The Shell Eco-Marathon is sort of a weird contradiction. On the one hand, it's sponsored by Shell, but on the other hand, it's all about challenging high school and college students to make hyper-fuel-efficient cars, i.e. kind of the opposite of Shell's goals. It's like if the Intel high school science competition were sponsored by Rick Santorum.

At any rate, though, the kids really came through this year. Here are four of the winning vehicles, all built by high schoolers, all of which got more than 1,000 miles to the gallon in their competition trials.

Photo by Watson House.

Velomobiles are reclining bicycles with fiberglass shells on top, to make you super aerodynamic, weatherproof, and sort of whimsical.

For all the Republican blather about keeping gas prices down with domestic production, pretty soon the U.S.’s effect on the market price of oil will be totally swamped by demand from the developing world. As energy futurist Chris Nelder observes at Txchnologist, nowhere is this trend better exemplified than the fact that auto sales in China recently exceeded auto sales in the U.S.

Chart source: Feng An, Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, Beijing, 2010.

Photo by Jake Metcalf.

San Francisco’s hipsters are about to get motorized. Scoot Networks, an electric scooter rental system similar to Zipcar, recently launched in the Bay Area.

The system, which is being rolled out to San Francisco-based companies for private fleets, lets users locate nearby scooters with their smartphone and claim the one they want (as with Zipcar, each scooter lives at a certain location). After it’s docked into the scooter, the phone unlocks the vehicle and acts like a virtual dashboard, providing a map as well as information on speed and range.

“Flow” batteries, i.e. batteries filled with a liquid electrolyte that can be pumped out and replenished, have the potential to transform the process of charging an electric vehicle into something that more closely resembles filling it up with gas. This research is still at its earliest stages, but a battery from startup Eos Energy Storage could be drained and refilled with charged electrolyte in three minutes, the company's CEO told Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm.

Aw, look, they're trying to make jokes! I'm going to print this right out and hang it on the fridge in a frame that says My First Satire.

A new breakthrough from California-based Envia Systems will yield lithium-ion batteries that are less than half the cost of current cells, while also having three times the energy density. And guess who funded it? The Department of Energy. That's right: Sometimes, when the government invests in innovation, it pays off moon launch-big.

For those of you who are out of touch with what the young people and Mormons are all about these days, Pinterest is this really big, Facebook-but-for-images type thing, and it's kind of wild that the Army is on it, because it's mostly pictures of cats, clothes, and cupcakes. They even have a collection of images for their "green" efforts, from which we plucked a few of our favorites.

At a campaign event in Georgia, Newt Gingrich told supporters that he would maaaaaagically lower gas prices because "you can't put a gun rack on a Volt." Shows what the hell he knows.

According to this 1971 article from Mother Earth News, British chicken farmer Harold Bate invented a car that runs on animal droppings 40 years ago. Why the hell are we still using oil?

Bate invented a converter that reportedly recycles animal (or human) waste into methane gas -- and he ginned it up from "odds and ends at hand." To be fair, using the converter is a pretty involved process, requiring 300 pounds of manure that has been fermented for up to a week. But on the flip side, Bate estimated it only cost him 3 cents (17 cents in 2011 money) for the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline.