My mother, she had this car. It was …
Many of you know that one of my favourite columnists is Mark Morford, who writes for the San Francisco Gate news. This is this weeks rant on Canada’s policies versus those of his own government. It’s a fantastic read and nice to see that at least one American is aware of what is going [...]
Now your board members can’t say that the board meeting is stopping them from getting any exercise! Just have it while riding the Conference Bike! Although you would probably be well advised to make sure that the person steering doesn’t also have to chair or do secretarial tasks.
Andrew Zolli (again) points out a fantastic project known as the Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe that was modelled on the termite mound (see biomimicry) and that resulted in 10% lower up front capital costs, lower ongoing running costs, and 20% lower rents for its inhabitants compared with the building next door built with a [...]
I love stories like this one at the Christian Science Monitor about Chris Anderson, a New Zealand scientist using crops to clean up contaminated mines. (Thanks Z+Partners for the link.)
In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
Portland Indymedia (pdximc) has a long and interesting post on the ecological costs of shifting from fossil fuels to biodiesel in particular that is very interesting. In short, it states that we use 1 billion gallons of fossil fuel per day and that we only generate 1.5 billion gallons of vegetable oil per year. He [...]
Wired talks about the demand outstripping supply for both diesel vehicles and hybrid vehicles in the U.S. and how that will likely lead to diesel/hybrid vehicles. The problem is that diesel is still fossil-fuel based, stinky, sooty, and toxic.
VW has also publicly declared that they are reversing their stand on hybrid cars and [...]
Okay, so it has to use human poop to attract the flies and it still can’t actually catch the flies – it has to have them fed to it’s little mouth – but all the same, the interesting parts of this equation are:
• it is self-powered • it uses microbial fuel cells to [...]
This looks like a blast! Check out the video of somebody goofing around on the prototype Centaur. It uses the Segway balancing technology to allow the user to do perfectly balanced wheelies. What a blast this would be to have around town! (I’m thinking that the posties will like this one WAY more than the [...]
I am extremely interested in this field of bio-energy and am excited by all the possibilities of using microbes to convert solar power into useable hydrogen as well as to store energy similar to traditional batteries.
Here is a great Wired Magazine article on some of the upcoming possibilities.
If you have a love of architecture, green homes, virtual reality, and Dilbert, and you have a good half hour to waste spend, I recommend that you visit Scott Adam’s new Virtual home tour at http://www.dilbert.com/duh and be prepared to be blown away. The house design was the result of thousands of Dilbert readers collaborating [...]
I saw one of these Smart cars down at the Concord Festival on the weekend and had the chance to sit in it. It was incredibly roomy up front for the two passengers. I totally fell in love with this car. There is not much room in the back. Less in fact than I had [...]
I thought that corn being turned into bio-diesel was cool but Toyota is experimenting with using sweet-potato-derived materials for some parts of new cars. The biomaterial is strong, light, and totally biodegradable.
Maybe when we’re done with our cars, we’ll be able to break them into parts and toss them into the farmer’s fields…
How cool is this? Metin Sitti, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Nano-Robotics lab has built a robot patterned on water striders, that can walk – not float – on water and that can propel itself forward the same way that water striders do. The “bug” contains about $10 worth of material.
Mike Crissey, writer for [...]
Okay, THIS is coooooool.
Martin Tobias from Ignition Partners, found it on Gizmodo. (Can you say echo chamber????)
This article at Newsday.com talks about the release of the findings of a major study being presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.
The research [...] followed 29,000 people in 52 countries. It took a decade and 262 scientists to complete the work, which, according to the editor of The Lancet medical [...]
Similar to my post yesterday on swarming algorithms, Steve Jurvetson, head of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also believes in the wealth of knowledge that we have yet to tap simply by exploring nature’s many inventions. Nice to see he agrees with me!! I’m kidding of course. The area of bio-mimetics has been discussed for quite some [...]
Here are a couple of articles on the new report from the Inspector General of the EPA where he states that the White House directly changed the language in the press releases before they were releaased to the public around the time of 9/11.
Now there is still a huge amount of pollution, possibly [...]
