If I tell you that you can run your car on trash, your thoughts will skip immediately to the shiny Mr. Fusion used on all time-traveling DeLoreans.
(Mr. Fusion gets fuel in Back to the Future)
It turns out that there is a present-day (and non-fictional) way to run your car on trash. And that's by using gasifier to "convert nearly any solid dry organic matter into a clean burning, carbon neutral, gaseous fuel."
Did you know that over one million vehicles in Europe ran onboard gasifiers during WWII to make fuel from wood and charcoal, as gasoline and diesel were rationed or otherwise unavailable? Long before there was biodiesel and ethanol, we actually succeeded in a large-scale, alternative fuels redeployment-- and one which curiously used only cellulosic biomass, not the oil and sugar based biofuel sources which famously compete with food.
Watch Mr. Gasification - the trash-powered Honda - in action in this video.
Peel And Stick Thin Film Solar Cells
'It turns sunlight into electricity, just like any solar power converter, but you spray it on.'- Larry Niven, 1995.
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Sky City's 220 Stories Are Go
'It rested among green parklands and... stood in total isolation, a glittering block of whites and flashing windows dotted with colors.'
Robo-Raven Flapping Wing Robot Bird
'When he had first built them, they had been crude indeed, flying mechanisms with little more than a reflex-response unit.'