A First Nation community in British Columbia hopes exposing the rare white black bear will help protect the species from threat of a planned oil pipeline project.
Click the photo for an interview with Bruce Barcott, who wrote the story about the white black bear for National Geographic.
(image ©Paul Nicklen/National Geographic)
(Source: National Geographic)
The Copenhagen Wheel is a remarkable set of technologies debuted in Copenhagen a few days ago by MIT researchers. The Swiss army knife of technologies inside of the rear wheel can monitor speed, smog in the air, your friends and where they are on their bikes. It will talk to your iPhone via Bluetooth to tell you the speed that you’re traveling, direction you’re going, and the distance you’ve traveled.
But wait! There’s more!
The Copenhagen Wheel has the ability to convert kinetic energy generated during breaking into power that will charge batteries. Those batteries can then be used to give you a speed boost up a hill through a built-in electric motor.
The best part is that the Copenhagen Wheel can be fit into any bike wheel, no special parts or modifications needed. I can see this technology making big impacts biking cities like Copenhagen or Boulder but MIT researchers hope that the built-in motor will encourage more biking in hilly cities like San Francisco. No one wants to get sweaty in a suit on the way to work and with the Copenhagen Wheel, you might not have to.
An Earthship is in and of the Earth—that is, constructed responsibly out of earthen materials and built into the ground. It also is autonomous from outside help, such as a power grid
Coming Up Short: What Water Conservation Means for Business · Environmental Leader
Sharon Nunes is the Vice President of IBM Big Green Innovations, a program which oversees development of product and service initiatives regarding the environment.
(via smarterplanet)
This is just something else.
Whale-Shaped Floating Garden Cleans the World’s Rivers
Vincent Callebaut, visionary behind the Lilypad and Dragonfly, has created a whale-shaped floating garden designed to drift through the world’s rivers while purifying their waters. The Physalia is a self-sufficient ecosystem that generates all the power it needs from the sun and works to reduce water pollution through bio-filtration.
The ocean is a potentially vast source of electric power, yet as engineers test new technologies for capturing it, the devices are plagued by battering storms, limited efficiency, and the need to be tethered to the seafloor.
Now, a team of aerospace engineers is applying the principles that keep airplanes aloft to create a new wave-energy system that is durable, extremely efficient, and can be placed anywhere in the ocean, regardless of depth.
While still in early design stages, computer and scale-model tests of the system suggest higher efficiencies than wind turbines. The system is designed to effectively cancel incoming waves, capturing their energy while flattening them out, providing an added application as a storm-wave breaker.
There’s been a “dramatic change in the attitude of utilities” toward centrally generated photovoltaic electricity, says Julie Blunden, vice president for public policy and communications with Sunpower. Mark Pinto, chief technology officer and senior vice president with Applied Materials, basically agrees with Blunden that a variety of factors associated with production scale and system costs are shifting interest markedly in favor of PV powerplants.
Norway opens world’s first osmotic power plant
Norway opened on Tuesday the world’s first osmotic power plant, which produces emissions-free electricity by mixing fresh water and sea water through a special membrane.
State-owned utility Statkraft’s prototype plant, which for now will produce a tiny 2 kilowatts to 4 kilowatts of power or enough to run a coffee machine, will enable Statkraft to test and develop the technology needed to drive down production costs.
The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity.
Seen at cnet news
KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News HP Labs has announced a project that aims to be a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE): a R&D program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of tiny accelerometers that detect motion and vibrations, and later, ones for light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity. The nodes could be stuck to bridges and buildings to warn of structural strains or weather conditions and along roadsides to monitor traffic, weather and road conditions. Other uses include in everyday electronics, tracking hospital equipment, sniffing out pesticides and pathogens in food, and ultimately even “recognize” the person using them and adapt.
Miniature Robots to Swarm the Oceans
Swarms of soup-can-sized robots will soon plunge into the ocean seeking data on poorly understood phenomena from currents to biology.
With $2.5 million in new funding from the National Science Foundation, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography will create and deploy fleets of autonomous underwater explorers (AUEs) to explore the depths.
why does this sound like a good idea that could go horribly wrong. unintended consequences & such like…
![IEEE Spectrum: Could Mechanics Best Power Electronics in EVs?
POSTED BY: Peter Fairley // Thu, October 29, 2009
Could smarter mechanical transmissions knock power electronics out of wind turbines, providing a cheaper and more efficient means of coupling the variable energy from ever-shifting winds to the regular waveform of AC power on the grid? They could according to […] MIT’s TechReview today on Viryd Technologies’ bid to exploit continuously variable transmissions (CVTs). If mechanics reclaiming territory ceded to electronics sounds like a technological step backwards, here’s an more heretical corollary: the same CVTs could also squeeze the power electronics out of electric vehicles (EVs).
That’s the argument put forward by Rob Smithson, CTO for Viryd parent company Fallbrook Technologies and one of the inventors of its clever CVT (dubbed NuVinci in a tip-of-the-hat to the Italian polymath who first dreamed up the CVT concept).
Heretics of the world unite!~](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksce3hadx41qz9qppo1_500.gif)
IEEE Spectrum: Could Mechanics Best Power Electronics in EVs?
POSTED BY: Peter Fairley // Thu, October 29, 2009
Could smarter mechanical transmissions knock power electronics out of wind turbines, providing a cheaper and more efficient means of coupling the variable energy from ever-shifting winds to the regular waveform of AC power on the grid? They could according to […] MIT’s TechReview today on Viryd Technologies’ bid to exploit continuously variable transmissions (CVTs). If mechanics reclaiming territory ceded to electronics sounds like a technological step backwards, here’s an more heretical corollary: the same CVTs could also squeeze the power electronics out of electric vehicles (EVs).
That’s the argument put forward by Rob Smithson, CTO for Viryd parent company Fallbrook Technologies and one of the inventors of its clever CVT (dubbed NuVinci in a tip-of-the-hat to the Italian polymath who first dreamed up the CVT concept).
Heretics of the world unite!~
“If the walls of the Big Dig House could talk, they’d tell you that it’s comprised of 600,000 lbs of recycled materials that were rescued from the Big Dig highway project in Boston. Inhabitat last reported on the striking modern residence in 2006 when it was still in its planning stages, and it has since come a long way from being a pile of rubble and recycled materials. We may now behold what stands today — an elegant and modern private home in Lexington, MA with an exciting backstory.” (via Inhabitat » Big Dig House: Recycled Residence Reaches Completion)not only is this house made of recycled materials, but it’s a house i’d actually like to live in.
Same here.
ditto.
