Sure, there are advantages to locating your business in the bustling downtown of a major metropolis. You’re centrally located, within walking distance of hundreds of potential clients and investors, and you can get some decent sushi and cocktails at clocking off time.

But a new study from the University of Michigan reveals significant cognitive defects caused by a short urban walk. Participants who took the walk, in this study, were in a worse mood and did worse in tests than those that stayed in the lab.

Taking a stroll has numerous health benefits, of course, but these had been counteracted by the noise, the bustle, the smell, and the hundreds of tempting distractions a single city block offers.

In other words, cities make you — and your employees — crazy. Even showing people a picture of a city block has been shown to reduce their performance on tests.

But before you order the packing boxes and head off to a suburban strip mall, consider the flip side of the study: people perform better on tests when they’re shown pictures of green space or live next to trees, even if they’re in a neglected inner city neighborhood.

So you’re better off locating your headquarters next to a nice, walkable park inside a city than a treeless wasteland of freeways outside one. The difference in employee performance should be palpable.

Some of us would call this common sense, of course, but it’s always nice to have science back it up. Together, science and common sense act as a counterweight to our greed and the lure of cheap real estate.

Bottom line: go green. Not just when it comes to resources, but also the view from your window.

Picture a fast-growing business that will help drive the future of air travel, and you’re likely to conjure up some engineering startup that will one day become the next Boeing or Airbus. It’s highly unlikely that you’re thinking of an algae producer in Hawaii best known for its spirulina and dietary supplements, or a company that procures weedy African shrubs. But those firms did in fact vault onto the aviation stage earlier this week, when Continental completed a two-hour test flight of a Boeing 737 jet that ran on a special blend of biofuel.

Granted, the biofuel was only present in a 50-50 blend with regular jet fuel, and then only in one of the jet’s two engines. In other words, only half an hour of the flight was environmentally friendly. But the test was an unqualified success, and the biofuel was shown to have better properties than petroleum — it’s lighter, and doesn’t freeze at high altitude.

Biofuels have gotten a bad rap recently. The bulk of biofuel production is taken up by corn and soy-based fuels, which often take more energy to produce than they contain, and are partly responsible for a global rise in food prices. But the blend Continental used was made from the seeds of the Jatropha plant, an African shrub, as well as algae grown by Cyanotech in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. (Terasol Energy and Sapphire Energy acted as fuel brokers; a division of Honeywell did the mixing.)

Jatropha has its own inherent problems. It can grow just about anywhere, but likes crop soil best. If it becomes popular as an airline fuel, cash-hungry farmers in Iowa may grow it instead of corn. (Or they might grow both, which wouldn’t be all bad: crop rotation is good for the soil, a fact that seems to have been largely forgotten in the age of industrial farming.)

Algae, meanwhile, is a win-win fuel — the more we grow of it, the more carbon dioxide is absorbed. And as one of the executives involved in the test fuel points out, most of our regular oil is merely algae that has been marinated for a million years or so. Why not cut out the middleman?

So expect to see a lot more scum in the skies — and we’re not talking about the guy in front who puts his seat back into your lap.

As every journalist knows, you need three stories to make a trend. So here’s the third example from 2008 of volunteer-created electricity: an installation on a sidewalk near Tokyo’s largest train station crossing at Shibuya. The device was created by a Japanese company called Sound Power, and you can rent your own for $550 — far more affordable than a $25,000 dance floor. The installation lasted for 20 days, and its creator says this one tiny device churned out enough commuter-generated power in that time to feed more than 1,400 televisions for an hour. Cover the avenues of Manhattan in this stuff — or the roads of L.A. — and you could close down a coal-fired power plant or two.

Forget Web 2.0. Content generated by unpaid volunteers? That’s so 2007. It seems 2008 was a banner year for what you might call Energy 2.0 — electricity generated by unpaid volunteers.

