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A company called Solar Wind Energy Tower wants to build the tallest structure in the United States along the border with Mexico. But it wouldn’t be your typical office-building skyscraper. This would be a massive wind tower to produce clean energy.

It would work something like this. The tower would be hollow, like a silo. Water sprayed at the top would get humid and heavy in the desert air. That should create winds up to 50-miles an hour that flow down through turbines on the ground.

“It’s a very simple process that is really using hot air and water as its sole source of power,” says Ron Pickett, CEO of Solar Wind Energy Tower. “Here we have a renewable energy that makes energy at competitive price to traditional power plants.”

He says it would cost about the same as a new natural gas-powered plant and less than nuclear. And it’s better for the environment.

“We’re zero emissions into the atmosphere,” says Pickett.

The tower would cost about a billion dollars. The company announced this week that it’s collaborating with Providence Energy to develop the tower. If all goes well, construction might begin at the end of next summer. Other wind-powered projects have already attracted funding.

“The U.S. industry just came off its strongest year ever, increasing by 28 percent,” says Peter Kelley, spokesman for the American Wind Energy Association.

He says wind energy will lower the country’s carbon footprint this year by almost two percent. And the wind power industry is expected to grow substantially.

“We’re on schedule to make 20 percent of the electricity in America by the year 2030,” says Kelley.

That’s about the amount of energy currently produced by nuclear power plants. Kelley says the wind energy industry is home-grown.

“It is a triumph of American ingenuity and technology,” says Kelley. Over the past six years, the industry has attracted an average of $18 billion per year in private money. Kelley says that’s twice the size of the proposed investment in the Keystone pipeline.

See a demonstration of how the downdraft tower would work in the video below:

This final note today, in which the big banks get a big win. This afternoon, a federal judge in New York dismissed a big chunk of the lawsuits against banks involved in the LIBOR scandal. The interest rate fixing -- well, I dunno if I can call it a scam anymore -- from last year.

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and others had been on the hook.

I found the original Easter Bunny, and his name is Warren Robinett. No, he's not the big, white, thumpity, furry kind. Robinett, a video game designer, is credited with creating one of the first digital Easter eggs. In the digital world, an Easter egg is a hidden message snuck into a computer program, video game, or website where it shouldn’t be.

PLAY ALONG: Find our digital Easter egg! Here's your challenge: do some Internet sluething to figure out the city and state where Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio was born. Then search for it on Marketplace.org and see what you find.

In 1979, Robinett secretly put his name in a room of the video game Adventure, which he developed for Atari. At the time, Atari had an anonymity policy where they didn't publicly credit their video game designers.

"Atari had the power to keep my name off the box," says Robinett, "but I had the power to put my name on the screen."

By the time a 15-year-old gamer in Salt Lake City discovered it and wrote in to tell Atari, thousands of copies had already shipped.

But bosses at Atari were amused and decided to leave Robinett's secret signature in the game. They thought, "it's kind of like searching for Easter eggs on Easter morning," says Robinett.

And so the term was born. You can find tech Easter eggs all over now. Say you type the word "tilt" into Google Search -- instead of just showing results for tilt, your computer window literally tilts.

"It's something that's clever and delightful and playful," says Jon Wiley, lead designer for Google Search, "and also is kind of an in joke between the creator and the people who are using the software." Wiley says they've been around since the company got started, and he doesn't even know where to find them all.

Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Searchengineland.com, can give a couple of hints. He says try Googling "do a barrel roll", or the word "askew", or:

"If you do a search for Lionel Richie, you get a little box that comes up for him, at the top of the box it says, 'Hello is it me you're looking for?"

Sullivan says these Easter eggs aren't just for fun. And Linda Bustos, director of e-commerce research at Elastic Path Software, agrees.

"When someone finds one, they are pretty proud of themselves," she says, "and sharing it through networks is how people start talking about that piece of content."

According to Bustos, fans become bigger fans, customers get more loyal, and companies strengthen their brand. And in the tech world, branding can be worth a whole lot more than chocolate. It can mean gold.

Dawn Maestas helps women who have been branded with tattoos as a result of domestic violence.

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A government study of the medical records of 1,000 kids found no correlation between the number of vaccines a child received and his or her risk of autism spectrum disorder. Experts hope the finding will allay some parents who worry that many vaccines on one day or in the first two years of life may lead to autism.

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Instead, say it's from the "Outer Coastal Plain." (It's part of a plan to kick the state's reputation for making cheap wine.)

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New restrictions on big depositors are controversial, and there's no consensus on the efficacy of the country's strategy. Besides affecting Cyprus' economy, the new measures could become a template for other eurozone countries. Selective restrictions might create a tiered system within the bloc.

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H&R Block claims it's equipped to guide you through the Affordable Care Act and the law's implications for your taxes this year. But the law doesn't really affect 2012 returns.

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Researchers are using cellular machinery to turn E. coli bacteria into little computers. By creating on/off switches that are similar to electronic transistors, scientists can control each microbe's behavior.

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Nearly 7 million people visit the Chateau at Versailles a year. But one day a week, it's closed. That's a spa day of sorts, when conservation work and cleaning takes place at the Grande Dame of France royal residences. The hardwood floors alone require nearly 1,000 gallons of wax a year.

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Aleppo was once the financial heart of Syria. But as the country's revolt grinds on, many of the city's most innovative businessmen have moved to the Turkish border town of Gaziantep. An estimated 150,000 Syrians are there — some of whom are putting down roots — raising questions about Aleppo's future.

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The Afro-Caribbean people known as the Garifuna have a rich tradition of music, dance and storytelling much like their forebears. They also have another parallel to Africa: a severe HIV and AIDS epidemic. The Garifuna are using their culture as a weapon to fight the spread of the virus.

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The Afro-Caribbean people known as the Garifuna have a rich tradition of music, dance and storytelling much like their forebears. They also have another parallel to Africa: a severe HIV and AIDS epidemic. The Garifuna are using their culture as a weapon to fight the spread of the virus.

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Syracuse, Ohio State, Marquette and Wichita State will play Saturday in the next round of the men's NCAA basketball tournament. The other four slots in the final eight will be decided Friday night.

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At the 2013 Game Developers Conference the video game company presented photo-realistic animations. And it seems, we've gotten to the point where telling apart reality from animation is nearly impossible.

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Financial terms of the sale, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013, were not disclosed. The announcement comes just weeks after major publishers launched their own book-recommendation website.

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The prosecution said they had not received any details from James Holmes' attorneys, so they weren't prepared to accept a plea.

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NPR's Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg ties up a few loose ends from a momentous week in the Supreme Court.

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A lawyer representing "Sister Wives" said the march of the law is toward the "right to be left alone." He said polygamy is now where gay marriage was a decade ago.

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Mouaz al-Khatib said last Sunday he was reigning the presidency of the Syrian National Coalition. He criticized the international community for not doing enough to end the civil war in Syria.

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