Congress is on track to passing a nationwide Internet retail sales tax, but it has serious flaws that could majorly muck up the e-commerce industry. We think citizens are often smarter than the government, and we want to give you a chance to make the bill better before it becomes law. So, we’ve teamed up with Congressman Darrell Issa’s Open Government Foundation, which designed a platform for making line-by-line suggestions to proposed laws. In TechCrunch’s version of the “Project Madison” crowdsourcing legislative platform, our readers can add, delete, and amend specific passages in the upcoming tax law.

Suggestions that are voted up by our community will get the most attention of Congressional staffers (which we know are watching our platform). It’s been claimed that the Internet is “democratizing” the world; well, here’s our chance to prove it.

Senate Bill S.743, the “Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013,” passed the Senate with overwhelming support and is on to the House of Representatives. But, it won’t be passed for at least a month, so we have some time to bubble up the best ideas from our community of readers.

As we promised when we first launched our new civics channel, Crunchgov, TechCrunch would source and promote the most insightful ideas from the technology community. A proactive approach to improving law is just the next logical step for how we can support the amazing work you all do.

Go to http://madison.techcrunch.com/ and get your citizen on. Encourage your friends, ping your local expert, and share  this opportunity loudly. If we make an impact on the bill, it’ll a watershed moment in American democracy. Go forth!

If you’ve flirted with vegetarianism like I have, then you’re probably aware of a range of meat substitutes, all of which pale in comparison to the real thing. But now Beyond Meat CEO and founder Ethan Brown says that mock meat is about 80 percent of the way to being able to sub in for the real thing without anyone being the wiser, in terms of taste, texture and appearance.

Brown made that claim on stage today at the WIRED Business Conference, where he was discussing the role of proteins in our diet in general and how Silicon Valley investment-backed startups like his own are trying to shake up perhaps one of the oldest and most entrenched industries: the meat market.

Beyond Meat grabbed headlines as an unlikely target for investment by Obvious Corp., the investment vehicle/incubator/idea factory co-founded by Biz Stone and Evan Williams of Twitter fame. In a blog post from August, Stone outlined exactly why Obvious felt that Beyond Meat was a prime investment target, and how it aligned with the Obvious vision.

Beyond Meat will become the market leader in the development and introduction of new plant protein products. Together, we are focused on perfectly replacing animal protein with plant protein where doing so creates nutritional value at lower cost. Aside from the fact that the products are healthy, sustainable, kind, and delicious, we are involved because with one company, we have an impact on climate change, resource scarcity, human health, animal welfare, and more. With this company, we can move into new territory while staying true to Obvious’ mission.

The Obvious goal is to “build systems that help people work together to make the world a better place,” and Beyond Meat definitely fits within that broad aim. On stage, Brown talked about the time saved in raising non-meat protein versus that which comes from animal sources, which is a comparison of minutes for his company’s products to days for even the fastest-grown animal protein, which doesn’t even begin to get into ethical concerns.

For Brown, a big part of winning the war with the consumer over meat alternatives is convincing them to try it to begin with, and that starts with giving them a recognizable product. Already, he says people find it challenging to identify Beyond Meat’s own chicken substitute as something other than chicken, except when it’s placed side-by-side with the real thing. But the key to wide adoption, and winning over a much bigger percentage of the roughly $177 billion annual animal protein market that exists today, will be achieving full verisimilitude. And part of that means getting equal billing with the red and bloody stuff.

“The meat counter for me is about an unlevelled playing field,” Brown explained on stage at the Wired event today. “They should be selling protein, not meat and meat alternatives. So when you go back to that section in the store it should be about protein, because often when you go back and are looking for a meat alternative, those products are off in a penalty box in the corner.”

Many vegetarians claim not to want meat substitutes that look, feel and taste like the real thing, but there’s an even larger market of people who are trying to limit their meat intake for health purposes but don’t want to leave the satisfaction of biting into a chicken breast or flank steak behind. That’s what has helped Beyond Meat’s business grow at a rate of 60 percent this past quarter, and 30 percent in the last month alone, according to Brown.

Solving the meat eater’s dilemma is a tech problem, and so it makes sense that investors like Obvious Corp., Vinod Khosla, and many others are interested in the space. But will we ever really get to a singularity point where we can’t tell our turkey from our Tofurky? Or will we all fall down in the uncanny valley just short of finding a perfect copy? Either way, it’s bound to be an exciting space to watch.

For large companies that have a long list of suppliers that they work with, it’s not only difficult to manage communication with all of them, but understanding the environmental impact of each supplier is next to impossible. It’s not a sexy space to work in by any means but the addressable market is comprised of Fortune 500 companies and the government itself, which is bound to mandates involving environmental sustainability when working with suppliers.

SupplyShift is a backend tool for those companies and organizations to track everything that’s going on with suppliers, which are usually scattered throughout the world. These buyers are collecting sustainability data but don’t currently have the tools to help them reduce risk exposure.

What SupplyShift really is is a network which allows them to understand their “supply chain footprint” which will make suppliers actually care more about how they present themselves, heating up competing among them. The team, led by CEO and cofounder Alexander Gershenson, has been working on these problems as a consultant and it was time to build their work out as an actual product.

Currently, Ecoshift, the consulting arm for the team, is already hosting panels with companies like Microsoft, Target and Sprint on supply chain management.