In September, Portland’s Green Microgym opened its doors. It’s the first gym in the U.S. to be partly powered by its own fitness bikes, and the owners hope that one day every machine in the gym will be contributing — making the place carbon neutral. Similar prototypes exist in Hong Kong and Scotland. The Portland system was created in concert with a Texas company, Henry Works, and its Human Dynamo system. From BBC News:

“A lot of gyms have large spinning group exercises with 30 or 40 or 50 people exercising at the same time - and that’s a perfect environment to use a machine like this,” explains Mike Taggett, who invented the Human Dynamo.

“Everyone is working extra hard and you have a lot of people doing it at the same time, and a machine like the dynamo, if you figure a 100 watts per machine and you have 40 machines that’s 4,000 watts.

“In a club that doesn’t have high air-conditioning requirements, for example, they would definitely be powering the whole gym, during that time period.”

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, a joint called Club Watt offered the first human-powered dancefloor. Again, it’s a prototype. It costs $250,000, and is unlikely to recoup that amount in electricity generation. But none of that matters. The desire is out there; the public feels the urgency to do something about energy conservation. And as Marshall McLuhan said, to explain the reason for the success of game shows in the early days of television, “it gave people something to do.” Expect to see a lot more of this kind of product in version 2.0 of Energy 2.0.

A couple of interesting tidbits from across the pond today, where innovative ideas are never absent — but investment, effective business plans and follow-through often are.

First, check out this fascinating British startup, Reestore. The company makes furniture from unusual recycled parts, such as a desk from an aeroplane wing and an office chair from a shopping cart.

Second, watch this fascinating BBC report on “the hotel room of the future” — a conceptual room created at the the Fraunhofer Institute in Duisburg. Few of the room’s elements are innovative on their own — round corners, colored lighting, a rocking bed, voice activation — but put together, the effect is profoundly calming, and you can easily imagine business travelers paying a premium for it. Anyone who’s ever dreamed of running a hotel, start your engines. With relatively cheap construction costs, a downturn is the perfect time to build one. (And while you’re at it, check out this story on the hotel of the future I edited some years back.)

It will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who uses Amazon — and according to the company’s blowout holiday sales numbers, that’s quite a few of us — that the site has helped to create a shadow economy of second-hand booksellers. I myself have been snapping up second-hand books on Amazon for years, guided by both the invisible hand of Adam Smith (the books are substantially cheaper, often costing as little as one cent plus shipping) and the invisible hand of Al Gore (reusing a book someone else bought is kinder to trees.) Even better, receiving a truly battered second-hand copy of a novel makes me actually want to read the thing immediately, lest it fall apart in my hands any minute. Pristeen paperbacks tend to gather dust on my shelves.

Meanwhile, my wife has become a part-time Amazon seller, reducing the clutter of our old CDs and video games and making some holiday cash into the bargain. It’s win-win. (Especially with some of the more obscure games, some of which she has shipped as far as Japan, while others fetched $100 each.)

Nobody ever tried to make us feel guilty for participating in the Amazon shadow economy. Not until this weekend, when the New York Times ran a story that blames Amazon sellers for the crisis that has hit the book industry. So many of us are buying books second-hand, the article claims, that publishing houses are feeling the pinch. Many have stopped accepting new manuscripts altogether, which will come as a blow to every one of us with drafts of novels in our desk drawers. Then came news that really tugged at my heartstrings — Powell’s City of Books in downtown Portland, my favorite bookstore in the world, is suffering from such weak sales that it is encouraging staff to take unpaid sabbaticals. This surprised me, as Powell’s was early to the online game. I remember buying my first ever second-hand book via the Internet from Powell’s, back in 1998. I guess the cost of maintaining a vast chunk of prime urban real estate outweighs the benefits of a strong online brand. Powell’s’ owners would probably be better off renting a large storage unit in the suburbs, and running the sales operation out of their apartment.

Every couple of years in my journalistic career, I’ve been forced to revisit this question of whether the book as we know it will survive the new century. My answer has invariably been: of course it will. No E-Reader, up to and including Amazon’s Kindle, can beat the traditional wood pulp book for comfort, durability and portability. Books don’t have to be recharged, never crash, are easy to lend and resell, and can be used in all kinds of situations where using an e-reader would be either illegal (as the plane is taking off) or suicidal (in the bathtub).

