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Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport is growing. In the coming years, the airport--the 15th largest in the world--expects to have 70 million bags passing through it any given time (a 40% increase from today)

In the past few years, online crowdsourcing has emerged as an ultra-popular method of finding solutions to difficult problems such as infant mortality rates and out-of-control oil spills . Could crowdsourcing help Japan quell its nuclear disaster and help the country get back on its feet? The Global Innovation Commons , a repository of innovations that can be used because of patent expiration, abandonment, invalidity, or lack of in-country protection, has compiled a list of patent disclosures and open source technology that could be used as part of Japan's

Most people who buy a Big Mac aren't concerned about where it came from--or whether the accompanying fries are made using sustainable palm oil. But apparently, McDonald's cares. The company recently announced its Sustainable Land Management Commitment , a pledge to work with suppliers that ensure agricultural raw materials and packaging come from sustainable sources.

Last week, Fast Company had the chance to sit in on a venture-capital pitch session featuring a number of startups that have in the past participated in the Cleantech Open , a series of competitions that provides funding and advice to cleantech startups. Below, we look at three of the companies with the most compelling pitches. Fenix International This startup designs distributed, small-scale micro power generation and storage solutions in a box.

Coca-Cola made headlines in 2009 when it introduced the PlantBottle, a beverage bottle made from petroleum-based materials and 30% plant-based materials. The company's ultimate goal has been to make a 100% plant-based bottle--but now PepsiCo has beaten it to the punch.

What do cloud computing, Bill Gates, and Schrodinger have in common? They are all contributing to the success of Nimbus , a biopharmaceutical company that leverages cloud computing (courtesy of Schrodinger, a computational drug-design company) to quickly discover medicines for difficult-to-tackle disease targets. This month, Nimbus scored an undisclosed amount of funding from Bill Gates and Dr.

Wildcat Discovery Technologies , a San Diego-based startup, thinks it has made a discovery that could, in one fell swoop, make your laptop battery, cell phone battery, and electric vehicle batteries all last between 25% and 65% longer. The key: a pair of new materials---a high-voltage electrolyte material and a high voltage cathode material--that provide vastly improved energy density compared to today's technologies (in technical terms, they have an energy density of over 675 Wh/kg while operating in fuel cells at five volts).

The 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan this week didn't just trigger a massive tsunami. It also caused an atomic-power emergency at the the Fukushima No. 1 plant in Fukushima Prefecture, where 3,000 people in a two-mile radius around the plant were forced to evacuate due to an overheated reactor.

It's not easy to design a home energy monitoring device that people actually want to use and pay for. As evidenced by Tendril's recent decision to nix its IDEO-designed dashboard, not even slick devices that look like they came straight from the Apple store will necessarily make it to market (the $200 price tag was deemed too expensive). Enter EnergyHub , a consumer-facing energy management company that thinks it has a solution to the energy monitoring device quandary

This past December, a leaked EPA document revealed that the agency allowed the widespread use of pesticide known to be toxic to honeybees, despite warnings from EPA scientists.

LinkedIn has announced the launch of LinkedIn Today, a social news product for business users that the company hopes will turn its site into a can't-miss daily destination. Up until now, LinkedIn didn't offer enough fresh information to be useful in daily life; well-connected Internet users don't check LinkedIn every day the way they might with, say, Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn Today aims to change that

IBM announced the first batch of cities this week awarded grants as part of the company's three-year, $50 million Smarter Cities Challenge . The recipients --including New Orleans, Newark, Rio de Janeiro, and Jakarta--are diverse, to say the least. So how did they end up with IBM's attention, and what happens now?

Google 's cloud-based music service may already be up and running--if you know where to look for it. A hacker from the XDA-Dev forum found something interesting when he forced the Motorola Xoom Android tablet's music app onto his Android smartphone: a "Sync Music" feature. So the hacker tested the out the feature

A big breakthrough in the race for better biofuels was announced this week from the U.S. Department of Energy, where the department's BioEnergy Science Center figured out how to produce isobutanol, a gasoline-like fuel, directly from cellulose (i.e. corn stalks and switchgrass).

The iPad isn't just just a luxury device for gadget fetishists. The proof may soon be found in airline cockpits, where major airlines are testing out the iPad as a replacement for paper maps and clunky aviation computers