using either a simple metal cone that looks like an old-timey hearing aid, or a set of headphones linked to a specially designed solar powered sensor placed on the tree.

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Bike theft is a pretty sizable problem in cities, with only the most industrial-strength locks keeping nimble-fingered thieves from taking off with your two-wheeler. This Bike Tree concept helps alleviate this problem by raising bikes up and out of reach of bike thieves. It also helps save space, allowing more bikes to be parked in a smaller area. I like it; let's see some of these installed in NYC, eh? [Coroflot via Treehugger]

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Apparently scientists (and some of our readers, surely) have known that we can grow oil for years, and not in the grow-corn-make-oil kind of way. The Brazilian Copaifera langsdorfii can be tapped (ala maple syrup) for a natural diesel fuel that requires only simple filtering before being poured into a truck. (This picture is of the tree's cells.) The catch? The diesel only has a shelf-life of about 3 months.

So how many trees would it take to match the oil output of, say, Saudi Arabia? Check our stats after the jump.

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