That remains my position today, with two important caveats. One is that we need a truly portable e-reader, the kind that you can fold up like a sheet of paper and stick in your pocket. I’m very excited by the potential e-readers of the future — such as the flexible sheet being developed by Plastic Logic — but let’s wait to see if they can be produced on a commercial scale.

And the second caveat is that publishers have to get a clue. They could be rolling in dough today if they recognized the potential of digital distribution. Digital copies of books need to be as cheap as MP3s, they need to be sold everywhere, and they need to apply to everything — especially those millions of out-of-print titles.

Think about it — if you could pay a dollar or so for books to be emailed as a PDF to your inbox or your iPhone, wouldn’t that make browsing Borders a different experience? Bookstores would become like showrooms (which, for us Amazon addicts, is pretty much what they are already — you walk in and make notes on books to research later).  You’d walk up to the counter with the books you wanted emailed to you, and at a few keystrokes — for a few dollars — it would be done. No waiting days for an Amazon box, or an Amazon reseller’s mailer. No carting a huge bag of books home. And no distribution costs for the publisher. I’d pay for that kind of convenience. Heck, it might even make me buy a Kindle.

One of the most astonishing designs I’ve seen of late: this Buddhist temple in Thailand, which was built almost entirely from Heineken and Chang beer bottles. (No word on whether the monks had to drink the beer themselves, or merely picked up the empties from nearby villagers.) Whether they knew it or not, the temple builders were fulfilling the 50-year-old dream of Heineken’s founder, who wanted to produce beer in bottles that would then fit together as bricks when empty (an idea that could have had something to do with his exposure to Lego).

The bottle temple is no mere curiosity. Building with recycled materials is becoming something of a trend (see for example the Earthships), and bottle buildings have been tried and tested (the oldest was built in Nevada in 1905, and is still standing). Last year, Random Valley winery in western Australia won a sustainability grant to build a wine cellar door out of 13,500 bottles filled with water for insulation — on the principle that water can store more energy than any other building material, and can be more precisely monitored. If your construction company is looking for cheap, eco-friendly, eye-catching materials (think of the kaliedescope effects!) it may be time to hit the bottle.

A quick shout out to Ocean Power Technologies, the wave power company that FSB featured in its Next Little Thing roundup back at the end of 2006 and updated you on in 2007’s Next Little Thing. The New Jersey-based company just announced that its electricity-generating buoys will be installed off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, helping to supply the island with some of the greenest power your greenbacks can buy. They’ve done this with the help of the U.S. Navy, which has invested more than $3 million in the company. It’s a major coup for seventysomething former surfer George Taylor (no relation), the CEO, and for the whole concept of wave power. Taylor’s buoys can, in theory, deliver power for a lower price than coal. Ocean currents are far more reliable than the wind and the sun, and far more accessible than geothermal energy. Seed the U.S. coastline with them, and you could power the entire continent. What’s not to love? Time for this surfer to ride the wave of the 21st century. It’s a big one.

File this one under intriguing business ideas for thrifty times. A startup in the UK, Numbuz, has hit upon the  idea of providing a marketplace for people’s old SIM cards — the bit of your mobile phone linked to a specific number. If the number spells out something interesting and memorable, the theory goes, you can charge more for it — and Numbuz takes 10% of every transaction. For example, according to The Register, one audacious Brit has listed GOOGLE (466453) for an asking price of 1,500 pounds ($2,250). No word yet on how successful this business model is, but I can imagine it has caused desk drawers to be shaken out across the UK. And maybe some vanity plate-owning hedge fund managers are rich enough to buy the number that corresponds with their name.

The big question is: could this model work in the U.S., which has more than double the cell phone users (not to mention the superrich)?

