Photo: NASA, public domain. Agriculture 2.0: Doing More With Less Imagine a farmer sitting at the kitchen table or at the wheel of a GPS-controlled tractor, looking at the screen of a iPad or smartphone that shows his fields seen from above with various data-points overlaid on top. “Hmm, the North-West corner needs a bit more water today.” and ‘tap-tap’ on the screen and the drip-irrigation system releases a bit more water there, taking into account the relative air humidity and the next few days’ weather forecast. Maybe there’s even a button somewhere that orders more ladybugs from a, organic p… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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photo: DorkyMum / Creative Commons The UK may have just had the coldest December in a century, but here’s an example of how the rest of the planet as a whole is still warming, even more so in the northern latitudes: As Climate Progress reports, the
Continue reading …Spam Drops Dramatically in December – Energy Used Selling You Stuff You Don’t Want Falls Fourfold
January 6, 2011 No Comment
image: Thomas / Creative Commons You may have seen headlines this morning about how global spam email levels have suddenly fallen , declining from approximately 200 billion spam messages in August to just 50 billion in December. Which got me thinking: Since spam is about 80% of email traffic , how much energy and gr… Read the full story on TreeHugger
Continue reading …Fraser’s Penguins Offers a ‘Blue Marble’ View of Climate Change (Book Review)
January 6, 2011 No Comment
Photo credit: Fen Montaigne In an age where information travels around the world in an instant—and moving people the same distance rarely takes more than a day—it’s easy to forget how foreign ideas of great scale and scope are to the human mind. While it’s easy for people to internalize and accept a concept like acid rain—specific emissions from factories in one place fall into the water downwind producing a measurable and nearly-immediate rise in acidity—it is much more difficult to grasp onto something like climate change, which is caused by actions around the world and has impacts measurable in decades,… Read the full story on TreeHugger
Continue reading …Just before the holidays I had the honor of being the subject of a short documentary. They must have worked very fast because the film is already done. In the film you will see how several of the recent images were made, including the shot of the duct-taped boots. I just arrived in Korea so I will start posting shots from Seoul soon.
Continue reading …Carbon Tax, Not Cap-and-Trade, Best Way to Combat Global Warming: Economist William Nordhaus
January 6, 2011 No Comment
photo: Martha Soukup / Creative Commons By many accounts it may be politically a non-starter right now in the United States, but nevertheless implementing a carbon tax is the best way to rein in rising carbon emissions and combat climate change. That’s the word of Yale University economist William Nordhaus , writing in a new article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists . But tha… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Images credit Birdair Tensotherm Back in 1967 at Expo67 and then at the Munich Olympics in 1972, German engineer Frei Otto wowed the world with his tensile structures, roofs of fabric that could cover huge spans with light weight. Single layer tensile roofs were beautifully translucent, but had little or no insulation value. Air supported roofs, a form of tensile structure invented by Walter Bird, suffered the same problem; as we saw in the
Continue reading …Tree Shaped Structure Of Mexican Apartment Is Stronger, Safer, But Uses Less Material
January 6, 2011 No Comment
The Nicolas San Juan apartment building by Mexican studio Taller 13 is green wherever you look: it has solar water heating, rainwater collection, proper wall isolation, uses certified wood and non toxic paint, and it even has a waste management system. It will also have a green rooftop with a cool bamboo structure and green balconies when the plants start growing. But its most interesting feature is perhaps its structure, which is inspired by the surrounding trees and was co-designed with structural engineers with a sei… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Malaysian eco-fashion label, Ultra. Photo: Ultra Ultra , a Malaysian eco-fashion label that launched in September 2010, will showcase their fall 2011 collection and bring their designs to an international level at Tranoi during Paris Fashion Week. Thanks to help from the public through their fundraising page on Kickstater and Matrade , Malaysi… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Image credit: Left studio 23 and Right Neelu How do you sell the concept of sustainability? What are the phrases that you feel will move people toward sustainable design and business solutions? This was the challenge posed by ” Sustainable Refrainables ,” a poster design competition run as a collaboration between Core77 and the San Francisco chapter of
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