Making good on one of his long-term platforms, Governor Schwarzenegger has passed a law that will see California become a leading state for the production of renewable energy. The bill aims to produce 3000 megawatts of power by 2018, by installing a million rooftop solar panels across the state – that’s the equivalent of five pollution-free power plants. Coupled with this are moves to cut greenhouse emissions and tax credits for developers who include solar power as an option in new homes – let’s hope that where California leads, others will follow.

Good news for future-thinking bikers who are worried about how they’ll get their hog-time when the roads have been destroyed by rising sea-levels – the EcoRider motorbike is powerful enough to act as an agricultural workhorse vehicle, yet less damaging to the ground than the average human walker, thanks to its wide low-pressure tyres. Plus it’ll run on homebrewed biodiesel, so there’ll be no need to engage in crossbow shootouts over scarce petroleum with people dressed in white sports equipment…

…sorry, I love that movie.

The US Federal Railroad Administration is hoping that a new apparatus it is testing will prevent many of the derailments that take place on US railways every year. The gadget ‘taps’ the tracks with a laser pulse, and listens for echoes to help it locate and identify microscoping flaws in the rails. Similar techniques have been used before, but the current system uses transducers that have to stay in contact with the rails, meaning that the scans have to be done much more slowly.

Baffled yet intrigued by all this talk of quantum computing? Recent advances in the field may have made the arrival of functioning quantum computers much more imminent – Advanced Nanotechnology has a good round-up of links that’ll set you straight, and help you to know your qubits from your cue cards.

Oddball mathematician and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker had a short story he wanted to include in his forthcoming collection, but couldn’t find a magazine market that could print it soon enough – so he decided to start his own webzine, Flurb. Issue number one may be a bit lo-fi on the design front, but it features five stories, of which Rucker’s piece with Paul di Fillipo is the first.