Tons of great small companies are springing up to take advantage of the iPhone applications store within iTunes. Case in point is Smule, the Silicon Valley-based maker of this week’s top iPhone application, Ocarina, which bills itself as “the first true musical instrument created for the iPhone.” You blow gently into the iPhone’s microphone, finger the on-screen holes, and soothing flute-like noises come out the speaker. Sound a bit New Agey? Indeed it is, and Smule — co-founded by a couple of music PhDs from Stanford and Princeton — isn’t above poking fun at itself. As in this video, where five Ocarina players foist the opening to Stairway to Heaven on us:

Smule has founded an online community where you can learn new music for Ocarina. Even if you don’t play a note, you can see and hear other iPhone users play the application anywhere in the world, and rate their performance, by spinning, clicking and zooming in on a virtual globe. Smule has created a whole new musical software platform, so expect other instruments, and international orchestras, to follow.

But the best thing of all is the price: 99 cents, just like most successful iPhone applications. This truly is a business model built for an economic downturn — a time when, as we know, the world tends to turn to cheap entertainment. If you’re genuinely interested in using your iPhone as an instrument, the sonic quality repays practice. Even if you’re just buying it to “annoy the guy in the next cubicle,” as Smule’s site says, it’s hard to imagine a bigger bang for a buck. Not bad for a company that launched its first product six weeks ago.

Say the words “nuclear reactor” and you probably imagine a vast complex with cooling towers, radiation symbols plastered everywhere, and Homer Simpson asleep at the controls. That’s not what John Deal has in mind. Deal, the CEO of year-old New Mexico startup Hyperion, has licensed technology from the labs at Los Alamos that lets him build safe, small reactors that fit on the back of a flatbed truck. The reactors will go for about $25 million a pop, and power up to 100,000 more than 10,000 homes (plus all their infrastructure requirements, like town halls and fire stations) for up to 10 years without refueling.

Last week, Hyperion announced its first sale, to a Czech Republic-based infrastructure company. The first six units will be delivered in 2013 and will be installed in Romania. Hyperion also says it is in talks with companies in Panama, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. With $100 million in venture funding, Deal can afford to take his time getting to the 4,000 orders he hopes to have for his first model.

So should you cross those countries off your list of holiday destinations? Is Deal really selling bomb-making equipment? How safe is this technology? Very safe, Deal says: the fuel, uranium hydride, is only 10% uranium 238, which is the active ingredient in nuclear reactions. (Nuclear weapons contain at least 90% uranium 238.) You’d have a hell of a time trying to turn it into a bomb, he says, and “might as well start with yellowcake.” The licensed fuel is self-cooling: if the reaction ever gets too hot, the offending atoms decay so fast that they turn off the reaction. “We’re finalizing the design so that it’s repeatable, it’s replicatable and it’s got a high degree of quality control behind it,” Deal told the Tech Rockies website in September. “Because, quite honestly, unlike a lot of products out there, we are extremely regulated. And I’m glad. It’s nuclear energy, after all.”

Like an iPod, the mini-reactor is designed not to be opened. But unlike iPods, these units are built to last. Every ten years or so, the idea goes, you ship your reactor back to Hyperion, which refurbishes it, replaces the fuel, and ships it back to you. Hey presto: limitless, non-carbon-spewing energy for your community forever, for $25,000 $2,500 per person. The waste fuel removed every ten years is about the size of a football. Deal doesn’t seem to have any firm plans on what to do with it yet, only that he won’t be dropping it in a nearby lake. Give him a decade, and he might figure it out. Yucca mountain, anyone?

Reactors like this play right into the debate now raging in the environmental movement. With wind and solar still too unreliable for the massive numbers of megawatts our world needs, nuclear is the only way to go if you want to retool our energy generation right now. Is it worth it, to stop global warming in its tracks? Should we decentralize the electric grid, and give each town its own mini-reactor? Do we have to do this now to save the planet, and worry about those footballs of spent fuel later?

Remember the Zeppelin tour company I wrote about back in May? Well, I was just sitting at my desk, catching up on work email on my first day back after an extended leave of absence (my honeymoon, if you must know), when something floated across the sky out of my window. At first, I assumed it was a blimp; we get quite a few of those hovering over SF. But this was long, sleek, cream-colored, and refreshingly free of advertising, other than two words: Airship Ventures.

