Police were today trying to identify two bodies that were found in a burning car parked in a layby last night.

The remains were so badly charred that detectives have been unable to work out whether they were male or female or even adult or child.

Several motorists raised the alarm at around 11.15pm, saying a vehicle was on fire beside the A47 north of Earl Shilton, in Leicestershire. The two bodies were later found inside.

Today, police set up a blue tent around the burnt-out car, which is round 200 yards from the main road. A forensic examination of the scene is due to be carried out later.

“Because of the ferocity of the fire, identification of the deceased and determining what happened might take some time,” a Leicestershire police spokeswoman said. “We are keeping an open mind. It is too early to speculate.”

Post mortem examinations of the bodies will take place this afternoon in an attempt to discover how the victims died, she added. Police are treating the deaths as suspicious.

Jim Driver, who owns a pet food business nearby, said: “There’s often quite a lot of traffic around there. Lorries park here, so the drivers may have seen what happened.”

Further tests will also need to be carried out on the car to determine its make and model.

In the past few years solar panels and wind turbines have become familiar friends, comforting images that give us hope for a greener future. Featured in the media and in corporate advertising, these new technologies have replaced cute pandas as an icon of environmental correctness.

But how many people out there have heard of green roofs, which may be an equally powerful tool for dealing with climate change? Not many, I bet.

Why? Green roofs are often homely, not photogenic. They are made of plants, not zippy new technology. Most important, perhaps, it is hard for large corporations to make a profit installing green roofs - so they are not promoted or featured in glossy advertising.

Creating a green roof, or living roof, involves putting down soil and plants on top of buildings - apartment blocks, corporate headquarters, even private homes - a practice that has multiple benefits for the environment.

A green roof is wonderful insulation for the building below, keeping it cool in summer and vastly reducing energy needs. In cities, green roofs help absorb CO2 and have a cooling effect. They soak water from rains, taking pressure off drainage systems. They give local species - plants, birds and insects - a place to roost, preserving biodiversity.

“There are not many technologies that give you so many environmental benefits,” said Dusty Gedge, founder of LivingRoofs, a group that promotes and provides advice for green roof installation in London. “But a living roof is not a piece of hardware that you can just install; its an ongoing process. So architects and builders and consumers have a hard time dealing with it. Its not like a solar panel.”

Ed Snodgrass owns Emory Knoll Farms in Maryland, the biggest nursery devoted exclusively to green roof plants in the United States. He said that green roofing was a difficult sell because it was hard for consumers to grasp and quantify the diverse benefits, and because it did not satisfy peoples desire for a quick solution.

“A solar panel fits into our need for problem solving: It increases capacity so you still get to have the SUV,” Snodgrass said. “But a green roof is a living, complex system.”

A handful of cities around the globe - like Linz, Austria; Potsdam, Germany, and Portland, Oregon - have promoted the planting of green roofs for more than a decade as a method to deal with excess rainwater runoff or simply to increase the green in the local environment.

More recently, cities from Toronto to London to New York are exploring them too, but now as a way to blunt the effects of global warming. They are considering implementing plans that would require large buildings or new buildings to be topped off with green roofs. Or giving tax breaks to builders and developers who create them.

These days, green roofs have some well-placed fans.

Green roofs “have a dramatic impact on energy use, greenhouse gas emission and parenthetically on the energy bills of every business and residence in all those buildings,” said Bill Clinton, the former U.S. president, in a recent speech in New York. He called green roofs “a huge deal.”

In fact, Clinton suggested, green roofs could be a powerful source of jobs as well. “You cannot outsource these jobs. Someone has to be standing on that roof. This is not data processing. Youve got to actually be there.”

The fact that all green roofs are inherently local, however, also “makes it hard to develop an infrastructure,” Gedge of LivingRoofs acknowledges. “There is no powerful economic driving force - like the companies that sell wind turbines - to promote green roofing.”

“If you call a company with experience in Stuttgart and say I want one in the Philippines, it wont work,” Snodgrass said. While his company ships to Oregon, it is only because no one is growing green-roof plants there yet. “It would be far better to have a local nursery,” he said.

While green roofs are relatively cheap to install, the building underneath must have a good seal and the garden needs to be maintained.

For cities, some of the benefits of green roofs are simple math. When the sun shines on a tar roof, the temperature can go up to 170 degrees Fahrenheit (76 degrees Celsius). That absorbed heat not only roasts the apartments below, but also releases heat into the air, creating a “heat island” effect, raising urban temperatures 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the surrounding suburbs.

“That created a huge stress on the air-conditioning load, which has led both Chicago and Atlanta to look into green roofs,” Snodgrass said.

(09-27) 13:07 PDT SUNNYVALE — Palm Inc. today introduced the Centro, its first low-cost, consumer-oriented smart phone, a product the company hopes will help it tap into the growing demand for more powerful multimedia handsets.

Palm chief executive Ed Colligan, speaking at the DigitalLife conference in New York, said that by combining the size of a mass-market feature phone with advanced smart-phone capabilities, Palm hopes to appeal to mainstream phone users who are ready to upgrade to a more versatile device.

The Centro, he said, “is meant to be the center of your life, both your business and person life. We’re trying to reach a new demographic.”

The device will sell for $99.99 and sports a compact design, considerably smaller than Palm’s flagship Treo devices, which have remained largely unchanged for several years. The Centro offers a host of features, including instant messaging, personal and corporate e-mail support, media player, touch screen, full QWERTY keyboard and high-speed 3G data access.

The phone, which runs a Palm operating system, will appear in mid-October exclusively with Sprint-Nextel and a two-year service agreement. The device, which will be available in black and red, also will feature Sprint’s live TV service as well as easy access to Web sites such as YouTube, Yelp and Google Maps.

Sprint vice president of product equipment Danny Bowman said the Centro combines a wealth of features at a low price, which should make it popular for the holiday season.

“We think with the ease of use we’re creating with the touch screen, the keyboard, the overall user experience and with Sprint’s secret sauce, we have a real killer product,” Bowman said.

The heat has been on Palm lately to keep up with the likes of Research in Motion, Nokia, Motorola and now Apple with its iPhone. Critics have increasingly wondered when Palm was going to start radically refreshing its line-up of phones, which have sold solidly to business users but haven’t kept up with the growth in the overall smart-phone market.

The growing competition has not been kind to Palm. The company’s profits slid 43 percent to $15.4 million in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended June 1.

But Colligan said the future is bright for Palm as it competes in a fast-growing market. Market research firm IDC is projecting that U.S. smart-phone shipments will grow from 13.8 million in 2007 to 74.4 million in 2011.

Analysts aren’t sure that the Centro will help turn Palm’s fortunes around single-handedly. But the device is a good start, said Tavis McCourt, an analyst with Morgan, Keegan & Co.

“This is the direction Palm needs to go in,” McCourt said. “It may not be as successful as the BlackBerry Pearl, but it’s nice incremental growth for Palm. It certainly answers some of the critics. They’re saying they get it, that customers want things smaller, thinner phones with more multimedia features.”

E-mail Ryan Kim at rkim@sfchronicle.com.