Naturalpath

Volkswagen’s radical 238mpg concept car may actually reach production; another blow to first generation biofuel; and a low-energy, strikingly green city takes root in the heart of Big Oil. The weekend is in sight — welcome to the Friday edition of The Daily Five.

VW to Sell 238mpg, 650lb Carbon Fiber “1L” Diesel in 2010 : Volkswagen — the original People’s Car — figures people would like to keep driving, despite dire predictions of runaway energy prices. The German auto manufacturer says it intends to bring a 238mpg, ultra-lightweight, ultra-aerodynamic diesel two-seater to market. Even more remarkably, VW hopes to do this in just two years. The 8.5 hp coupe would be designed from bottom to top for fuel efficiency. (Next Energy News)

Stillborn: French gas stations chain stops selling E85: The wheels are coming off for ethanol. French gas station chain Système U is suspending sale of E85 ethanol-added fuel. Why? Nobody will buy it. (Autoblog Green)

Antarctica may not be warming as fast as computer models project; windpower and solar companies boom; and Wal-Mart offers state government free expert energy audits. It’s your Thursday edition of The Daily Five:

Climate Models Overheat Antarctica: Sometimes being wrong is good news. A new report from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) suggests concern about warming in Antarctica may be overstated. NCAR scientist Andrew Monaghan says that while warming is clearly happening elsewhere, the best climate models consistently show greater heating than has been historically observed. Why the divergence? It seems that the models assume more water vapor in the Antarctic atmosphere than is actually present. (Newswise)

New concept may provide a powerful platform for climate science.

Building a conventional computer on this scale is possible, but such a system would literally require enough power to light a small city. There’s also the expense: an estimated $1 billion USD.

But three Berkeley Lab researchers think they have a cheaper, dramatically more efficient solution: a massively parallel array of low-power processors similar to those which run iPods, cellphones, and portable devices. Such chips are already designed to run cool on as little wattage as possible, opening up new possibilities in the development of a supercomputer which is essentially a vast network of embedded processor cores.

Whatever floats your point

In a paper published this week, the Berkeley scientists estimated an “iPod supercomputer” could be constructed for about $75 million. The proposed architecture would be optimized for small processor cores, optimized links, and the requirements of highly parallel applications.