The type of risk that companies experience with suppliers are the situation that Mattel went through with lead paint, where 1M toys had to be recalled. As far as how suppliers can affect how the public thinks about your company, look no further than Apple’s relationship with Foxconn, regarding their labor practices. You get the point. SupplyShift will track all of these potential risks, sharing them among the network of companies that use it.

Why now? Gershenson told me: “The market situation changed radically in the last three years, and sustainability is becoming a key part of corporate strategy, but corporations and the government do not have the tools to address that need. SupplyShift takes care of that.”

The main component that makes SupplyShift different from its competitors is that the companies who use the service are also paying to enroll their suppliers. This is key, because suppliers either won’t, or can’t afford to enroll themselves in similar services. By putting this in the hands of the companies who are selling goods, the database of suppliers will grow at a more rapid rate.

This isn’t a social network for professionals, photo-sharing apps for tweens, but it’s a product that provides important information that could save companies millions of dollars in bad PR and lawsuits due to critical mistakes made by a supplier.

Kickstarter might be better known for funding films and hardware projects, but it’s now getting its first synthetic biology proposal. A Singularity University alum, a Stanford post-doc and a Stanford Ph.D. are looking to use synthetic biology and software from startup Genome Compiler to creating plants that glow.

While the first several generations of plants might be weaker at emitting light, the long-term idea is to replace electric or gas lighting with natural lighting from plants.

“We live in a world that is generating too much carbon dioxide,” said Antony Evans, who is one of the three people behind the project. “Nature has figured out ways of creating energy that don’t require so much CO2 use, and what we really want to do is awaken people to the potential of that. Instead of having all these expensive street lights, why don’t we get plants?”

With the project, they’re inserting bioluminescence genes into a small flowering plant called Arabidopsis that’s part of the mustard family.

They’re looking for $65,000 in funding to print DNA sequences they’ve designed using the Genome Compiler software and then to create rewards for backers like “Maker” kits that let you create your own glowing plants. The startup associated with the project, Genome Compiler, lets people easily design genetic sequences and order them online.

The project comes at a time when costs around both genome sequencing and DNA printing are falling precipitously. Printing DNA at this points costs at least 25 cents per base pair. So for an 8,000-character sequence, they’re looking at at least $2,000 per unique sequence.

They’ll test a number of experimental sequences and print them with partner and Silicon Valley startup Cambrian Genomics, which has made a DNA laser printing system that cuts the cost of DNA synthesis dramatically. Then they’ll use bacteria as a vector to insert the new DNA into the plant.

Evans, who doesn’t have a background in biology at all, got into the field through Singularity University and Biocurious, a bio-hacking space down in Sunnyvale.

His bet is that the next decade will usher in a new era where it’s as easy to hack on animal or plant genomes as it is to build software with Python or Rails. The cost of sequencing a full human genome is falling even faster than Moore’s law would suggest at a current rate $8,000 down from $100 million in 2001. Not only that, DNA printing is getting cheaper as well with companies like Genscript.

They’ve also gone through the regulatory process to ensure that the project is compliant with U.S. law. Regulators from the USDA and EPA are naturally concerned that synthetic plants could become pests and crowd out or compete with natural plants for resources. They check for whether newly designed life forms have genes associated with pests; Evans has cleared this. The third agency that regulates synthetic biology experiments, the FDA, isn’t really involved here because these “Glowing Plants” are inedible.

Biomimicry is an engineering field that takes cues from nature to help solve and address human problems, and Google today launched a new website at its Google Green initiative that highlights some of the ways nature’s engineers can inspire and guide human behavior. The site uses gorgeous National Geographic images along with brief descriptions of how the natural antecedent relates to the human concept, and then provides Google-sourced tools to help people emulate that activity.

Is it basically an ad? Yes. Is it a smart one? Definitely. Google manages to pitch pretty much all of its major web- and app-based offerings and services in a single slide show, with direct integrations built in that make it possible to take immediate action based on the trends they choose to highlight. You can do a local search for recycled and upcycled decorating material, grab apps and movies on the subjects from Google Play, search for maps and join Google+ communities and more. My only complaint is that Google buries the science at the end of the site in linked academic articles for each animal or plant behavior, where those probably should have been at least linked somewhere in each well-designed spread right alongside the Google service advertisements.

Some might call this empty lip-service to Earth Day, which takes place today and probably would be better served by Google powering down a server farm or two for a few hours, but the concepts highlighted (including ride sharing, composting, energy conservation and diet modification) are solid ones and would have genuinely beneficial ecological effects if adopted by large portions of the community. Plus it’s an impressive example of web design in its own right, and a look at what Google can do with content marketing models which could be a key vector for it to exploit as the nature of online advertising continues to shift.

Google has long had an interest in renewable energy and has now invested more than $1 billion of its own money in alternative energy projects. However, as the company notes in a blog post and white paper today, it’s not always easy for companies that want to buy renewable energy to do so, given that most utilities don’t yet offer a renewable power option yet. In its white paper, Google lays out a plan that would make it easier for more companies to buy green energy.

Currently, Google says, businesses have the option to install on-site generation (like the solar cells on its Mountain View headquarters’ roof), buy renewable energy certificates or to sign power purchase agreements. All of these approaches, however, Google argues, have significant downsides. On-site generation usually can’t produce enough energy to power a facility 24/7, for example, and renewable energy certificates don’t “provide assurance that the price paid for RECs is being used to support additional investment in new renewable power generation.”

For the most part, companies also have to accept that at least a part of their generation mix includes some carbon-intensive sources. Currently, if a company wants renewable power — and is willing to pay for it — it still can’t get it in most places because it’s simply not being offered.

