According to the International Programs Center, U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the World will hit 6,666,666,666 people on may 10th, 2008. that’s tomorrow!! go breeders! that’s six billion, six hundred and sixty six million, six hundred and sixty six thousand, six hundred and sixty six people (please do correct me if i’m wrong on reading that number). right now as i type this at 01:31 GMT (EST+5) the world population is at a projected 6,666,648,651 people!!! wow. oddly, my car is about to hit the 66,666 mile mark too. awesome!
Archive for the 'environment' Category
the makers of the fantastic & inspiring film One Giant Leap are coming out with a new film titled What About Me? the first chapter of the movie is titled Bombardment. the entire chapter (spanning 15 minutes) is available to view on the whataboutme website & even better at dailymotion as well. this movie looks to be as moving and as powerful as their first project, with a wonderful message that we all have & share many more similarities than we do differences. the project creators use music & song as a common thread to connect artists & musicians from around the world along with interviews with people like eckhart tolle, noam choamsky, timothy “speed” levich, and more. take a look when you get a chance & thanks claudine for the link!
the bright minds over at luxim have created an incredible new light bulb that is the size of a small pill and turns out 140 lumens per watt. that’s pretty damn amazing!!! quoting the post on treehugger about the luxin plasma bulbs: “At 140 lumens/watt, these pill-sized plasma light bulbs by Luxim are a pretty awesome contender for “light of the future”. They are almost 10 times more efficient than traditional incandescent light bulbs, twice as efficient as current high-end LEDs, and they also beat CFLs, most of which are around 50-80 lumens/watt.” that is great! mass produce them now please!
i liked reading this: Around 300 women rural residents in Brazil burst into a property owned by the US company Monsanto and destroyed a plant nursery and crops containing genetically modified corn. the women were from the group via campesina and were protesting brazil allowing monsanto and bayer to move ahead with developing genetically modified crops (GMC). brazil legalized genetically modified crops in 2005. last month french officials banned one of the approved monsanto GMCs to be grown in brazil, MON810, after doubts over the GMC’s safety. go ladies! monsanto is evil.
meet the world’s largest wind turbine! it’s the enercon E-126 made by enercon. this beast is gigantic! The length of each rotor blade measures 413 feet (126 meters)! the first E-126 wind turbine was setup near emden, lower saxony, germany in november 0f 2007. though it’s rated to generate 6 Megawatts of power, it is expected to go much higher - up towards 7+ megawatts (20 million kilowatt hours per year). with those figures, enercon expects one e-126 wind turbine to generate enough power for 5,000 households of four in europe. awesome!
a very interesting and informative article from tech author nicolas carr via his blog rough type titled Google, Apple and the future of personal computing. the article discusses the future of personal computing based on the developing partnership between google and apple. the future would have apple building the front end of sleek gadgets, devices, & handhelds that easily integrate with each other (phones, computers, etc) and google providing the back end of a networked supercomputer to provide the bulk of the data-processing might and storage capacity for the devices. it’s brilliant. what would such service and computer setup like this mean for the user? according to the article, computing will be cheap, highly energy efficient, very low maintenance, and it will be flexible. for more in depth info, please check out the original article (and the comments too).
ever been in a situation where you were bitten a lot by mosquitos but your friends around you were never bitten? me too! turns out i’m hella flavorful to mosquitos. no really. be sure to read the post titled Why some people are prone to mosquito bites on the telegraph.uk. quoting the article: Specific cells in one of the three organs that make up the mosquito’s nose are tuned to identify the different chemicals that make up human body odour. To the mosquito some people’s sweat simply smells better than others because of the proportions of the carbon dioxide, octenol and other compounds that make up body odour. awesome! this research will more than likely lead to developing a new generation of repellents that stop or prevent a mosqito’s nose from ever smelling (and thus detecting)a human. wow.
an exciting article over on sciencedaily covering a breakthrough in solar technology. researchers at the new jersey institute of technology (NJIT) have found a way to make inexpensive flexible solar panels that can be printed out or painted onto a surface, making them very easy to produce. awesome! lead researcher Dr. Somenath Mitra states “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.” the new solar cell technology uses cylindrically shaped carbon nanotube complexes combined with tiny carbon Buckyballs (known as fullerenes) to harvest the sun’s energy. read more about the science behind the new solar panels at sciencedaily or at the NJIT website.
