Made On Earth

Not Brian Wilson’s woodie

Not Brian Wilson’s woodie

That’s right, it’s a wooden sports car. And although the sexy images shown here look PhotoShop-y to me, the body of the car, which is made fiberglass-style out of wooden fibers woven on a custom-built loom, appears really to be complete. You can follow Joe Harmon’s construction of “Splinter” at his site. [via Dude Craft]

The Belonio stove

The Belonio stove

Alexis Belonio is an associate professor in agricultural engineering at the Central Philippine University of Iloilo City. In 2008 he received a Rolex Award for Enterprise for a rice-husk-burning stove he designed. Belonio’s stove is not complicated, either mechanically or conceptually: A columnar metal burner with the addition of a small intake fan at the base to tip the stoichiometry of combustion towards oxidation, giving a blue, clean, efficient flame that leaves little or no residue. Traditional rice husk burners, by contrast, do not have this forced-air feature and produce a yellow, dirty, inefficient flame that leaves tar behind. The upshot is more efficient use of rice husk biomass and greatly reduced pollution from the many rice-husk burners in use today.

Living willow architecture

Living willow architecture

More arboreal architectural awesomeness, here brought to you by German architect Marcel Kalberer and the Sanfte Strukturen group. The first structure, called the Auerworld Palace, was constructed in 1998, in Aeurstedt, Germany, and was their first “willow palace” project, taking the efforts of 300 volunteers to build. Kalberer has gone on to… er… plant 70 […]

Living root bridges

Wow, how cool are these bridges, “grown” by training roots to grow into the shapes you want for your structure. In the depths of northeastern India, in one of the wettest places on earth, bridges aren’t built – they’re grown. The living bridges of Cherrapunji, India are made from the roots of the Ficus elastica […]