Earthlings - VEG-TV. EARTHLINGS is a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers. " The film is narrated by Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoenix (GLADIATOR) and features music by the critically acclaimed platinum artist Moby. With an in-depth study into pet stores, puppy mills and animals shelters, as well as factory farms, the leather and fur trades, sports and entertainment industries, and finally the medical and scientific profession, EARTHLINGS uses hidden cameras and never before seen footage to chronicle the day-to-day practices of some of the largest industries in the world, all of which rely entirely on animals for profit. Powerful, informative and thought-provoking, EARTHLINGS is by far the most comprehensive documentary ever produced on the correlation between nature, animals, and human economic interests.
London's Unpackaged Grocery Shop: No Packaging Whatsoever - Food. I can't fathom a better way to reduce waste created by plastic bags and other packaging than by eschewing the stuff altogether, which is precisely what London's Unpackaged grocery shop does. WeHeart has more: Beginning life as a market stall in 2006, Unpackaged is a unique and brilliant concept that is so simple it hurts, especially considering the sheer amount of packaging waste that is ridiculously filling our planet's landfill sites.
Within the beautifully designed shop, organic whole foods, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, even refillable oils, vinegars and wines are all available to place straight into your own containers, that you will have brought along with you … if you haven't then reusable bags are available. So simple it hurts. Exactly. The Earth Is Full. Al Gore's new thinking on the climate crisis. Al Gore on averting climate crisis. Get the Facts | whataretherealcosts.org. Super X Divertor Eats Nuclear Waste, Generates Clean Power. The Super X Divertor sounds like some fantasy invention from a 1950s Popular Mechanics.
But it's a real device that helps enable two eco-friendly processes: Generating zero carbon-footprint power, and eating up dangerous nuclear waste from older power stations. Physicists at the University of Texas have invented the Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS), which is a clever system that mixes of two types of nuclear power reactors. The older fission reactor we're all familiar with (which generate lots of dangerously radioactive waste) and a tokamak fusion reactor (where small atoms are fused together much more cleanly). The CFNS will eat up so-called nuclear "sludge," which is a dangerous, highly toxic, long-lived radioactive by-product of existing nuclear power stations. The sludge is formed into a jacket around the core fusion reactor. [via Physorg] The secret superpower of the cockroach - life - 21 April 2011. See gallery: "The unlikely charm of cockroaches" You don't need to be tough to conquer the world's kitchens, but you do need one extraordinary ability ON A midnight foray into my kitchen, I flicked on the light and was confronted with a devil's playground.
Cockroaches were fornicating on my pots and dancing on the cooker. They were grinding on my floor and scuttling around my fridge. Disgusted, I reached for the light switch again. When I moved from Melbourne to Sydney to work for New Scientist, I was told only about the fabulous weather and ... Halve your meat intake to stem nitrogen damage. Andy Coghlan, reporter I'm contemplating becoming a "demitarian". That's neither a strict vegetarian nor a full-on carnivore.
The reason is the first Europe-wide assessment of the effect of nitrogen on human health and the environment, which has calculated that nitrogen pollution costs each European citizen between £130 and £650 per year. Nitrogen oxide pollution from car exhausts also shortens the lives of Europeans by six months on average, by producing ozone and particles that aggravate respiratory diseases such as asthma. Produced by 200 experts from 21 countries, the European Nitrogen Assessment calculates that the cost of damage from nitrogen in Europe totals between £60 billion and £280 billion.
One solution, according to lead research Mark Sutton of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology near Edinburgh, UK, is for people to become demitarians, halving the amount of meat they eat. Shipping noise pulps 'ears' of squid and octopuses - environment - 11 April 2011. It's not just dolphins and whales that suffer from the noise of shipping, sonar and oil prospecting. Experiments on squid, cuttlefish and octopuses show that their balancing organs are so badly damaged by sound similar to submarine noise pollution that they become practically immobile.
