But one of the biggest breakthroughs in clean energy was actually in solar power, as designers at Rawlemon created a spherical, sun-tracking glass globe that's able to concentrate sunlight (and moonlight) up to 10, 000 times.

ENGADGET: Inhabitat's Week in Green: go-kart made of Lego bricks, TOTO toilet bike and the launch of 'Willow Glass'

All 80 game tables and 850 slot machines form a kind of orbit around a multi-story glass sun by American artist Dale Chihuly, around which swarm scantily-clad resort guests, crisply-attired croupiers and more than a few celebrities (rumoured recent sightings include Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber).

BBC: Surf and turf gambling in the Bahamas

The sun-drenched 19th and 20th floor residence has floor to ceiling glass walls, a master suite with a fireplace and French doors opening to a terrace, and an oversized master bath and dressing room.

FORBES: Calvin Klein Compound, Manhattan, New York

Her skin, every follicle and flaw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the naked mountains.

ECONOMIST: Charis Wilson

The sun still came through the same glass walls to make the same patterns on the then-ultrafashionable white linoleum floors.

WSJ: How Less Became More

Early of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, proposed siting a vast, 2000 km-wide glass deflecting panel at the "inner Lagrange point" between the Earth and the sun, the latter diverting the sun's rays away from the Earth's atmosphere.

CNN: The shield of Ra: Could solar reflection save the planet?