The reason for this, Google argues, is that historically, utilities never designed their rate schedules around a specific category of power generation (though it’s worth noting that at least some utilities recently started offering this option). Instead, the focus was always purely on cost and reliability.

So how does Google plan to change this? The company wants utilities to offer companies like Google the choice to buy renewable energy through a new class of service. The service would be voluntary, provided only to those companies that request it but open to all customers that want it and meet basic criteria.” The cost of procuring the renewable energy would only be passed on to those customers who select this option and not impact anybody else.

You can read more about the exact details of the proposal here, and we have embedded the proposal below.

Google also plans to put this plan into action. As part of the planned $600 million expansion of its Lenoir, N.C. data center, the company has partnered with Duke Energy to develop a new program based on its ideas. Duke Energy still has to file this plan with the N.C. state commission, though, which Google says it will do within the next 90 days.

Google’s Renewable Energy Options Proposal

Japanese startup Terra Motors officially debuted its electric tuk-tuk (a type of three-wheeled passenger vehicle common in Asia), a tricycle that costs just over $6,000 U.S. and gets 31 miles on a 2 hour charge. The electric vehicle stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from something like the Tesla Model S Roadster, and for good reason: it’s designed to be affordable for emerging markets in large quantities.

The first fleet is already on order for the Philippines (via CNET), as part of a plan to replace 100,000 gas-powered tuk-tuks in that country by 2016, with more efficient, cost-effective electric vehicles. They’ll be offered to passenger transport drivers across the country on a lease-to-own basis, and should save those drives up to $5 per day in fuel costs, as well as cut down on air pollution on the ground in some very densely populated urban areas.

The Terra Motors electric trike isn’t exactly cheap at $6,300 (gas-powered models can be had for between $1,000 to around $1,500 depending on seating capacity and amenities), but it’s fundamentally opposite from something like a Tesla, which actually just axed its cheapest entry-level model citing poor demand. Terra Motors Director of Business Development Tetsuya Ohashi said in an email that the goal is to start expanding its business to the broader Asian market as quickly as possible, and hitting the right price point is a key ingredient in that strategy.

The Terra Motors tuk-tuk is also quite the looker, with a space-age design and ample interior seating, so it’s got that going for it over its gas-powered brethren, too. 31 miles isn’t terrific in terms of range, but these are designed as in-city transport for short trips. Still, having to bog down for two hours every time you hit that limit also isn’t going to be ideal, but the money saved in gas expenses could make up for the down time, especially if planned properly.

Terra has impressive investors, including former top execs from Apple Japan, Google Japan, Sony and Compaq. Chinese companies already market electric tuk-tuks, but none are quite as ambitious as this new prototype from Terra, and while a Dutch company called The Tuk Tuk Factory launched an EV a couple of years ago called the e-Tuk, it’s aimed primarily at the European market, so Terra has a chance to make a big splash depending on its reception.

There is no shortage of cloud-based file storage and synchronization solutions: Dropbox, Box.net, Ubuntu One, and on and on and on. Most offer pretty much the same things. A few niche players offer something special, like Spideroak‘s approach to encryption, or ownCloud‘s host-it-yourself solution. QloudSync puts forward two interesting differentiators: it’s powered by 100% renewable energy, and it’s hosted in Iceland.

From a feature perspective, QloudSync isn’t anything new. File storage and synchronization. Share links with others. Stream music and video. The client apps are open source, and built atop SparkleShare.

QloudSync runs on GreenQloud‘s ComputeQloud and StorageQloud, which offer API compatibility with Amazon EC2 and S3. What is different about GreenQloud’s offerings, though, are that they run on renewable energy and claim to be carbon neutral, without the use of emissions offsets of any kind. Users of GreenQloud’s services can easily share their carbon savings to the social media outlet of their choice.

We see a great opportunity in utilizing Iceland’s abundant 100% renewable geothermal and hydro energy infrastructure, naturally cool climate and strategic location as a means to clean up IT and greatly reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.

GreenQloud is also making a strong play for the fact that they’re hosted in Iceland. According to them, your data “is safe from SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, Patriot act because StorageQloud runs from data centers in Iceland.” This doesn’t strike me as strong reason to use GreenQloud by itself, but it may be one of several that makes them a more attractive option in the sea of similar products.

If you’re at SXSW, stop by booth #1326 in the convention center and say hello to them.

Correction: There is a Jedi meld starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_meld (h/t @thegarance)

—
BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) March 01, 2013

President Obama inadvertently triggered national geek outrage, after he mistakenly mixed up the warring science fiction universes of Star Wars and Star Trek. During a press conference related to recently triggered budget cutbacks, known as the “sequester,” he said, “I can’t do some kind of Jedi Mind Meld on congressional Republicans,” referring to the partisan gridlock that has prevented Congress from passing a budget. Twitter immediately lit up with comments poking fun of the fact that Obama mixed up Star Wars’ ‘Jedi Mind Trick‘, used for mind control, and Star Trek‘s Vulcan ‘Mind Meld’, for sharing thoughts.

Obama just said "Jedi mindmeld." What's next, Klingon lightsabers? #Shame #Impeach

—
rob delaney (@robdelaney) March 01, 2013

A few savvy (i.e. super-geeky) users pointed out that there is, in fact, a Jedi mind meld, employed in later books of the Star Wars universe. According to a Wikia entry,

Force Meld, otherwise known as Jedi meld or Battle meld, was a technique where a number of Force users joined their minds together through the Force, drawing strength from each other. A refinement of battle meditation, it was known to the ancient Jedi, though dangerous. While battle meditation could influence both the Force-sensitives and the insensitives of both sides, Force Meld concentrates on coordinating and improving the Force-sensitives of the user’s side.