The consequences seem permanent. "For the first time we are seeing the effects of noise pollution on species that apparently have no use for sound," says Michel André of the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. "We were shocked by the magnitude of the trauma," he says. The results of the experiments, in which André's team exposed captive cuttlefish, octopuses and squid to low-frequency sound for 2 hours, seem to confirm that "ear" damage in nine giant squid that unexpectedly washed up on Spanish beaches in 2001 and 2003 was caused by low-frequency sounds from nearby seismic surveys for oil and gas. Stuck in the middle Flight and freeze More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by. Our amazing planet: Top to bottom. Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all - environment - 30 March 2011. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 UPDATE, April 6: This article has elicited a considerable amount of interest, and some criticism.
We always welcome discussions of the stories we publish. Some readers felt the original headline (Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all) was misleading, so to address these concerns we have changed it. We have also been made aware of a wider debate about Kleidon's research that we did not address in the original article: we will continue to follow this issue and report back on what we find.
Editorial: "The sun is our only truly renewable energy source" The idea that we can draw endless supplies of clean energy from the wind and waves just doesn't add up WITNESS a howling gale or an ocean storm, and it's hard to believe that humans could make a dent in the awesome natural forces that created them. He concludes that it is a mistake to assume that energy sources like wind and waves are truly renewable. New Scientist Not just a website! One Per Cent: Green Machine: Electric charging, fast as petrol.
Helen Knight, technology reporter The humble hairbrush could hold the answer to building fast-charging electric car batteries. Existing batteries used to power electric cars take up to eight hours to charge, compared to the few minutes it takes to fill a tank with petrol. While fast-charging units that can fill up a car in around 30 minutes are available, Amy Prieto and colleagues at Colorado State University in Fort Collins have now built a prototype battery with hairbrush-like electrodes that can be charged in just a few minutes. Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular devices for powering electric cars and portable electronic gadgets thanks to their high energy density and low weight. The batteries consist of a graphite anode and lithium cathode, with an electrolyte sandwiched between them. Prieto's battery contains nanowire anodes made of copper antimonide.
Robert Ballard on exploring the oceans. Zoologger: The hairy beast with seven fuzzy sexes - life - 02 March 2011. Species: Tetrahymena thermophila Habitat: fresh water around the world, having way more sex than you Finding someone to have sex with can be a trial. There are plenty of humans in the world, but the proportion who are desirable, live nearby and – crucially – are willing to have sex with you can be prohibitively small. At first glance it looks like the single-celled organism Tetrahymena thermophila has cracked this problem in spectacular fashion. Fuzzy sex Its seven sexes are rather prosaically named I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII. In most animals, what sex you are is straightforward. Not so for Tetrahymena. Skewed sex As if that weren't enough, sex itself is different for this animal.
With all this going on it should come as no surprise that Tetrahymena populations look a little weird. They built mathematical models of populations of animals with different kinds of sex determination. Journal reference: Evolution, DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01266.x More From New Scientist More from the web. Sea level's rise and rise is down to melting ice sheets - environment - 11 March 2011. Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at a faster and faster rate, according to a new study that has tracked the rate of melting in two independent ways. At this rate, melting ice sheets could dominate sea level rise in the 21st century. The most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that sea levels could rise by 18 centimetres to 59 cm by 2100 – but that estimate didn't take the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets into account. The new study, by Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues, could make things clearer.
Next, they used a mass balance approach, which involves taking monthly measurements of glacier movement and ice thickness and plugging them into a regional climate model to estimate the net accumulation of snow and ice. Fast ice loss Both techniques broadly agreed on the quantity of ice being lost. Because the two data sets agree both methods are validated. More From New Scientist Promoted Stories Recommended by. Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows. Earth economist: The food bubble is about to burst - environment - 10 February 2011. We're fast draining the fresh water resources our farms rely on, warns Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute What is a food bubble? That's when food production is inflated through the unsustainable use of water and land. It's the water bubble we need to worry about now. The World Bank says that 15 per cent of Indians (175 million people) are fed by grain produced through overpumping - when water is pumped out of aquifers faster than they can be replenished.