According to the company blog, which is filled with fantastic photos from the air, the Zeppelin tours have been up and running for the past week or so. There have been so many excited Zeppelin spotters like myself that the company has started a whole new blog where you can send in snaps of your sightings from the ground — a brilliant PR ploy. 

At $450 an hour for the joyrides in the world’s largest zeppelin, it remains to be seen whether Airship Ventures can fill the sky with these creatures or whether it will forever remain a niche for well-heeled tourists. (A second, more expensive ride is slated to start in Sonoma later this month.) For now, all I can say is I’ll be glued to my window every day at midday.

See the FSB video on the Zeppelin here, and read our story about the company here.

Once again, a small company leads the way into the future. Image Metrics, based in Santa Monica with an R&D office in Manchester, England, has unveiled one of the most uncanny-looking digital animations to date. And uncanny is the word, because Emily — seen in the video above — is being hailed as one of the first CG creations to make it through Uncanny Valley.

For those reaching for an atlas, let me explain: Uncanny Valley is a term that describes the gap between things that look real — like human beings — and things that are deliberately cartoonish, like Shrek. Any stuff in the middle, we tend to shun; something built deep into our evolutionary circuits tells us this creature just ain’t right. CG studios have been grappling with this problem for years. Image Metrics may have just solved the problem.

Of course, it helps that Emily’s facial movements are digitally mapped to those of an actress. But everything else — her face, her bone structure, her clothes, the lighting — is computer generated. Image Metrics’ customers (Hollywood and the games industry, including the makers of Grand Theft Auto) are going to go ga-ga for this technology, which could change the face of entertainment — literally — as we know it.

On Friday I sat down in San Francisco with Israel Ganot, president and COO at Second Rotation. The former eBay and Amazon executive — not to mention the cubemate of the CEO of Kozmo.com (remember them?) — has had many and various adventures in techland. But this, I think, will be his most profitable. This week, Second Rotation launches a service called Gazelle, which is probably best described as Netflix for junk. You log on to the site, tell them about the outmoded electronics you have — say, a pre-3G iPhone — answer some questions about it, and presto: they offer you a price. If you accept, they mail you a box with free postage. They’ll even predict how their price for that gadget will rise or fall in the next three months.

You get rid of your junk and make some money without having to throw a yard sale; indeed, with no more effort than clicking a few times and walking to your mailbox. Second Rotation makes a profit on reselling the junk to electronics recyclers (ethical and environmentally friendly ones, I was assured, not the kind where circuit boards end up in Chinese villages, as seen in the harrowing documentary Manufactured Landscapes). Everyone wins.

To me, it seems like a no-brainer. We’re a nation of overstuffed garages. Millions of desk drawers are filled with gadget squatters whose lease has long since expired. The stress caused by stuff has inspired at least one major cable show and a bestselling author.

So why, I asked Ganot, has nobody done this before? He brought up a few companies that did some components of the Gazelle service, such as recycling cellphones — but not the whole package, and certainly not the ease of use. The big players in this space used to be the eBay resellers such as Auction Drop, which I wrote about here. But now Auction Drop has taken a big business step backwards — they’re no longer partnering with UPS stores, so you can’t drop your stuff to be resold there any more. (A staff training problem, apparently).

Gazelle is perfectly positioned to pick up the slack; some of their marketing is pretty clever, such as a Facebook widget that will tell you how many gallons of gas you can buy for your gadgets. Topical, in so many ways.

Ganot suggested the company may start to expand into sporting equipment shortly. And that’ll be one more giant step towards emptying out America’s garages.