Now, did Obama use the phrase correctly? Probably not. Is he a hyper-wonky follower of the post-movie Star Wars universe? Even less likely. Did I make a horrible mistake as a writer getting into the middle of a nuanced sci-fi debate? Yes, most definitely.

As American science students struggle to compete with the global competition, Oklahoma is moving forward with a law that could ban Biology teachers from failing students who argue that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. The state legislator’s committee in charge of education standards has approved a law that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who argue against widely accepted scientific theories, such as evolution and climate change.

“I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks,” said Republican State Representative Gus Blackwell who sponsored the Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act, which can now go the state legislature for a vote.

Students are not exempt from being tested on textbook material, “but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories,” reads the bill [PDF].

Not everyone is ecstatic about the bill, however. “An extremely high percentage of scientists will tell you that evolution doesn’t have scientific weaknesses,” said education director of the National Center for Science Education, Eric Meikle, to Mother Jones. “If every teacher, parent, and school board can decide what to teach on their own, you’re going to have chaos. You can’t deluge kids with every theory that’s ever been considered since the beginning of time.”

[Photo Credit: myfavoritedinosaur.com]

Tesla Motors CEO and founder Elon Musk definitely isn’t the best guy to try to pull a fast one on. The visionary entrepreneur set Twitter a titter when he claimed earlier this week that New York Times writer John Broder had fudged details about the Tesla Models S car’s range in cold weather, resulting in what he termed a “fake” article. Musk promised evidence, and now he has delivered, via the official Tesla blog.

In keeping with his brief description of what was wrong with the review from his original tweet, Musk laid out how vehicle logs (standard practice after Tesla ran into issues with Top Gear, which dramatized a breakdown where none actually existed) showed that the car Broder was driving for his article was improperly charged, took an unscheduled side trip and essentially seemed to have been set up to fail.

Musk breaks down what went wrong in a number of bullet points, but basically Broder’s car never ran out of juice completely; was charged to a level which he knew wouldn’t be enough to get to his destination at one point; actually exceeded its anticipated range; was driven past charging stations which could’ve helped it finish the journey; and was taken for a lengthy detour through Manhattan not included in the original trip plan.

Other problems add to the reported deception, including climate control settings that run counter to Broder’s stated claims in the article about what he did with in-car heating (turned up the temp when he said he turned it down). The smaller details aren’t necessarily the most consequential, but the fact that Musk has record of even these smaller contradictions in his test vehicle’s logs helps to paint a picture of a writer who seems to have been blatantly gunning for Tesla from the start.

Musk says that Broder altered details and the conditions of the test to help fit with his pre-existing opinion, which he arrives at thanks to a quote from Broder in an article published in 2012. Broder essentially attempts to deflate the sunny image of a future filled with electric cars, claiming that “the state of the electric car is dismal, the “victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.” To be fair, in that article Broder also goes on to give plenty of space to electric car supporters, too, and even gives the last word to Chris Paine, the documentary filmmaker behind Who Killed the Electric Car?, ending on Paine’s implied accusation that the oil and gas industry are behind stalling the electric future of car transport.

But overall, Musk’s evidence is pretty damning, especially backed up as it is by solid data from the Model S itself. He ends by calling for the NYT to launch an investigation into the article and its writing, and after an attack like this, I’d guess the NYT would have to do just that in order to be able to come up with a satisfactory response.

Rally.org, the U.S.-based crowdfunding platform designed for socially-minded causes, is taking its mission to Europe. Today, the startup is opening an incubator in Berlin, its first outside of the U.S., and on a limited beta will start to process donations made on its proprietary payment platform in euros, with the intention of adding British pounds and other currencies in the very near future.

Rally.org — which, commendably, used its own platform to raise $7.9 million from the likes of Relay Ventures, Mike Maples of Floodgate Fund, Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners, Kevin Rose of Google Ventures, Craig Shapiro of Collaborative Fund, Michael Birch of Bebo, Tim Ferriss and Eric Ries — recently passed 3 million people contributing to 23,000 campaigns on its platform, and the idea is to tap into more local social causes and fundraising activities in this part of the world to grow that base even more.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Rally.org co-founder and CEO Tom Serres says that the company chose Berlin for its incubator and head office partly because Rally.org had already opened a Rallypad co-working space of sorts in the city last year; and partly because it’s a very startup-friendly city economically (in other words, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to start a new company there). “We wanted a community, not just a product,” he said.

But the intention is to expand very soon to the UK, which Serres notes has the highest concentration in Europe of people who donate money to good causes. For Rally.org, a cause can be anything from a donation drive for a non-profit; to an environmental startup project aimed at improving, say, energy consumption; to someone looking to raise money for their education — not a small issue in Europe, where student fees are skyrocketing in many countries as states pull back spending in these recessionary times. (Rally takes a 5.75% commission on all final fundraises.)

While crowdfunding sites seem to be approaching a dime a dozen these days, Rally.org has a few points that distinguish it from the pack. Its emphasis on good causes is the obvious one. But the other may be the one that helps it grow: it has built its own payment platform — independent of PayPal, Amazon and the rest — that underpins the service, which is already capable of handling 17 different currencies, says Serres.

“My long term vision is to be the infrastructre of the next economy, the cause economy,” Serres told TechCrunch, describing a future where we make purchasing decisions based on making bigger statements and helping the world: think Tom’s Shoes and its idea of donating one pair to a needy child for each pair bought, expanded into all of your daily transactions. “The idea is: Everywhere I go I make a statement to the world.”

Serres points out every person who makes a contribution through Rally.org gets a virtual wallet, and the idea is to eventually make that wallet into something that consumers can use for more donations, as well as for purchases elsewhere.

For now, those posting campaigns on Rally.org will need to have German bank accounts to receive funds — although this will expand over time, Serres says. Companies based in the company’s Berlin incubator — Startup Weekend, music resource-sharing company Muzup, and social relocation community G1OBALS — will be the first Europeans to use the product. Another group is starting a campaign to preserve Berlin’s princesses garden, Prinzessinnengarten.

You know those mobile devices that everyone keeps raving about? Turns out it’s a huge business. Shocker, I know. Strategy Analytics recently estimated that about 1.6 billion mobile phones shipped in 2012. What’s more, according to Canalys’ report today, the tablet market grew by 75 percent in the fourth quarter to 46.2 million units, with total shipments hitting 114.6 million in 2012.

With all these new devices hitting the market, people tend to overlook the fact that this creates an enormous amount of waste. ecoATM debuted in 2011 with a green solution: Give consumers an easy way to recycle their used electronics. The San Diego-based startup has been on a mission to become the Coinstar for used, mobile devices, offering consumers ATM-like kiosks that automate the buy-back of their has-been electronics and give them a cash reward for doing so.

With the tablet market growing like gangbusters, last week, the company expanded its support to include tablets, which means that its kiosks will now accept your iPads in addition to your cell phones, smartphones and MP3 players. Over the last year, the startup has gone from 50 kiosks to about 300 across 20 states, and this year, it hopes to add another 600 or 700 kiosks, bringing cash for clunky devices to a mall near you.

To support this growth, the 2012 Crunchies Winner announced today that it has secured $40 million in debt financing from Falcon Investment Advisors, which ecoATM CEO Tom Tullie says will help provide the fuel it needs to continue nationwide expansion.

“There’s still a large percentage of the country that doesn’t have access to a convenient recycling solution for their mobile phones and other personal portable electronic devices,” Tullie says of the new debt round. “We raised this money to help us deploy ecoATMs nationwide and help people recycle their old phones, tablets, or MP3 players, regardless of where they live.”

To date, ecoATM’s expansion plan has focused primarily on positioning its kiosks in shopping malls in large metropolitan areas — for good reason — “eventually, we’re going to run out of malls,” ecoATM marketing director Ryan Kuder told us recently. So, with its new capital, the startup wants to expand into smaller cities and other types of high-foot traffic areas, like supermarkets and smaller retail outlets.

And, according to Kuder, the expansion reflects a growing demand (and growing use of) its kiosks among consumers. Yes, people are actually using the machines. Kuder says that people used ecoATM to recycle “hundreds of thousands of phones” last year and has paid out “millions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of customers.”

By doing so, Tullie added, the company has been able to save landfills from “hundreds of thousands of potentially toxic devices,” as it has been able to “find a second life” for 60 percent of the devices it has collected, while recycling the rest.

The new debt round adds to the $17 million in funding it has raised to date from Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, TAO Ventures, PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital and Koh Boon Hwee, to name a few. In 2012, the company was also awarded a Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation for up to $1 million. The new financing brings ecoATM’s total funding to just over $70 million.

For more, find the company at home here.

Apple has released its 2013 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, and it features a number of updates from last year, including Apple’s decision to join the Fair Labor Association (a notable first), and conduct audits of its suppliers in tandem with that outside watchdog organization. The results seem to be a tightening of Apple’s code of conduct for suppliers all around, in terms of monitoring, penalties and programs to improve conditions.

Apple conducted 72 percent more audits in 2012 than it did in 2011, for example, totaling 393 audits across facilities employing 1.5 million workers. All types of audits increased for the year, including firs-time, repeat, process safety assessments and specialized environmental audits, but the last one took the biggest jumps vs. previous years. In 2012, Apple conducted 55 focused environmental audits, which is a 293 percent increase over the number it ran in 2011. The Mac maker works with outside associations in this area, too, just as it does with the FLA regarding labor, including the Natural Defense Council, the EPA and the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs.

The supplier audits also actually resulted in more severe punitive action than usual. Apple has faced criticism in the past for doling out corrective measures that seem rather toothless – most often putting suppliers “on probation,” meaning they’ll be watched more closely for future violations. But one supplier fell afoul of Apple’s measures to protect against underage labor, with 74 cases counted at a single facility. Apple terminated the relationship with that offending party entirely, proving that there are real consequences for companies that ignore its code of conduct and local labor laws.

Apple also came down harder on companies for compliance with working hour regulations, and changed its policies and practices in monitoring them to be more effective. In 2012, Apple started doing real-time work hour tracking on a weekly basis for over 1 million of the employees at its supplier companies, and publishing data on its progress every month. That led to a 92 percent compliance rate with its 60 hour maximum work week, as laid out in the Apple Supplier Code of Conduct, and Apple says overall work weeks averaged less than 50 hours.

Another area of improvement for Apple was in participation in its training and education programs. There were 1.32 million workers trained on local laws, worker rights, health and safety and Apple’s own Code of Conduct during 2012, a 97 percent increase over 2011′s 670,000. Apple also provided more free educational opportunities to workers than ever before, with 201,000 cumulative participants in those programs, up 235 percent from 60,000 in 2011.

