The Lotus Mobile is an 18-panel solar device that unfolds into a flower shape, and is so lightweight that inventor Joseph Hui was able to mount it on his Tesla Roadster and use it to charge the car.

OK, it's probably not safe to permanently mount the Lotus Mobile on your vehicle, for the same reason it's not really a good idea to drive around wearing a gigantic floppy-brimmed hat:

But that's not its real purpose -- the point of mobile solar is to bring electricity to places that are underserved or unserved by current energy grids.

The nearly $2 billion lettuce industries of California and Arizona are likely to get mighty wilted as temperatures in those hot states continue to rise. But science is here to save the day -- with GMOs.

A research team with USDA and National Science Foundation funding has identified a lettuce gene and enzyme that make the plants stop germinating when it's too hot -- so now scientists hope to tweak those lettuces to grow even when they naturally wouldn't. Currently growers have to cool soil and seeds with extra cool water, at great expense. The study, published in the journal The Planet Cell, was a collaboration between scientists at India's Ranga Agricultural University, the University of California at Davis, and scientists from Arcadia Biosciences.

Scope announced today (April 1, in case you need help) that it's introducing a bacon-flavored mouthwash and -- bonus -- it's entirely vegetarian.

From the Scope Bacon FAQ:

Does Scope Bacon contain real bacon?
No. No pigs are harmed during the making of Scope Bacon. The bacon taste you’ll find in Scope Bacon is a perfectly healthy synthetic flavoring.

A perfectly healthy synthetic flavoring? If we hadn't already been pretty sure this was an April Fools' joke, we'd be certain now.

You can now tap into your inner evil capitalist and lay virtual oil pipelines through meadows and fields while trying to avoid conflicts with virtual farmers and virtual environmentalists. Sounds like fun, right?

Well, not according to a number of government officials in Canada, where the game has been kicking up controversy since its release last month. Their big complaint is that the game includes pipeline bombings. From CBC News:

[W]hen the game play gets too heated, a level is sometimes ended with the bombing of the imaginary pipeline, which brings to mind several unsolved bombings that took place in B.C. in 2008 and 2009.

Oh, and they're also not happy that the game was developed with taxpayer funds. From CTV News:

The game, called “Pipe Trouble,” was released by TV Ontario, the province’s public broadcaster. ...

Banking giant Citigroup recently issued a report [PDF] that ought to thrill fans of renewable energy. However, tucked inside the good news is a pill that some greens will find difficult to swallow.

The good news is that Citi expects renewable energy to triumph; it believes that typical forecasts like those from the International Energy Agency are too pessimistic. Contrary to a certain strain of conventional wisdom, it says, shale gas will not crowd out renewable energy. Quite the opposite.

The pill? Citi expects it will take lots of natural gas -- more than we're currently using, in the medium term -- to get to a power system run primarily on renewables. In fact, renewables and shale gas are in a "symbiotic" relationship, the report says, each helping the other increase market share. If that's true, a moratorium on fracking, called for by many greens, might serve to inhibit the spread of renewable energy.

There are two reasons to see renewables and natural gas as mutually reinforcing. The first and most familiar is that renewables -- at least wind and solar -- are intermittent and require backup plants that can quickly ramp on and off ("peaker" plants) to support them. Those peaker plants typically run on natural gas.

The second reason is less well understood.

It may look like a giant airplane window strung with Venetian blinds, but this structure, designed by Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo and installed at the Delft University of Technology in March, is a model of a machine that would convert wind to energy without any moving parts.

Any mechanical moving parts, at least: The technology, developed by the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science faculty at Delft, uses the movement of electrically charged water droplets to generate power. How does this work? A handy video explains:

Do you love Gmail, but feel it's not blue enough? Then you'll enjoy Gmail Blue, which is blue. You don't have to make it blue. It is blue. And it's inspired by nature (ocean, sky, blue whales) but better than what nature created -- which means it's also green! But mostly it's blue.

Disturbed by the recent tar-sands spills in Minnesota and Arkansas, Kryptonite lock company has decided to step up its efforts to protect the planet.

Today, the company offered corporate sponsorship to any of the Keystone XL pipeline protesters who raised the bar by chaining themselves to tar-sands equipment over the last year. (Needless to say, they've been burning through a lot of locks.)

"The people at Kryptonite have a pure passion for creating the best security in the world. And that includes creating security for the planet," the company said in a statement. “We recognized the blockaders for their creative use of our product, and we wanted to encourage more of their important work. Plus, Kryptonite's reinforced, anodyzed steel design resists removal 50 percent longer than competitors and is guaranteed to frustrate law enforcement.”

They may seem like odd bedfellows, but Kryptonite's products have already helped activists disrupt energy conferences and slow down pipeline construction.

It’s been a long, dark winter in Germany. In fact, there hasn’t been this little sun since people started tracking such things back in the early 1950s. A few days before Easter, the streets of Berlin were still covered in ice and snow. But spring will come, and when the snow finally melts, it will reveal the glossy black sheen of photovoltaic solar panels glinting from the North Sea to the Bavarian Alps.

Solar panels line Germany’s residential rooftops and top its low-slung barns. They sprout in orderly rows along train tracks and cover hills of coal mine tailings in what used to be East Germany. Old Soviet military bases, too polluted to use for anything else, have been turned into solar installations.

Twenty-two percent of Germany’s power is generated with renewables. Solar provides close to a quarter of that. The southern German state of Bavaria, population 12.5 million, has three photovoltaic panels per resident, which adds up to more installed solar capacity than in the entire United States.

With a long history of coal mining and heavy industry and the aforementioned winter gloom, Germany is not the country you’d naturally think of as a solar power. And yet a combination of canny regulation and widespread public support for renewables has made Germany an unlikely leader in the global green-power movement -- and created a groundswell of small-scale power generation that could upend the dominance of traditional power companies.

Have you ever lain awake at night thinking, "Wow, I would just sleep so much easier if I knew that, in addition to all the  drones that already exist, someone was out there adding to the genre of unmanned war apparatus by inventing a giant robotic jellyfish that could spy on people?"

Well you can rest easy tonight, because indeed, there's a partnership between the U.S. Navy and Virginia Tech College of Engineering intent on creating such a creature/object/robot/jellyfish. In fact, they are so dedicated to this project that they have constructed a 600-gallon tank entirely for the robo-jelly. (We wonder if they are having parties in it like in our favorite scene from Real Genius?)

The "jellyfish" is made out of a metal base, kind of like a really ugly coffee table. It is then covered with a flexible silicone top, and then has all these little wires and stuff so it can move along, really jellyfish-like, so that America's enemies just look at it and say, "Oh, look at that jellyfish!" instead of "Look at that thing that looks like a jellyfish that is spying on us right now." Here is a video of the people making it: