Inhabitat's Week in Green: cow treadmills, electric cars, and the Milan Furniture Fair

It was a busy week in green design as the design world's most important trade show, the Milan Furniture Fair, wrapped up, and Earth Day hit with full force on Thursday, April 22nd. Inhabitat brought you the most incredible green designs from Milan -- from LED lamps made almost entirely from soap to Inigo Mauerer's stunning new stripped-down OLED chandelier to gigantic architectural LEGO bricks (with life-size lego furniture to match!)

We also caught wind of several curious new energy developments from across the pond -- first, the UK is hatching a plan to recycle human waste into fuel by piping biomethane from the sewage system back into homes in Oxfordshire. Meanwhile a farmer in Norther Ireland has created a treadmill for cows that he thinks could generate 6% of the world's power. More conventional alt energy sources are on the rise as well - this week researchers announced advances in dye solar cells that make strides towards grid parity and a gasification process that is capable of doubling biofuel production.

Several major auto manufacturers also got our engines racing this week as they unveiled the next generation of sleek electric rides. Toyota officially revealed plans for a minivan sequel to it's ever-popular Prius while Chevy charged ahead with the MPV5, a larger version of the Volt sedan that seats five and packs extra space in the trunk. And finally, if classic cars are more your style, don't miss this cloth-covered retrofit to a rusty old MG Midget.

Pixel Qi and OLPC to share all current and future screen tech

Our man Nicholas Negroponte was certainly excited about pushing the state of the art forward with future versions of the OLPC when we hosted him on The Engadget Show earlier this month, and now he's got one more tool to help make that happen: the OLPC Foundation and Pixel Qi just signed a permanent and free cross-license on a slew of next-generation screen technology patents, including Pixel Qi's sweet dual-mode displays. If you're recall, Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepson actually developed part of the 3Qi screen tech while at OLPC, so there was some mild confusion over who owned what -- but the two organizations have solved that problem by cross-licensing all future and current IP covering multi-mode screens. See, it's easy for two tech companies to get along... especially when one is actually a charity that's not at all concerned with profits. Super simple. So -- let's get working on that OLPC XO-3, shall we?

Microsoft facing patent lawsuit over Zune Buy From FM feature

Looks like someone at Microsoft should be paying slightly more attention to the mail: an ophthalmologist (yes, that's right) in Illinois named Edward Yavitz is suing Redmond over the Zune's Buy From FM feature, saying he wrote the software giant a letter in 2006 that disclosed his two relevant patents on the tech, suggested how it could be integrated into the Zune, and asked for a deal. Two years and presumably zero replies later, a young Joe Belfiore introduced Buy From FM along with the Zune 3.0 software, which Ed says directly infringes on his patents -- and his lawsuit, filed ten days ago, asks the court to permanently stop sales of the Zune and award him triple damages in cash. Oops. We haven't dived too deeply into the patents themselves, but it looks like Ed's going to have a bit of a fight on his hands here, as the patents seem to describe systems that have preloaded content about music that's then accessed when a data trigger is received over the air, not just storing song information for later purchase over the Internet. We're sure the good doctor's attorneys have some high-powered arguments to the contrary, so we'll withhold judgment and see where this all leads -- we're guessing a quick settlement is in the cards, as fighting Microsoft might end up actually costing more than any percentage of royalties on total sales of the Zune.

P.S.- If you're wondering why Apple hasn't been named for its similar iTunes Tagging feature... well, so are we. We'll see what happens.