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Swedish apartment encourages cycle-friendly lifestyle
As cities seek to become greener and healthier places to live, cycling is increasingly being catered for. In Malmö, Sweden, this now extends beyond infrastructure like bike lanes and cycle paths, with a specially designed apartment block and hotel being built for people who wish to lead a car-free lifestyle. Designed by architects Hauschild+Siegel, Cykelhuset Ohboy will comprise 55 apartments, ranging in size from one to four bedrooms, and a “bike hotel” on street-level with 31 mezzanine apartments, all spread across seven floors. Like Foster + Partners’ 250 City Road in London, UK, it will feature space for bike storage, large elevators to accommodate bikes and a bike workshop, as well as focusing on greenery and sustainability.
Game demonstrates impact of climate change on Antarctic
Scientists and games developers have joined forces to help communicate the impact of climate change on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice held in the Antarctic Ice Sheet has the potential to cause significant changes in sea level in the future, which will affect many people around the world. As a result, it is important that people have an awareness of the impact of a changing climate on the world’s ice sheets, but this complex system is difficult to understand and predict. Now the scientists and games developers have produced a free-to-use interactive game, “Ice Flows”, to help demonstrate how the Antarctic Ice Sheet responds to climate change in an accessible way to children and game players of all ages.
Iceland Carbon Capture Project
A pilot project that sought to demonstrate that carbon dioxide emissions could be locked up by turning them into rock appears to be a success. Tests at the CarbFix project in Iceland indicate that most of the CO2 injected into basalt turned into carbonate minerals in less than two years, far shorter a time than the hundreds or thousands of years that scientists had once thought such a process would take.
Extent of America’s Landfill Problem
America, land of the … landfills? That’s what we’ve turned into since 1937, when the first sanitary landfill opened in Fresno, California. Today, there are nearly 2,000 active landfills across the country and hundreds more are at capacity, a stark reminder of just how massive our waste problem has become. This visualization from SaveOnEnergy shows how quickly landfills have boomed across the country, particularly in the past 30 years. One thing we have to remember when looking at this is that trash, and landfills, are a human invention. Waste does not exist in nature, in any form. Everything that is produced in a healthy ecosystem is consumed or decomposed by another organism, or the sun. That is because, in a natural system, everything has value to something.
5 plants for removing indoor air pollution
New research finds that certain houseplants are best for removing specific harmful compounds. It’s not new news that houseplants are beautiful little workhorses when it comes to human health. Among their many benefits is one decidedly impressive one – they remove toxins from the air. And this isn’t just woowoo mumbo-jumbo. NASA, given their interest in improving air-quality in sealed environments, has researched this extensively and concluded: “Both plant leaves and roots are utilized in removing trace levels of toxic vapors from inside tightly sealed buildings. Low levels of chemicals such as carbon monoxide and formaldehyde can be removed from indoor environments by plant leaves alone.”
Five ways cities are acting on climate
Cities aren’t waiting for the rest of the world to make huge strides in confronting the climate crisis. In December 2015, almost the entire world (195 nations to be exact) agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and do their part to solve climate change as part of the landmark Paris Agreement. After years of negotiation and discussion, the world is closer than ever to finally shifting away from dirty fossil fuels and working together to reverse the dangerous upward trend in warming global temperatures.
California Freeways Will Soon Generate Electricity
“Energy conservation is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about freeways jammed with idling vehicles. But in California, which has some of the most congested freeways in the country, that’s about to change. The California Energy Commission (CEC) has approved a pilot program in which piezoelectric crystals will be installed on several freeways. No, these aren’t some kind of new-agey crystals with mystical powers. Piezoelectric crystals, about the size of watch batteries, give off an electrical discharge when they’re mechanically stressed, such as when a vehicle drives over them.
Appliance puts nanofarm in your kitchen
Replantable aims to be a hands-off modular indoor growing device for fresh homegrown produce, year-round. The future of fresh homegrown food may be an indoor one, at least in the cold season and for those without garden space, and although I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to gardening, it’s fairly obvious to me that there are plenty of situations where growing food indoors makes sense, even if it entails buying yet another plugged-in appliance.
Key species act as warning signs of ecosystem collapse
The Earth’s biodiversity is under attack. We would need to travel back over 65 million years to find rates of species loss as high as we are witnessing today. Conservation often focuses on the big, enigmatic animals – tigers, polar bears, whales. There are many reasons to want to save these species from extinction. But what about the vast majority of life that we barely notice? The bugs and grubs that can appear or vanish from ecosystems without any apparent impact? Biodiversity increases resilience: more species means each individual species is better able to withstand impacts. Think of decreasing biodiversity as popping out rivets from an aircraft. A few missing rivets here or there will not cause too much harm. But continuing to remove them threatens a collapse in ecosystem functioning. Forests give way to desert. Coral reefs bleach and then die.
Farming Solar Power in the Cosmos
What was then an implausible idea—collecting solar energy in space and sending it to Earth—is now the goal of scientists around the world, marking a new space race that could end reliance on dwindling fossil fuels, fundamentally shift power in the geopolitical conflicts they have sparked, and meet the rising demand for energy from the developing world. Paul Jaffe, a spacecraft engineer and principal investigator at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., has brought the U.S. closer to that goal with his work on space solar technology, which has drawn international attention—and for good reason: The innovation would have a profound impact on humanity.
