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There are always a few intrepid folks who aren't satisfied with mass-produced products. These tinkerers always look to improve upon or tweak items churned out by assembly lines.

Ryan Fulcher is one of those dudes. A self-confessed "dabbler" who became interested in hybrid car technology when he bought a Honda Insight back in 2000, he's become the man behind EAA-PHEV. Those seven letters are music to the ears of anyone who's interested in breaking away from the gas pump. His Electric Auto Association/Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle site is a repository for information related to converting hybrid cars into plug-ins.

Why on earth would you want a car you could charge in a wall socket? For starters, you might like getting 100 miles plus per gallon of gas. In fact, Ryan's currently getting that sort of MPG in his modified Prius Blue. The oh-so-knowledgeable Mr. Fulcher was kind enough to put on the brakes for a bit and chat with us about electric vehicles, his site, and how it all began...

Hey Ryan, how did EAA-PHEV get started?

I was the Webmaster for SEVA (Seattle EVA) and it spawned out of the hybrid pages I was writing for the site. Read the full profile...

Hazardous rankings accumulate every day on the web site for Superfund365. Cleanup costs mount. And "visualizations" of contaminants unfold like beautiful, terrifying fans.

A location deemed by the EPA as a "Superfund" location is one that has been lost to "heavily contaminated toxic waste." The team behind Superfund365 will visit a different Superfund site every day for a year and present that catastrophe's chemical makeup on the Web. We wrote about the endeavor several weeks ago. Now, we check in with Brooke Singer, the director and producer of the project, to find out how it's going...

Hey, Brooke. Tell us how Superfund365 came about.

For a little over a year now I have been working on a documentary with cinematographer Brian Rigney Hubbard about the EPA and the aftermath of 9/11 in New York City. Specifically, we are looking at the extent of toxic contamination and the federal response (or lack thereof).

The health consequences of WTC dust are now being reported and New York representatives are pushing for legislation to pay for adequate health care, both short and long term, for the first responders and residents of Lower Manhattan. We have been examining a slightly different angle, which includes the internal debates and struggles post-9/11 inside the EPA, the agency charged with handling the environmental consequences of a national terrorist attack.

The agency was by no means unified behind the head administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, who stated just seven days after the WTC collapse that the air was safe to breathe and life could resume as normal in Lower Manhattan. For example, Robert J. Martin, the former National Ombudsman of the EPA, described to us in an interview how several people within the EPA were discussing declaring all of Lower Manhattan a Superfund site after 9/11...

Inquiries by EPA employees into exactly how the EPA should respond to the catastrophic environmental dimension of the WTC collapse were prematurely halted when Whitman made her statement that everything was OK.

After our interview with Martin, I did a lot of research into Superfund. I knew that it was quite serious to say that Lower Manhattan should have been declared a Superfund site… and I wanted to know exactly what that meant. Superfund365 is the result of that research. The documentary process is rather lengthy and launching shorter projects along the way keeps me charged and engaged. We have also released a video short called "800 Steps Apart" that highlights another portion of our research. Read the full profile...