Apple’s transparency definitely improved over the course of 2012 when it comes to its efforts around supplier responsibility and maintaining healthy and safe work environments, and that’s something Apple CEO Tim Cook clearly undertook as a conscious effort. That’s not to say that Apple didn’t have its fair share of labor issues during the year (issues around the demanding requirements for building the iPhone 5 come to mind), but especially in the way that Apple has allowed disinterested third parties to come in and aid with its monitoring efforts, 2012 was definitely the most significant year yet in terms of improvements made to its stance on supplier responsibility.

The Bonsai is gadget with a soul, one that hopes to make a global difference by changing the way we go about an activity many do on a daily basis. It’s a shaving accessory, and it’s being funded via Indiegogo right now, with creator Craig Battin and his team looking for $125,000 to turn their final prototype into a production shipping device.

The Bonsai is a razor rinsing device, one that can save up to 99 percent of the water the average person uses rinsing out their blade under a running tap. It’s essentially a cup, one that you fill with a set amount of water at the beginning of your shave, which then creates a spray via high-pressure circulation of water. It also filters out hair and other debris, which you can then dump when you’re done.

Battin explained via email that growing up in Las Vegas, the need to conserve water was ever-present, hence his fascination with this problem in particular.

“I can remember driving over Hoover Dam with my family on the way to Arizona and seeing the “bathtub ring” of Lake Mead grow and grow, and it was very alarming to me,” he explained. ” At the most severe point in the ongoing drought, I believe the lake level had dropped by 120 feet.  When I joined the workforce after college, I was forced to shave frequently, and I was always bothered by how much water I wasted each day. That was the genesis.”

While the water conservation aspect drove the Bonsai’s initial development, Battin and his team quickly turned their attention to other areas of concern. These prompted the design of the filter to get rid of gunk that can clog drains, especially with daily shaving, and also the way the Bonsai actually blends your shaving cream with the rinse water as you go to create a solution that’s easier on your face since it’s oiling your razor as you go. The project will also offer an oil that you can use in combination with the Bonzai to enhance that effect. Battin explained that too much attention has been focused on razors, hence the lack of forward movement in terms of changes to the way we actually shave.

“It seems like we’ve been riding this trajectory where the only feasible innovations involve the physical razor or the blades, so you end up with things like vibrating handles and lethal 6-blade cartridges,” he said. “I think the lack of disruption has everything to do with where the focus has been, and the fact that consumers really don’t have many alternatives.”

Of course, the Bonzai also saves money by saving water, and Battin claims, by extending the life of your razor blades. It’s powered by a rechargeable battery and works both in and out of the shower. The gadget is available during the Indiegogo campaign for a pledge starting at $79, and the team estimates they’ll begin shipping devices by July 2013. If you’re a slave to the shave, as most of us likely are, you could do worse than to back this project and its aspirational goal of cutting down on the environmental toll it takes for us to clean up our ape-like faces and bodies.

Apple’s patent filings today reveal one concept outside their usual product-focused applications, detailing a method for harnessing wind power in a manner different from that employed in traditional turbines. Electricity gathered from a wind turbine would be converted to heat energy and stored in a “low-heat capacity fluid” in Apple’s patent, allowing it to be tapped on an as-needed basis whenever the wind dies down.

It all gets pretty technical, but painted in broad strokes, the system would potentially use the motion of the rotor shaft moving against a “low-heat capacity fluid” (such as ethanol or mercury, for instance) to generate heat through friction between the two surfaces. This can then be transferred from the storage fluid to a working fluid which is then boiled off to release steam. The steam powers a turbine, converting the energy to usable form.

Apple’s system differs from basic wind-power generators that are highly subject to variances in wind power, as well as systems that use batteries to store energy made through rotational energy for later use when wind isn’t actively making that much power. Instead, it is designed to make wind power available on a more “on-demand” basis, which is of significant importance for facilities requiring a constant, uninterrupted power supply. That likely explains why Apple is pursuing this kind of tech: Its massive data centers have huge power requirements, and the company has stated its commitment to harnessing wind, solar and other alternative energy sources to help keep these facilities running smoothly.

So far, Apple has been working mostly on building solar farms and biogas generators to help fulfill its energy needs at data center locations like the one it has in Maiden, NC, and competitor Google recently revealed that it has powered a data center with wind power for the first time.

In a second filing published today, Apple is back on track with its more consumer-oriented patents, this time detailing an evolution of the mouse that would bring more gesture controls to the input device. The additions would allow a mouse to detect tilting, tilt-sliding, lifting and other gestures to add additional command capabilities to the mouse’s basic clicking, movement and scrolling. It’s sort of a Wii Remote-lite, which is likely an easier control paradigm for traditional desktop computer users to adopt than anything more drastic.

This is interesting is because Apple is still showing an interest in iterating on its input device design, which still requires a lot of improvement. The Magic Mouse, while promising with its multitouch surface, is in practice a frustrating device to use. Apple traditionally hasn’t done great with mice, and it’ll be interesting to see if it can do any better while adding motion control into the mix, if this patent ever turns into a shipping product.

Induction charging seems ready for its time in the spotlight, with the Nexus 4, Droid DNA and Lumia 920 all shipping with wireless charging based on the Qi standard built-in. Now a concept design that offers solar-powered wireless charging cleverly hidden inside a futuristic looking bonsai tree hopes to become a reality with the help of Kickstarter.