In China, the figure could be 130 million. Has this bubble already burst anywhere? Saudi Arabia made itself self-sufficient in wheat by using water from a fossil aquifer, which doesn't refill. With population rising, a fall in grain production would spell big trouble. Yes. What will happen if we carry on as we are now? Civilisation as we know it can't withstand the stresses of continuing with business as usual. How can we avert a disaster like this? Can individuals make a difference? Profile New Scientist Not just a website! One Per Cent: Green Machine: Sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. Helen Knight, technology reporter (Image: F1 Online/Rex Features) Think of it as a chemical vacuum cleaner for sucking greenhouse gases out of the air. Air capture, in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere, has been touted as a potentially promising way to tackle climate change. That's because unlike carbon capture from power plant flue gases, the technology has the potential to reduce existing CO2 levels, rather than simply slowing the rate of increase.
To demonstrate that the technology works, Christopher Jones at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta tested a CO2 absorbent based on amines - the chemicals predominantly used in power plant carbon capture trials - on gases with CO2 concentrations similar to those found in ambient air. He found the material was able to repeatedly extract CO2 from the gas without being degraded, which will be vital if the technology is to be used economically on a wide-scale. A blue-green revolution: Upgrading photosynthesis - environment - 22 February 2011. Norway and Jordan Sign Agreement to Make Sahara Forest Project Oasis a Reality Sahara Forest Project, original rendering – Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World. Welcome to Coates International Ltd. 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) Weapons and the People Who Use Them As we touched on briefly above, if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it's killing other things.
We're so good at it that we've made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. Add to the mix the sheer number of armed rednecks and hunters out there, and the zombies don't even stand a chance. There were over 14 million people hunting with a license in the U.S. in 2004. At a minimum, that's like an armed force the size of the great Los Angeles area. Remember, the whole reason hunting licenses exist is to limit the number of animals you're allowed to kill, because if you just declared free reign for everybody with a gun, everything in the forest would be dead by sundown. Even the trees would be mounted proudly above the late-arriving hunter's mantles.
Plus, if we look at zombies as a species, they are pretty much designed for failure. Harm's way is about 4875 feet from the end of this. The zombies have no choice but to walk into bullets. 10 Creepy Plants That Shouldn't Exist. We spend a lot of time here at Cracked pointing out horrors of nature that slither on the land and lurch through the sea. But staying under the radar in nature's landscape of nightmares is the twisted carnival of things that grow out of the ground. Like ... Bleeding Tooth Fungus The bleeding tooth fungus looks kind of like a wad of chewing gum that leaks blood like a rejected prop from The Shining. They're also called the strawberries and cream, the red-juice tooth, and the devil's tooth.
Oh, and they are listed as "inedible," which implies that someone attempted to eat one at some point. Chinese Black Batflowers There's a good reason that Batman uses bat imagery to strike terror into the hearts of Gotham's criminals, rather than, say, some kind of shrew. It is kept as an ornamental plant by gardeners who prefer to cultivate nightmares, and have the balls to live in the presence of a plant that looks like it crawled out of a Bosch painting and wants to plant its young in their head. Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world. Einstein was right - honey bee collapse threatens global food security. The agri-business lender Rabobank said the numbers of US bee colonies failing to survive each winter has risen to 30pc to 35pc from an historical norm of 10pc.
The rate is 20pc or higher in much of Europe, and the same pattern is emerging in Latin America and Asia. Albert Einstein, who liked to make bold claims (often wrong), famously said that "if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years to live". Such "apocalyptic scenarios" are overblown, said Rabobank. The staples of corn, wheat, and rice are all pollinated by wind. However, animal pollination is essential for nuts, melons and berries, and plays varying roles in citrus fruits, apples, onions, broccoli, cabbage, sprouts, courgettes, peppers, aubergines, avocados, cucumbers, coconuts, tomatoes and broad beans, as well as coffee and cocoa.
This is the fastest growing and most valuable part of the global farm economy. China has its own problems. Einstein was not always wrong. Dear Bell & Yellow Pages... We Have a Thing Called The Internet. Bees Solve Hard Computing Problems Faster Than Supercomputers. Vending Machine Grows 20,000 Heads of Lettuce a Year Without Sunlight. Slavemaker ants bend only the strongest rivals to their will. Low-impact housing. Shape-Shifting Battery Smooshes To Fit Sizes AA-D. Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic. Transformer Owl. Renewable Energy. Gold Nanoparticles Could Transform Trees Into Street Lights. Amazing Underwater River : Cenote Angelita in Mexico.