The whole idea of RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, was that it was supposed to simplify the mass of new information available to us on the Web. Subscribe to the RSS feed of your favorite websites, and you can keep up with them all in one place (that is an RSS reader like Google Reader, Future Boy’s favorite). Well, as anyone who uses an RSS reader knows, it didn’t quite work out the way we’d hoped. Add up all those RSS feeds, and you’ve still got a time-consuming list of stories to plough through.
Ari Newman, co-founder of the media monitoring startup FiltrBox, is out to fix that. “We are dying in an avalanche of information,” says Newman. “There might be only one article that matters in that RSS feed.” Newman and his co-founder, developer Tom Chikoore, created FiltrBox as a private beta site in February; its official launch was last week. Newman is hoping his four-person, Boulder-based company can crack a new market for customized searches of online media — and find the handful of articles that matter to you.

FiltrBox allows users to set up multiple, repeating searches of mainstream media outlets and blogs, as well as sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. Business owners can get results for for their industry, competitors, their business name, their markets. A myriad of other features are also included, ranging from a widget to stick on your company web site to iPhone-friendly daily e-mails.

“Our target audience is small businesses,” Newman says. Small business owners and employees can take advantage of FiltrBox Team, which allows up to six users to share an account with up to 100 customized searches, and one year of article memory for a monthly fee of $100. The program learns its user’s preferences over time through an article rating and “noise control” system, allowing a business to hone in on particular aspects of a market.

At least one small business owner agrees. Tim Stephens, CEO of ToolPax, began using the site after seeing Newman give a demo six months ago. “It’s absolutely a critical piece of our sales and marketing effort,” says Stephens. “We’ve been using FiltrBox to get industry intelligence and feedback on ToolPax. I use my BlackBerry as my alarm clock, and the e-mails come right in when I wake up. Bam! FiltrBox has my list and I can keep track of my business. I don’t have to go anywhere.”

—Meg Massey

Ever had a weather report tell you that it’s sunny outside, only to glance outside your window and see rain? Before you blame the forecaster, consider that the climate can vary wildly from neighborhood to neighborhood – and most forecasts use only one data point per city.

Help may be on the way. NanoWeather, an Oklahoma-based company, says its new weather forecasting software is as much as 70% more reliable than traditional methods. Rather than go into competition with services such as weather.com, the company aims to provide tailored predictions for local microclimates.

Typical forecasts rely on long-term statistics and weather observation, according to Matt Haugland, NanoWeather’s founder. The observing usually happens at airports, so forecasts are generally accurate there, but less so farther away.

Haugland’s product uses high-resolution topographical maps, and factors in everything from small hills to the type of grass on the ground. Even New York City’s Central Park has a unique microclimate compared to the rest of the city, Haugland says. All the vegetation and trees affect the wind and temperature. And while picnickers may not be such a lucrative potential market for microclimate information, large weather-dependent operations such as agricultural and construction businesses might.

Haugland, who has a PhD from the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology, started the company in 2006 after winning $25,000 at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, and just completed a commercial version of his product. NanoWeather will license out the software, and also sell individual forecasts. It is currently in talks with a Houston energy company who would like to predict the weather for its windmills. –Herman Wong

Last week, Future Boy finally got an up-close look at that homebrew ethanol pump, the Micro Fueler, which he wrote about last month. EFuel CEO Thomas Quinn invited FB to his home high on a hill in Los Gatos, where the pump sat in a driveway larger than most homes. Quinn, 53, is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who brings in a pretty penny from patents such as the motion sensor in the Nintendo Wii. But having seen the Micro Fueler in action, and having driven away with a gallon of its fuel in his tank, FB is convinced the whole world could soon be Quinn’s driveway — if he plays his cards right.

Why? Because contrary to the impression given by the New York Times, the MicroFueler will run on more than just cheap Mexican sugar. Using a patented membrane, it will convert any waste alcohol, and any sugary drink, into ethanol that will at the very least top up just about any car sold in the U.S. in the last 10 years. (On its website, EFuel has a video touting a cheap and easy ethanol converter kit, for those who want to completely eliminate the need for foreign oil; it takes mere minutes to install.) Quinn demonstrated by pouring cheap vodka into the back of the MicroFueler, and hit the “brew” button. Mere minutes later, the ethanol was ready to pump into FB’s Prius.