The electree+ began life as a concept by French designer Vivien Muller, which he originally unveiled in 2008. Then, three years later, Muller tried to bring the device to market, kicking off pre-orders for the device beginning at $370. She was aiming for 400 pre-sales, but the device eventually shipped to just a small group of 200 pre-order customers.

Now, the electree+ has been redesigned to maximize its solar efficiency, and to be manufactured in the USA at much larger volume, and for less money. The redesigned electree+ boasts a 14,000mAh internal battery, which when fully charged can fill an iPhone 5 up to and over nine times. It features 27 solar panels at the tips of branches, which are adjustable to capture maximum light. It requires 36 hours in sunlight to build up a full charge, but it also only needs around 4 hours to build up enough juice to fully recharge your standard smartphone.

Other features, like an optional built-in- NFC chip, mean that it can trigger an action when a smartphone is placed on its surface, in order to put it into dock mood or manage smart home connected devices, like light fixtures and curtains. It also has changeable faceplates, if you’re feeling bored by a particular color. Plus, the electree+ is environmentally friendly, since it’s just sipping sunlight to deliver charges to your devices.

The electree+ has two USB ports, including one designed for devices with lower power requirements like smartphones, and one for tablets which feature faster charging powers. As mentioned, because it uses Qi, it’ll work out of the box with the Nexus 4 and other smartphones with Qi inductive charging coils built-in, but it should also work with iPhones so long as they have a wireless charging case.

Pre-orders begin at $199, depending on what kind of options you want, and the team behind the redesigned electree+ wants to hit at least 1,000 pre-sales, or a total funding amount of $200,000 in order to go to production. It’s an ambitious project, but unlike with a lot of products on Kickstarter, this is one that’s actually been made and shipped, so hopefully the team stands a better chance than most of hitting their May 2013 target ship date.

Google just announced that it has invested $75 million in a 50 MW wind farm in Rippey, Iowa, a small town an hour outside of Des Moines. This is Google’s second wind energy investment in the state. In 2010, Google entered a long-term contract to buy green energy for its Iowa data center, but this is the company’s first direct investment into an Iowa wind project.

The wind farm, Google notes, is already in operation and has been contracted to sell all of its energy to the Central Iowa Power Cooperative, which will use it to provide electricity to about 15,000 homes. It looks like none of this electricity will be used for Google’s local data center.

With this investment, Google has brought its total committed investment into green energy projects to just over $990 million. The company’s other wind energy investments include a $157 million investment in a Southern California wind energy farm and a $100 million investment into a wind farm in Oregon that is anticipated to be the world’s largest at 845 MW. Google’s first wind energy investment was worth $38.8 million and involved two North Dakota wind farms. Besides the wind farms themselves, Google also owns a 37.5 percent stake in the Atlantic Wind Connection backbone, a project that aims to build transmission lines for green energy along the mid-Atlantic coast.

When Apple introduced the Retina MacBook Pro and new MacBook Airs in June, it also quietly noted it would be withdrawing its computers from voluntary EPEAT environmental standards qualification. That provoked a minor customer furor, with some government agencies in particular saying they might not be able to continue sourcing notebooks from Apple, and the company promptly rejoined the program. But questions of whether the new MacBook Pro in particular could meet the EPEAT standards, which include a provision for products being able to be “upgradeable with commonly available tools” still hung in the air, until a new rule change.

The EPEAT organization has verified the MacBook Pro, Air and a number of other new unibody laptops from Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba, based in part on the wide availability of external hardware like HDs and optical drives that can be added via USB and other I/O ports like Thunderbolt. Once upon a time, the “upgradeable” rule was taken to mean things like expandable memory, easily replaced internal components like HDs and batteries, but the shift in definition (which EPEAT calls a “clarification”) reflects a shift in the manufacturing trends of notebooks and all-in-ones, and also, it’s definitely true that higher speed I/O (USB 3.0, Thunderbolt) makes it possible to do much more with external accessories today than in the past.

The organization also had concerns around ease of disassembly, an important point for making notebooks easy to recycle and for increasing their longevity with users via things like battery replacement. Provided with instructions from manufacturers, however, EPEAT found its lab could take the laptops apart in 20 minutes at the outside, and take batteries out in three minutes max. That’s apparently even true of Apple’s glued-down MacBook Air batteries, so the company’s ultraportable gets a pass and retains a certification that makes it much easier sell to government and NGOs who look to EPEAT compliance as a way of showing off a green-minded organizational ethos.

Not everyone is pleased with the outcome, however, as Greenpeace has spoken out about the change to the assessment standards in a statement from the organization. Greenpeace’s Casey Harrell said in that statement that essentially, the process involved to replace the batteries is by no means accessible to the average user, and doesn’t reflect real-world experience since it also means voiding the warranty if a user tried to replace the battery on their own. Harrell included the following in the statement:

Is it a coincidence? It’s unclear why EPEAT caved in, but the impact is that EPEAT has confused consumers and businesses who want to buy green electronics that can be repaired and will last a long time, and sets a dangerous trend for the burgeoning market of ultrabooks.

Apple isn’t the only company floating smaller, thinner unibody laptops as the future of portable computing, but it does appear to be the one doing so with the most success, so while Greenpeace has a tradition of calling out Apple on its environmental gaffes, this time the allegations are likely laid at the feet of the right target.

