10 Vegetables & Herbs You Can Eat Once and Regrow Forever. IBM discovers new class of ultra-tough, self-healing, recyclable plastics that could redefine almost every industry. Stop the press!
IBM Research announced this morning that it has discovered a whole new class of… plastics. This might not sound quite as sexy as, say, MIT discovering a whole new state of matter — but wait until you hear what these new plastics can do. This new class of plastics — or more accurately, polymers — are stronger than bone, have the ability to self-heal, are light-weight, and are 100% recyclable. Fantastic Fungi: The Startling Visual Diversity of Mushrooms Photographed by Steve Axford. Marasmius haematocephalus To think any one of these lifeforms exists in our galaxy, let alone on our planet, simply boggles the mind.
Photographer Steve Axford lives and works in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales in Australia where he spends his time documenting the living world around him, often traveling to remote locations to seek out rare animals, plants, and even people. But it’s his work tracking down some of the world’s strangest and brilliantly diverse mushrooms and other fungi that has resulted in an audience of online followers who stalk his work on Flickr and SmugMug to see what he’s captured next. Axford shares via email that most of the mushrooms seen here were photographed around his home and are sub-tropical fungi, but many were also taken in Victoria and Tasmania and are classified as temperate fungi.
The temperate fungi are well-known and documented, but the tropical species are much less known and some may have never been photographed before. Countdown to oblivion: The real reason we can’t stop global warming. There was a time when the environmental damage we produced remained somewhat localized, confined to specific places.
That time is gone. Today, nonindustrial areas, such as Greenland and the Antarctic, experience the industrial pollution generated in the United States and in Russia, to mention just two countries. Damage produced in particular sites now scales up, driven by the vastness of destruction, and becomes a planetary problem that drifts back down to hit even those places that did not contribute to the damage. Greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter such as black carbon) are key causes of climate change. Diverse measures arrive at an estimate that human activity has generated 350 billion tonnes of carbon since 1959; 55 percent of this has been taken up by the oceans and land, and the rest has been left in the atmosphere.
One major effect is rising land temperature. The 'magic mesh' that can make water out of thin air. Mesh can extract water from fogSystem already being trialled in Chile to provide drinking water By Mark Prigg Published: 21:16 GMT, 16 May 2014 | Updated: 01:03 GMT, 17 May 2014.
Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear. NOTE: Some major wind projects like the proposed TWE Carbon Valley project in Wyoming are already pricing in significantly lower than coal power -- $80 per MWh for wind versus $90 per MWh for coal -- and that is without government subsidies using today's wind turbine technology.
The International Clean Energy Analysis (ICEA) gateway estimates that the U.S. possesses 2.2 million km2 of high wind potential (Class 3-7 winds) — about 850,000 square miles of land that could yield high levels of wind energy. This makes the U.S. something of a Saudi Arabia for wind energy, ranked third in the world for total wind energy potential. The United States uses about 26.6 billion MWh's, so at the above rate we could satisfy a full one-third of our total annual energy needs.
Now what if a breakthrough came along that potentially tripled the energy output of those turbines? Eco-Enegry Flooring System by Stephen Chan Wing Tak. Piezoelectricity Generation X!
Electric polarization in a substance resulting from the application of mechanical stress – that’s what Piezoelectricity is. It’s used in these: Eco-Enegry Flooring System pads that use the pressure applied by people walking, running, rolling over to squeeze piezoelectric blocks. Upon squeezing, energy is generated and stored on a paper battery system. Then, THEN, the energy is used for, what else? LED lights! Boost in low-cost solar cell efficiency › News in Science (ABC Science) News in Science Thursday, 31 May 2012 Anna SallehABC Solar cells The efficiency of low-cost solar cells that could one day form exterior walls or windows of buildings has been increased by 30 per cent, say Australian researchers.
Associate Professor Kalantar-zadeh, of RMIT University, and colleagues, report their research in the journal ACS Nano. "This kind of solar cell is considered the third generation of solar cells," says Kalantar-zadeh, whose team led an international consortium of universities and the CSIRO. Dye-sensitised solar cells (DSSCs) use a dye-coated semiconductor, instead of silicon, to absorb sunlight. Scientists hope that DSSCs will one day replace the more expensive silicon solar cells. 7th Grader mimics Nature.
13 year old copies Nature to Improve Solar Performance.
ModernSurvivalOnline.com. Off Grid System This section is dedicated to off-grid power as well as back up power systems. Articles: Brooks Solar Living Off Grid – 12/10/2010 Build Your Own Generator – 12/10/2010 Cheap Solar Power Setup – 12/10/2010. The Sietch Blog » Organic Solar Cell Breakthrough. Solar cell technology developed by the Massey University’s Nanomaterials Research Centre will enable New Zealanders to generate electricity from sunlight at a 10th of the cost of current silicon-based photo-electric solar cells.
Dr Wayne Campbell and researchers in the centre have developed a range of coloured dyes for use in dye-sensitised solar cells. The synthetic dyes are made from simple organic compounds closely related to those found in nature. The green dye Dr Campbell (pictured) is synthetic chlorophyll derived from the light-harvesting pigment plants use for photosynthesis. Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods. Best Environmental Ads - Powerful Environmental Ads. In Baltimore, the gods will not save you — but the trees will. TreeHugger. 10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Buy Reusable. Vegetarian Times - Great Food, Good Health, Smart Living. A Low Impact Woodland Home.
Recyclebank. Earthbag Construction. The EnviroLink Network - Biodiversity. News and Information for Planet Earth. Ecology and Society. Imagine What'll Happen if We Fail to Stop 10°F Warming. Photo Credit: carlos castilla/ Shutterstock.com July 9, 2012 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. This heat wave has broken thousands of temperature records. In general, we expect the greatest number of temperature records to be set during a widespread drought. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. Supertree park in Singapore « Coolplaces « WhereCoolThingsHappen.