The amount of waste alcohol produced by breweries, and soda thrown away by bottling plants in the U.S., beggars our understanding, in part because nobody has made a complete study of this fuel source. But we’re certainly talking many billions of gallons a year. Quinn has a contract with local restaurants which have agreed to throw all their customers’ discarded drinks into special containers that EFuel takes away once a week. He sees a world where gas stations act as independent middlemen — your local 76, for example, could buy a MicroFueler and do a deal with your local Pepsi bottler, at a cost of pennies per gallon.

Result: gas stations, bottlers and brewers win, consumers win, oil companies lose. Corn farmers can get back to the business of feeding the world, and we get roads full of guilt-free vehicles. What’s not to love? (Well, apart from the fact that America would probably decide to fall in love with SUVs all over again — and city parking is going to get truly horrendous.)

A couple of interesting pieces on Second Life, that much-loved, much-hyped, much-maligned virtual world, caught FB’s eye yesterday. First was this story from FB alma mater Time.com on how making your Second Life avatar do certain things can actually change your behavior in your first life — a perfectly normal practice, apparently, connected to our deep-seated need to wear masks and try out different roles throughout our lives:

The possibilities are — virtually — endless. Inhabit buffed-up versions of yourself to lose weight, cuter versions of yourself to gain confidence, or older versions to start putting money away for the future (that last one is being studied at Stanford now).

Coincidentally, along came this story from the London Guardian on how Spanish teenagers are starting to take their embarassing ailments to doctors in Second Life:

Spanish health authorities launched a virtual portal through the Second Life website yesterday designed to help young people too embarrassed to speak to a doctor about sexually transmitted disease or a drug problem.

The avatar: Sort of like the grown-up version of using a doll to communicate with kids about abuse, right? If the Spanish experiment works, FB foresees a big market for similar teen health care in the U.S.

FB has long said that living in the Bay Area is like living five minutes in the future. Sometimes it’s also like living fifty years in the past. Take this story on a new company called Airship Ventures that is planning to bring Zeppelin back to San Francisco. Not Page and Plant, alas, but the Hindenberg version, albeit with safer fuel:

At 246 feet in length, the Zeppelin NT will be 50 feet longer than the largest blimp, and will hold up to 12 passengers. Similar airships are already operating safely in Japan and Germany, the company says.

Airship will offer its rides for “flightseeing” tours (yes, that’s what they call them), as well as media and science operations. Apparently, flights will be available for between $250 and $500, around the same price as a ride in a hot balloon.

The startup already has two things essential for success here in Techland: $8 million in venture funding and praise from Esther Dyson. FB can’t wait to climb aboard.

Speaking of cars of the future — and strategies to avoid the $4 gallon — the New York Times has a report on a couple of canny Davids trying to slay the uber-Goliath of the oil industry. Los Gatos, Calif. entrepreneurs Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn have created the Micro-Fueller, a washer-dryer sized fueling station that creates ethanol — not out of corn, but a patented mixture of yeast and super-cheap industrial-grade sugar from Mexico. The cost: $1 a gallon. The ethanol will work in most any recent model car, no conversion required.

The cost of the device: about $5,000 with California alternative energy rebates. At that price, you’d have to make 1,667 gallons of ethanol before you start seeing ROI. That will come down with mass production, of course. But even at that price, it’s a bargain if you’re bearish on the price of oil. And let’s not forget the 100% markup you could make on $2 gallons of ethanol for all your neighbors. Forget lemonade stands: homebrew fuel is the new summertime moneyspinner.

The most important question — does the ethanol pass muster from the driver’s seat? The Times doesn’t say, which suggests either lazy reporting or a reluctance on the inventors’ part to offer test drives. It would be a shame if it were the latter, for this is a fascinating development that deserves a lot of attention. Future Boy is on the case.

UPDATE: The folks at E-fuel (that’s Butterfield and Quinn’s company) pinged FB to say they will be officially unveiling the Micro-Fueller to the press next week, and to invite him to sit down with the inventors in Los Gatos. Stay tuned, and let me know your thoughts on whether cheap NAFTA sugar is the fuel of the future.