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Elon Musk Gives Drivers Vegan Options
Read the full article on http://www.nytimes.com/ “‘Tesla revolutionized the electric car and now it’s redefined luxury interiors by using these vegan materials, which are both animal- and environmentally friendly,’ said Anne Brainard, senior corporate liaison and manager of corporate affairs at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The group urged Tesla to stop using […]
A Seed Bank in the Arctic
“What happens if war or global warming threaten the key plants that the world depends on for food? A consortium of scientists is running what it believes is an answer: a deep-freeze for thousands of seed samples that is meant to serve as a back-up to cope with the worst-case scenarios. The Global Seed Vault is buried inside a mountain on the Arctic islands of Svalbard and science editor David Shukman was allowed inside.”
A Victory for the Delta 5
Read the full article on http://www.desmogblog.com/ In September 2014, five individuals — now known as the Delta 5 — blockaded a train transporting Bakken shale oil at the Delta rail yard in Everett, Washington. This action was taken to oppose the known risks of the explosive Bakken oil and the risks that fossil fuels pose […]
A Superhighway for Bikes
“Germany, the country that invented the modern highway for motor vehicles, is taking on the challenge of keeping bikers safe and enabling them to easily commute long distances. It opened a three-mile-long leg of the Radschnellweg, a new autobahn for bikes, just before the New Year.
Instead of forcing riders to avoid swerving vehicles on a busy street, the Radschnellweg is a dedicated multi-lane highway for two-wheeled transport. The bike lanes are about 13 feet wide, are lit at night, and, like a road for cars, will be plowed during winter to remove snow.”
Scientists create a MATERIAL THAT HARVESTS AND STORES SOLAR HEAT
“Imagine a sweater that could automatically increase its temperature on command. You’d no longer have to worry about grabbing an extra jacket when you go out at night in case it gets chillier. Or what about a windshield that can warm up on its own to automatically clear ice away? Both sound like things you might have glimpsed in Back to the Future 2, but each could soon be a reality thanks to a new material.
Researchers at MIT have invented a new transparent polymer film that allows heat to be harvested from the sun and saved for later use. Unlike traditional methods of storing solar energy, which takes heat from the sun and stores it as electricity, the new solar heat-storing transparent polymer film takes the sun’s energy and saves it in a chemical state. Once saved, the stored solar heat can be unleashed via a simple chemical reaction.”
New High-Res Images from NASA
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently captured a unique view of Earth from the spacecraft’s vantage point in orbit around the moon.
“The image is simply stunning,” said Noah Petro, Deputy Project Scientist for LRO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The image of the Earth evokes the famous ‘Blue Marble’ image taken by Astronaut Harrison Schmitt during Apollo 17, 43 years ago, which also showed Africa prominently in the picture.”
The Most Eco Friendly College in the World
Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, may be a small school at 1,400 students, but it’s making huge leaps and bounds in sustainability. The school will soon be home to a living building and will be the only college generating all of its electricity from solar energy.
Aura mission tracks global pollutant trends
The success of clean air legislation in western developed countries is evident in the results from a 10-year study by a US space agency satellite.
The Aura mission has been tracking trends in emissions of nitrogen dioxide since its launch in 2004. It has seen big falls in the pollutant in the US and Europe, while at the same time recording significant increases in some developing nations, such as China.
There is More Plastic in Our Oceans Than We Thought
The 5 Gyres Institute co-authored this study which is the most comprehensive estimate of small plastics in the world’s oceans. There were two other papers published earlier, one by Cozar (2014) and Eriksen (2014) using separate data sets.
The paper published last week in Environmental Research Letters, A Global Inventory of Small Floating Plastic Debris, uses three ocean models and every dataset published since the 1970s. With 10 authors contributing to it, it’s the best so far. This new study suggests there are 15 to 51 trillion microplastic particles in the world’s oceans, weighing somewhere between 93 and 236,000 metric tons. This is roughly seven times more than what we thought before.
Why Are We Being Fed By A Poison Expert? by The Undercurrent
Why Are We Being Fed By A Poison Expert? by The Undercurrent
