Ever had a weather report tell you that it’s sunny outside, only to glance outside your window and see rain? Before you blame the forecaster, consider that the climate can vary wildly from neighborhood to neighborhood – and most forecasts use only one data point per city.

Help may be on the way. NanoWeather, an Oklahoma-based company, says its new weather forecasting software is as much as 70% more reliable than traditional methods. Rather than go into competition with services such as weather.com, the company aims to provide tailored predictions for local microclimates.

Typical forecasts rely on long-term statistics and weather observation, according to Matt Haugland, NanoWeather’s founder. The observing usually happens at airports, so forecasts are generally accurate there, but less so farther away.

Haugland’s product uses high-resolution topographical maps, and factors in everything from small hills to the type of grass on the ground. Even New York City’s Central Park has a unique microclimate compared to the rest of the city, Haugland says. All the vegetation and trees affect the wind and temperature. And while picnickers may not be such a lucrative potential market for microclimate information, large weather-dependent operations such as agricultural and construction businesses might.

Haugland, who has a PhD from the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology, started the company in 2006 after winning $25,000 at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, and just completed a commercial version of his product. NanoWeather will license out the software, and also sell individual forecasts. It is currently in talks with a Houston energy company who would like to predict the weather for its windmills. –Herman Wong

Last week, Future Boy finally got an up-close look at that homebrew ethanol pump, the Micro Fueler, which he wrote about last month. EFuel CEO Thomas Quinn invited FB to his home high on a hill in Los Gatos, where the pump sat in a driveway larger than most homes. Quinn, 53, is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who brings in a pretty penny from patents such as the motion sensor in the Nintendo Wii. But having seen the Micro Fueler in action, and having driven away with a gallon of its fuel in his tank, FB is convinced the whole world could soon be Quinn’s driveway — if he plays his cards right.

Why? Because contrary to the impression given by the New York Times, the MicroFueler will run on more than just cheap Mexican sugar. Using a patented membrane, it will convert any waste alcohol, and any sugary drink, into ethanol that will at the very least top up just about any car sold in the U.S. in the last 10 years. (On its website, EFuel has a video touting a cheap and easy ethanol converter kit, for those who want to completely eliminate the need for foreign oil; it takes mere minutes to install.) Quinn demonstrated by pouring cheap vodka into the back of the MicroFueler, and hit the “brew” button. Mere minutes later, the ethanol was ready to pump into FB’s Prius.

The amount of waste alcohol produced by breweries, and soda thrown away by bottling plants in the U.S., beggars our understanding, in part because nobody has made a complete study of this fuel source. But we’re certainly talking many billions of gallons a year. Quinn has a contract with local restaurants which have agreed to throw all their customers’ discarded drinks into special containers that EFuel takes away once a week. He sees a world where gas stations act as independent middlemen — your local 76, for example, could buy a MicroFueler and do a deal with your local Pepsi bottler, at a cost of pennies per gallon.

Result: gas stations, bottlers and brewers win, consumers win, oil companies lose. Corn farmers can get back to the business of feeding the world, and we get roads full of guilt-free vehicles. What’s not to love? (Well, apart from the fact that America would probably decide to fall in love with SUVs all over again — and city parking is going to get truly horrendous.)