i am really liking the homebrew biodiesel processors for sale over at biodiesel warehouse. for the price of a new laptop ($2,000) you can get a complete biodiesel processing system that generates 55 gallons of biodiesel fuel in just 3 hours of hands-on processing time. if you’re not liking the hands-on approach, they offer a fully automated biodiesel processor model costing $7,000 but there’s no measuring or mixing of materials required (processes 50 gallons of fuel in about 60 hours). so nice to see these alternative fuel systems becoming much more accessible to the general public.
scientists at rice university’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) have made a breakthrough in cheaper solar cells: make them out of quantum dots. the breathrough comes through the use of quantum dots and the recipe for stable development of four legged quantum dots called tetrapods. quoting principle investigator Michael Wong:
“Our work knocks down a big barrier in developing quantum-dot-based photovoltaics as an alternative to the conventional, more expensive silicon-based solar cells.”
the essence of the new quantum dot recipe developed by CBEN produces quantum dots where more than 90 percent are tetrapods (which are many times more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity). the new process is cheaper and safer than previous methods too. read more on about this via rice university’s article. and you can read more information on quantum dots here via a 1999 article at lawrence livermore national labs.
great article on sfgate by carol lloyd titled ‘small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards.’ it features a home built by jay shafer that’s only 96 square feet in size. brings up the idea of space and how much space one needs or thinks they need to live. you can see more of jay’s work and houses via his website called tumbleweed tiny house company. very cool!
a great post on neatorama called the ten most significant trees in the world. even you know of some equally significant & noteworthy trees deserving the same title, it’s a really great list. i learned about the quaking aspen (amazing!), the two oldest trees in the world, and the super fat baobab tree of madagascar, thanks neatorama!
are you drinking non-organic milk or eating non-organic dairy products? please stop. chances are the milk and dairy products you are consuming contain a gift from monsanto (the makers of round-up, agent orange, and nutrasweet /aspartame) called rBST - or Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (also rBGH). and you should avoid anything with rBST like the plague. although legal in the united states, rBST has been banned in the EU, canada, japan, and other nations due to tests that show it’s link to cancer. monsanto’s own tests on rats showed this but those results were excluded from the report to the FDA. and monsanto has gone out of it’s way to suppress that information, as well as suppress the labeling of milk & dairy containing rBST. please watch this youtube clip from the movie The Corporation titled Fox News Kills Monsanto Milk Story (embedded movie below). more info at alternet.org and foxBGHsuit.com. more about the absolutely evil monsanto via the organic consumers association website. avoid any dairy with rBST. support organic dairy farmers by purchasing organic milk and diary products.
very cool to read this: scientists at Purdue University have developed a portable generator that turns garbage and trash into electricity. the generator, referred to as a ‘tactical refinery’ (yes, it was developed for the US military) is the roughly the size of a moving van (larger, hi-res picture here). the tactical refinery converts different types of waste and garbage to fuel via two parallel processes and burns the different fuels it creates in a diesel engine. quoting Michael Ladisch, scientist and lead on the tactical biorefinery project: “At any place with a fair amount of food and scrap waste the biorefinery could help reduce electricity costs, and you might even be able to produce some surplus energy to put back on the electrical grid,.” also, much of the generator’s combust/exhaust is carbon neutral. from the article:
The tactical biorefinery first separates organic food material from residual trash, such as paper, plastic, Styrofoam and cardboard. The food waste goes to a bioreactor where industrial yeast ferments it into ethanol, a “green” fuel. Residual materials go to a gasifier where they are heated under low-oxygen conditions and eventually become low-grade propane gas and methane. The gas and ethanol are then combusted in a modified diesel engine that powers a generator to produce electricity.
on a greater scale, i could see these tactical refineries set up in housing districts where people can go to convert their garbage into electricty for their neighborhoods and home. i want it now!
tickets for the 2007 burning man festival go on sale tomorrow - wednesday, january 17th, 2007 - at 10am. starting price for tickets is at a hefty $195 each, followed by a second tier at $225 each, and a third tier at $250 each. this years burning man theme is the green man, which seems to focus on humanity’s relationship to nature as well as put a green, eco-friendly face (and also marketing spin, depending on how you look at it) on the event. gotta love the irony. one move to make burning man ‘green’ and also appeal to current and new environmentally conscious ticket buyers comes from coolingman - a project aimed at offsetting greenhouse gases for the festival’s activities. more info and links on going carbon neutral can be found on wikipedia. personally i look at this type of carbon trading as a way of allowing groups and individuals to continue with their current rate of consumption without any actual reduction in activities that cause pollution. it’s a bit like conservation through consumerism, where greater luxuries, consumption, and pollution can be rationalized and permitted by simply throwing money at it’s ecological impact through buying carbon credits. it’s convenient like a credit card, but it doesn’t raise eco-consciousness. anyway, what was i talking about? oh yeah, that big eco-fest party in the desert - burning man.
