Originally published on Planetsave. Juliana v. U.S. Government And the winners are … today’s children (the plaintiffs) … and future generations (the ultimate winners). According to legal observers, it’s the first lawsuit to “involve a planet” …. But faithful readers of Planetsave will likely see that this legal case and … [continued]
Recently, electrical engineers at the University of Michigan, have perfected a device that can harness ambient, mechanical vibrations and convert these into electricity at 5 to 10 times the efficiency and power output than previous devices of this type. At 27 cubic millimeters, a single such system fits — with room to spare — on a penny. According to the engineers, the wireless/battery-less devices can be installed and left alone for 10 to 20 years, essentially a “limitless shelf time”.
Vertical farm concepts for the urban environment are not new, but now, a Swedish-American architectural design company (Plantagon) seems to have solved once of the biggest challenges of urban vertical farming: the need for uniform, sufficient natural light to provide even growth of vertically-farmed plants.
A University of Arizona engineering team led by Roger Angel has designed a new type of solar concentrator that uses half the area of solar (PV) cells used by other optical devices and delivers a light output/concentration that is over 1000 times more concentrated before it even hits the cells. … [continued]
What most of us see as the ubiquitous blight of modern convenience consumerism, i.e., littered plastic shopping bags, Japanese inventor Akinori Ito sees as the “fuel of the future”. Like most sensible inventions, Ito’s began with the simple realization that plastic bags are made from oil. Thus, it should be … [continued]
In what is considered to be a first in new materials science, a team of engineers at the Brookhaven and Los Alamos National Laboratories have created a light-absorbing material that efficiently generates charge and charge separation. What’s more, these “films” are transparent, making them perfect for windows. Soon, perhaps, your … [continued]
Puff (a car exhaust monitoring device) is attached near the exhaust pipe of your vehicle. Its color changes dynamically, visualizing the amount of pollution your car is producing. Green indicates the lowest rate of pollution, red the highest. Karolina Sobecka, the artist/designer of Puff, explains: In this project, design is used as a strategy to explore the overlap between the material and immaterial worlds and spur discussion on the hidden social and psychological mechanisms behind the cultural use of accessories as ‘objects to think with’…Amateur Human (the design project’s official name) focuses on the environmental issues since we all are inadvertently becoming more eco-conscious whether we want to or not, and these issues seem both overwhelming and ambiguous.
In a first, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a completely tree-powered electrical circuit. The nano-scale device—approximately 130 nanometers [a nanometer is one billionth of a meter] in size—consumes just 10 billionths of a watt (10 nanowatts). Unlike the legendary science fair experiment in which a … [continued]
Hydrogen (H) fuel cell technology could perhaps become the cleanest form of energy, both in terms of generating the gas and in terms of combustion products (which are just heat and water). The biggest problem has been making the process of H generation clean, efficient, and cheap, as the current, … [continued]
