This Awesome Urn Will Turn You into a Tree After You Die

“After you die, do you want your body to feed worms or to feed squirrels?” asks the team behind the Bios Urn — a product by Spanish design studio estudimoline — that enables you, your loved ones, or your pets to be buried in a life-assuring kind of way by transforming their ashes into a tree. “Bios Urn changes the way people see death, converting the 'end of life' into a transformation and a return to life through nature. [It is] a smart, sustainable, and ecologically friendly way to approach what’s, probably, one of the most important moments in human life.” The Urn is 100% biodegradable, made of coconut shell, compacted peat, and cellulose. It has two parts — a top capsule for the seed, and a bottom part for the ashes. The Urn is manufactured both for people and for pets; it can be used with ash saved from another urn, and it doesn’t expire. Leaving behind a tree definitely seems like a better option than leaving behind a tombstone. Photos: Urna Bios

Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear NOTE: Some major wind projects like the proposed TWE Carbon Valley project in Wyoming are already pricing in significantly lower than coal power -- $80 per MWh for wind versus $90 per MWh for coal -- and that is without government subsidies using today's wind turbine technology. The International Clean Energy Analysis (ICEA) gateway estimates that the U.S. possesses 2.2 million km2 of high wind potential (Class 3-7 winds) — about 850,000 square miles of land that could yield high levels of wind energy. This makes the U.S. something of a Saudi Arabia for wind energy, ranked third in the world for total wind energy potential. The United States uses about 26.6 billion MWh's, so at the above rate we could satisfy a full one-third of our total annual energy needs. Now what if a breakthrough came along that potentially tripled the energy output of those turbines? Well, such a breakthrough has been made, and it's called the "wind lens." Editor's note: Want more info?