here’s a very nice environmentally friendly vehicle from the french company venturi electric called the eclectic (great pics & forum post on the dexigner website too). deemed the ‘first energy autonomous vehicle‘ it is powered using 100% renewable energy: solar and wind. the eclectic is 1st solar production vehicle and it is the 1st production vehicle that can be directly recharged with a personal wind turbine. this means that the eclectic can access the energy needed to power it by deploying its wind turbine, using solar cells or, if necessary, find a simple electric plug (which can also use solar energy). no oil or fossil fuels (gas, coal) needed. the eclectic will have a range of 31 miles (50 kilometers) and a top speed of 31 mph (50 kph) making it best for urban travel and campus areas. more photos and info on the venturi eclectic website. via treehugger via dexigner.
the greenfestival is in san francsico this weekend. november 10 - 12 at the concourse exhibition center on 8th st & brannan. i’ll be there today checking everything out. there’ll be workshops and talks on organic foods & farming, eco-building & building green, sustainability, and a whole lot more. plus, working assests has a discounted admission ticket available online. you should go!
rather discouraging report on the BBC website titled ‘Only 50 Years Left’ for sea fish, which talks of a report on the declining fish stocks in the earth’s oceans. the report is for the journal Science and is the work of an international team of researchers and scientists. The great decline in fish stocks is largely due to the broader loss of marine biodiversity. quoting steve palumbi from stanford university (one of the scientists on the project):
“Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood.”
in the report, experiments performed in small, relatively contained ecosystems show that reductions in fish and marine life diversity tend to bring reductions in the size and robustness of local fish stocks. This implies that loss of biodiversity is driving the declines in fish stocks seen in the large-scale studies. But data gathered from areas where fishing has been either banned or heavily restricted was promising, showing that protection of fishing areas though ‘no fish zones’ and marine sanctuaries brings back biodiversity and helps to restore fish populations.
my savvy friend margaret sports a very cool looking handbag. turns out it’s a freitag bag, made from recycled large vinyl truck tarps used for truck siding, car seat belts, bicycle inner tubes, and used car airbags. the tarps are colorful as they have bright advertisements printed on them. and durable too as they have to withstand heavy wind, rain, and sun. freitag has a great bag cutter application (links to flash) for custom bags on their site too. their work seems to have inspired other designers to creatively recycle vinyl, instead of throwing it out or producing more new vinyl (vinyl/PVC is way baaad for the environment and considered a human carcinogen). the freitag site is built in using frames, but worth checking out.
more goodness from treehugger on improvements solar panel technology & efficiency. prism solar technology of new york has developed a solar module that uses 25% to 85% less silicon than a crystalline silicon solar panel of comparable wattage. the technology uses holograms to increase efficiency and concentrate light. this also brings the cost down of solar panel as less photovoltaic material is needed to gather energy.
great study carried out by scientists from cornell university in ithaca, new york, that looks into the use of pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops. the big biotech firms promote the benefits of GM crops stating that GM crops are safer for the environment as they require less pesticides and toxins. this was based on three year study began in 1997 where farmers growing GM cotton did actually reduce pesticide use by 70% and make more money then conventional farmers. but that was just a three year focus. a longer term look (7 years +) reveals that the farmers growing GM crops use just as much pesticide as their conventional farming counterparts. the US study also revealed that the GM cotton farmers were spending far more money in the long run because GM cotton seed is three times the price of conventional cotton seed. factoring in price of grain and increased pesticide & toxin use makes GM cotton more expensive then conventional cotton or organic cotton in the long run. the article states that the findings of the study “will undermine claims by the biotechnology industry that GM technology can boost food production without necessarily damaging the environment with pesticides.” it seems that short term studies on GM crops tend to promote GM crops while longer term studies of the effects of GM crops tend to refute the positive results of the short term GM crop findings. long term studies also reveal the harm of GM crops and the very negative side effects, such as the creation of ’superweeds’ that are resistant to pesticides.
