Media Matters does a wonderful job of tracking what the media is talking about (or not). It recently showed the whoppingly warped media coverage of Solyndra compared to government corruption related to the Minerals Management Service (MMS) and a shocking military contracting waste and fraud report. Here are a few of their graphs on these topics:
The notorious E. coli bacteria, renowned as a source of food poisoning, has lately been undergoing something of a rehabilitation tour. Various strains of E. coli are being developed to make sustainable biofuels or convert sunlight into usable energy, and in the latest example, a team of chemists from Tufts University in Massachusetts has engineered new strains of fluorescent E. coli bacteria.
This is a full repost of a Media Matters article too good to pass up, especially since we continue to get inane comments here on CleanTechnica about it and I can only imagine how many people have been confused by the disinformers.
This is a truly wonderful post from The Oil Drum by Goddard College’s Charles Eisenstein (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 U.S. License). Giving more depth to peak oil than the good infographic on that presented yesterday, but also delving deeply into the problems of our economy and how they are linked to our energy and environmental crisis, this is my recommended reading of the month, or more.
I was just listening to this great cover of a great Rolling Stones song while reading this and thought it was actually a good match for this piece, so let’s start off with that:
Recycling has always meant reusing materials like glass or plastic, and reducing atmospheric carbon has traditionally meant cutting emissions, but what if the two could be combined and make combating climate change profitable by recycling carbon out of the atmosphere?
energyNOW! correspondent Josh Zepps looked into a new technology that could pull a thousand times more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than trees, and could one day power our cars and trucks with green gasoline.
For years, in truth until this morning, I would have said that the rotation of the radiometer’s vanes was caused by the pressure differential of the photons reflecting or being absorbed by the dark or light colored vanes. I was wrong, then and now.
Solar cell manufacturing may be taking major strides forward by using carefully folded paper or plastic to develop functional arrays that can distribute electrons.
WiFi downloads can drain a battery so fast it would put True Blood to shame, especially if you are using a smartphone or laptop in an area where other WiFi devices are lurking. Now a grad student at Duke University, Justin Manweiler, has developed software that enables your mobile device to sniff out other Wifi users nearby.
I had been worried about two or three states pulling out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, pronounced “Reggie”), the nation’s first cap and trade program for greenhouse gases, for awhile. It seemed 99.9% sure that New Hampshire would pull out after its House of Representatives voted to pull out of the initiative and its Senate had a clear Republican majority likely to do the same. Even if the Governor tried to veto such a decision, he could be overridden.
Basic scientific curiosity paid off in unexpected ways when Rice University researchers investigating the fundamental physics of nanomaterials discovered a new technology that could dramatically improve solar energy panels.