Editor’s note: Sal Cangeloso is the editor of Geek.com and wrote a new book on an odd topic. It’s called LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future and it focuses on the upcoming explosion in LED manufacturing, offering a basic understanding of the technology and an interesting look at the history of LED lights.

You can buy LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future here and the first three commenters below get a copy of the book. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the book discussing the growth of lighting from old-timey incandescents to modern LED technology.

The incandescent bulb is a good place to start with any talk about lighting. This design has had tremendous longevity (over 130 years) and it makes for a cheap, versatile bulb. Unfortunately, this design is also power-hungry, inefficient, short-lived (with some exceptions), and fragile. They produce a minimum amount of lumens-per-watt, though they’ve made appreciable gains over the years, and are highly sensitive to power conditions. For example, a 5% reduction in voltage could double the life of a bulb while only decreasing light output by 20%.

One of the most notable strengths of the incandescent is the quality of the light it provides. This isn’t as easy to define as some of the other characteristics that will be covered, but it’s an important one when it comes to consumer adoption. After all, it’s nice to try to sell people on longevity and power savings, but if they think that the new bulbs are ugly or are too different from what they know, you’ll find them hoarding 75W and 100W incandescents before such bulbs are removed from the shelves.

Quality of light means that in order for people to be comfortable with the light these bulbs provide, the bulbs will need a color temperature that they find to be in an acceptable range, a high degree of color accuracy (usually measured by CRI), and a usable light pattern, to name a few qualities. The bigger point, as any early CFL or LED bulb buyer could tell you, is that if the bulbs don’t produce attractive light that people are comfortable being around, it won’t matter how long they last or how little power they consume.

Incandescents have good qualities, but ultimately their inefficiency means they are not a viable solution moving forward. Even modern incandescents can turn about 90% of the energy they take in into heat, which is obviously wasteful and inefficient in the extreme. Physicists might argue that this isn’t wasteful at all, and you might enjoy the heat they provide, but most of us want to leave the lighting to the lights and the heating to our furnaces. Before we demonize the long-standing bulb design, it’s worth noting that there is such a thing as efficient incandescence. While these are in fact more efficient versions of the incandescent bulb, they are still not at the level of top CFLs and LEDs. In fact, GE was working on a high-efficiency incandescent (HEI) for about 18 months, but gave up on it in order to focus its efforts on LED and organic LED (OLED) bulbs. HEIs were said to produce about 30 lm/W with the ultimate goal of doubling that amount.The halogen lamp is a type of incandescent that operates hotter and lasts longer, but its efficiency gains are minimal.

The much-maligned CFL solves some of the efficiency problems of incandescent bulbs, usually producing around 50 lm/W. Unfortunately, each bulb contains a small amount of mercury (about 4 milligrams per bulb), so disposal can be a problem, especially if the thin, usually helical, glass breaks. The bulbs have reasonably long lives, usually rated for 5,000 to 15,000 hours—but they don’t last nearly that long if they are used in short time spans as rapid cycling is bad for the bulbs. That means a CFL in a bathroom or closet might not last much longer than an incandescent bulb, despite what it says on the package. In fact, a CFL that runs for an average of 15 minutes at a time might last just 40% of its rated lifespan. Alternatively, a CFL that is used continuously from the first time it was turned on might last close to twice its expected lifespan.

CFLs saw a big jump in marketshare in 2007, capturing around23% of the market, but have been in decline over the last year or so, despite the bulbs being widely available, affordable to purchase, and much cheaper to operate than incandescents. Part of this is due to an increasing number of consumers learning about the CFL’s use of mercury, but current economic conditions also indicate that people have simply been looking for a more affordable option. In that respect, incandescents still cannot be beat.

One of the most important characteristics of LED lighting is that they are solid-state. “Solid-state” might be a term we normally associate with computer parts (as in the solid-state drive) but it’s not something the casual LED buyer will ever consider. The concept is quite simple: rather than generating light through burning or gas-discharge, LEDs use semiconductors. The is the most fundamental and important distinction that determines why LED lights have their unique characteristics and will be able to have such an impact on the lighting market. As seen in other industries, semiconductors improve at an exponential rate and have a way of taking over wherever they are used. Lighting should prove to be no different.

Of course, LEDs are just one type of solid-state lighting; there are also organic LEDs (OLEDs) and polymer LEDs (PLEDs). Right now, the LED is the main focus of SSL adoption and its future looks quite promising, thanks to the efficiency gains it brings to the market. OLEDs and their carbon-based semiconductors have potential, but high costs mean they won’t be a viable option as soon as standard LEDs.

The advent of solid-state lighting doesn’t just mean more efficiency. Just as with the introduction of high technology to other parts of our lives—from our phones, to our mail, to our televisions—light is now high-tech. In this case, it’s not the tech that makes the difference, it’s that this latest step means our lights could soon be gadgets. Today’s technology brings with it intelligence and connectivity, which makes way for lights that can be tracked, controlled remotely, and designed to work with other devices. While the humble incandescent was just a conduit for electricity and output both light and heat, a modern-day bulb can be and do much more.

What does this all mean for the LED lamp? Basically, the time is ripe for growth. LED adoption is low at the moment, but not because purchasing one won’t pay off. An LED bulb will pay for itself many times over thanks to its energy savings, but the high initial cost is just too much of a hurdle for many businesses and is unpalatable for even more consumers. As prices drop we’ll see a dramatic growth, just as CFLs grew when it was clear that they could lead to long-term savings and could, in fact, provide acceptable light for our kitchens and living rooms, not just offices.