very cool company that recycles car tires and turns them into highly functional & modular sidewalks. rubbersidewalks is bringing a rubber sidewalk to a city near you. the rubber sidewalk sections are modular & install much like pavers. unlike concrete sections, these sections for sidewalk area to be lifted up for tree root repair and then re-installed. so simple. and it keeps tires out of landfill.
interesting post on treehugger around the hype & subject of who killed the electric car. the article covers a recent post to a usenet group detailing problems with the electric car, indicating it’s death was maybe a mercy killing. the usenet poster allegedly worked for GM while the EV1 was in production and lists the numerous customer complaints and problems with the electric car. some of the issues …
The range of 130 miles is bogus. None of them ever achieved that under normal driving conditions. Running the air conditioning or heater could halve that range. Even running the headlights reduced it by 10%.
Lessees were complaining that their electric bills had increased to the point that they’d rather be using gasoline.
Home electrical systems simply couldn’t handle the necessary current draw for “fast” charging.
ouch. seems to take issue with a lot of the points brought up in the movie Who Killed The Electric Car? still, technology moves forward. taking into account the ability to set up a home solar charging station, better NiMH battery systems and options available, and the cost of gas, i’d very much prefer that ride over my gas car any day. one month after GM bought the Hummer from AM General, they discontinued building the EV1s. i just can’t respect that.
… now with grass! check out this grass lined wheel design project (also via spacing) done by four architecture students of the dalhousie school of architecture in halifax, nova scotia. the project wanted to comment on access to green spaces in an urban environment and the north american obsession with manicured lawns. to me this is a great take on our over emphasis on efficiency as applied to being outdoors (sort of like those popular indoor wave surf parks - experience the outdoors with all the safety of being indoors & none of the hassle of actually going outdoors). very cool. via treehugger.
from the environmental association of nova scotia comes this helpful website: a guide to less toxic products. this guide helps to find & identify products which are least toxic then other brands and items available, ranging from cleaning supplies, mattresses, personal care, and more. link found via treehugger.
wanting to be all environmentally conscious and switch out your energy & cash eating incandescent bulbs for efficient and longer lasting compact flourescents? good! but you find your still stuck with using incandescent bulbs for any lights on dimmer switches? well, you are stuck no more. greenlite is a canadian company that makes and manufactures a 23 watt dimmable compact flourescent bulb. and there’s also litetronics that makes a 3 watt dimmable flourescent bulb too! they are pricey, but over time they will save lots of money. and use much less energy. link via meta-efficient.
what the heck is a counter rotating ring receiver reactor recuperator, or CR5 for short? it’s an invention in the works with a whole new way to make hydrogen to power automobiles and homes. created by inventor Richard Diver, the CR5 invention splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, using a two-step thermochemical process. plans for a prototype CR5 are in the works. original link via treehugger.
from march 13th, great article on SFGate about a UC berkeley grad student doing research on developing paper-thin solar panels. working with chemicals to arrange inorganic crystals a thousandth of a human hair in width into structures that could possibly conduct electricity. worth a read.
check out this amazing and disturbing photo essay by brendan corr called End of the Line. it deals with the dangerous and hazardous work of ship breaking, the piece by piece dismanteling of those gigantic cargo ships, naval vessels, and cruise liners. now almost all of this highly toxic and hazardous work takes place asian countries, mostly in India, Bangladesh, Turkey, China, and Pakistan. workers are often exposed to high levels of asbestos, heavy metals, and other contaminants. greenpeace has been involved in effective activism and campaigns to stop western nations from exporting ‘end of life’ toxic ships to poorer countries. greenpeace has even spotlighted 50 toxic ships, including the Pacific Princess - a.k.a. the love boat, in their campaign.
wow. from treehugger, a great post on a stylish little diesel powered car that get 157 miles per gallon. hello! the car is called the Loremo AG. it weighs less than a thousand pounds, seats 4, diesel fuel powered (no hybrid technology), aerodynamic, has a modest 2-cylinder, 20 hp turbo engine, a top speed of 100 mph, and does 0-60 mph in ten seconds. no, it’s not a sports car. but who the fuck cares? did i mention it gets 157 miles per gallon? oh, and is anticipated to cost around $13,000? i’m sold. it hits the european market (wah!) in 2009. so cool!