Plants’ ability to survive and thrive on a simple diet of sunlight and water can seem sort of miraculous, especially to we animals who have to go through the indignity of eating other living things, pleasant as that may be at times. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to harness the Earth’s abundant supply of sunlight and water for our own power needs? A newly designed revision of the artificial leaf might let us do that on a wide scale, not for food of course, but for electricity.

Game consoles use electricity; that’s just a fact of life. If I had to choose between playing lots of video games or saving on my electric bill, I think I’d choose the video games. It may not come down to that, however. As it turns out, in 2010 the lion’s share of energy used by consoles was when the consoles were in idle states, a whopping 68% of it. That being the case, saving energy and playing video games might not be mutually exclusive. In fact, something as simple as a firmware update could cut these energy costs right down to size.

Solar power is a pretty direct and elegant way to generate power. After all, most traditional fuels involve energy that originated from the sun in one way or another, and unlike oil, gas, even hydroelectric and wind, solar power doesn’t require any of those pesky turbines. You just sit a panel out in the sun and wait. The problem is, convenient as that all may sound, the actually production of solar panels has been pretty inefficient up to this point, making them prohibitively expensive considering their relatively low level of energy collection. Now, however, a new production technique utilizing a literal ion cannon may be able to halve the production cost of solar cells and make them even better in the process.

If you like to be on the bleeding edge of sustainability and style, there’s a new mobile phone on the horizon that you might want to know about, a mobile phone that’s made of bamboo. OK, so it still has a screen and like, electronic gizzards –it’s not from Gilligan’s Island or anything– but the casing is made entirely from a single piece of bamboo, grown and cut in such a way as to rival most plastics in strength and durability.

While rechargeable batteries are taking some of the financial sting out of consumer electronics, those batteries still contain some nasty chemicals that would probably just as well not be in our landfills. With that in mind, and no doubt to tout its green clout, Sony has demonstrated a remarkable “bio-cell” that breaks down paper to create power. The demo was rolled out at Tokyo’s Eco-Products 2011 exhibition. Though the bio-cell was only powering a small fan, the potential of the new technology could be huge.

A recently opened solar power plant near Seville in southern Spain, is the first of its kind to be able to generate electricity from sunlight during the day and still retain enough heat to continue generating energy all the way through the night. The $410 million Gemasolar plant has a output of 20 megawatts, although at the moment, it does not produce at full capacity when the sun isn’t out.

The plant is of the heliostatic variety, meaning that it doesn’t derive its power from photovoltaics, but rather from the raw heat energy of sunlight. A series of concentric mirrors, 2,650 in this case, direct the sunlight at centrally located salt tanks. The heat melts the salt, which boils water around it, and the steam generated turns the turbines. The salt tanks’ ability to retain heat is what affords the plant up to 15 hours of sunless energy generation.

Over the weekend, bio-fules achieved an important milestone when two transatlantic flights landed at the Paris Airshow. These were the first ocean-crossing flights ever made using with green fuels. From the Scientific American:

The blended fuel boasts all the same characteristics as traditional jet fuel, except that it burns a little more frugally. The bio-jet has to be blended, however, lest it leak out of conventional engines (biofuel lacks the aromatic hydrocarbons that help swell shut valves and seals in an aircraft engine). On the upside, the blended mix cuts down on the pungent aroma of jet fuel for the ground crew.