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Inside Japan's solar boom
In the wake of 2011’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan installed solar panels at such a furious rate that the small nation is quickly becoming the largest solar market in the world.
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Can cloning redwoods help fight climate change?
A recent study revealed Earth is currently warmer than any given point in the past 11,300 years. So what should we do?
One idea: Clone and plant a lot of gigantic trees with a glutton’s appetite for carbon dioxide. Archangel Ancient Tree Archive is spearheading a movement to plant California’s towering redwood trees in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Germany, and other parts of the United States.
According to NASA previous research has demonstrated that these monstrous organisms are capable of digesting much more carbon than any other tree on the planet.
Photo from: DLILLC/Corbis
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4 annoying ways climate change will make your life a bummer
Get ready for bumpy flights, horrible allergies, and watered-down beer. Climate change will definitely affect you. -
Photos taken over nine consecutive days demonstrate the air pollution levels in the sky over Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Air quality in Beijing has been at “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” levels since the beginning of this year. PHOTO: REUTERS/Wei Yao
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On this day in 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant established the nation’s first national park — Yellowstone. A future president, Gerald Ford, worked as a park ranger at Yellowstone — the only President to ever work as a park ranger.
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Drones aren’t always the rights-infringing death machines conjured up by news stories. Sometimes they do the world quite a bit of good. Take the above nature footage by Thomas Renck, a hobbyist whose camera-equipped tricopter captured a pack of wild coyotes sweeping across a hillside in Riverside, Calif. The vantage point makes the video look like something straight out of a Discovery Channel documentary.
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Since the 1980s, a hole in the ozone layer has loomed over Antarctica for three months of every year. During these months, the concentration of the ozone decreases, and harmful ultraviolet light, which causes sunburn and skin cancer, seeps through to the Earth’s surface. Environmentalists have long looked to the ozone hole as evidence of man’s negative impact on the atmosphere, but recent findings may ease their minds: Measurements indicate the hole in the ozone layer is the smallest it has been in 10 years, and could be completely gone within a few decades.
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Cartoon of the day: Winter wildlife
CAMERON CARDOW © 2013 Cagle Cartoons
More cartoons(Source: theweek.com)
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20 recyclable objects that might surprise you:
1. Sex toys
The first step in recycling your toy is to send it to a specialty processing plant, where it’s sterilized and sorted. There, all “mechanical devices” are salvaged, refurbished, and resold. Silicone and rubber toys, on the other hand, are “ground up, mixed with a binding agent, and remolded into new toys.” Metals, plastics, and other leftovers retire from the sex toy life and are recycled into conventional products. As one company puts it, “Love yourself. Love the planet.”2. Soap
Not all hotels throw out that half-used soap you left in the shower. Some actually recycle it, sending it to Clean the World. There, soap is soaked in a sanitizing solution, treated to a steam bath, and then tested for infections. Once deemed safe, the soap is distributed to less fortunate people across the globe. So stop stealing soap from hotels. You may be stealing from charity.3. Holiday lights
Got burnt out holiday lights? The folks at HolidayLEDs will gladly take your old lights, shred them, and sort the remaining PVC, glass, and copper. Those raw materials are taken to another recycling center and resurrected as something new. In 2011, the State of Minnesota collected and recycled around 100 tons of dead lights.PHOTO: ThinkStock/Stockbyte
(Source: theweek.com)
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5 disturbing trends you should pay attention to in 2013
“Perhaps you’ve heard stories about how close many of our most well-known animals are to extinction: 97 percent of the world’s tigers have been wiped out in the last century and the World Wildlife Fund warns the remainder could be gone in a decade or two. Ditto for elephants, sharks, and even the tiny honeybee, which is essential for pollinating our food sources.
But these are just the high-profile examples. Escaping the broader public’s attention, warns the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) is the possibility of ‘30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.’ Not just animals, but plants that are critical for human life. Rain forests, coral reefs, grasslands, tundra, and the polar seas — these critical, life-enhancing ecosystems that humans take for granted are all at risk. It is, the CBD warns, the ‘worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.’ Granted, some of this is natural, but human behavior — habitat destruction, pollution and yes, global warming — is accelerating the process.
Although few Americans have knowledge in basic sciences, it hasn’t stopped us from challenging or dismissing the peer-review findings of those who do. We don’t want to invest in addressing a slow-moving catastrophe like this because it’s just too hard to focus or acknowledge something that isn’t top of mind. ‘If honey bees become extinct,’ Albert Einstein noted, ‘human society will follow in four years.’ If you’re smarter than Einstein, Mr. Armchair Expert, tell me why he’s wrong.”
The extinction crisis, and four other disturbing trends you should pay attention to in 2013
(Source: theweek.com)
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Two young filmmakers camped out in the freezing cold for weeks to capture this thunderous, rare shot of a massive 4.6-cubic-mile glacier in Greenland crumbling apart. This brief clip of the largest glacier calving ever caught on camera is just a small segment in the recently debuted documentary Chasing Ice, which is dedicated to chronicling the perhaps-irreversible impact of climate change on glaciers (and sea levels) around the world. Filmmaker James Balog says watching the roaring landscape shift is like watching “Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes.” Seeing is believing, says Will Oremus at Slate. Here, “[Balog’s] team succeeded in capturing the awesome effects of climate change in a way that papers published in Science just can’t.” Terrifying? You bet. (Video via The Guardian)
(Source: theweek.com)
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New laundry detergent makes your clothes remove pollution from the air
In an unusual collaboration of form and function, scientists from the University of Sheffield and designers from the London College of Fashion have teamed up to create a liquid laundry additive, CatClo (Catalytic Clothing), that turns your clothes into pollution magnets using the magic of nanotechnology.
The laundry additive coats your clothes with minuscule particles of titanium dioxide, which, when exposed to daylight, attract nitrogen oxides — a major source of pollution — from the air. You only have to use CatClo once per clothing item, the developers say, as “nanoparticles of titanium dioxide grip onto fabrics very tightly.” The additive can remove 5 grams of nitrogen dioxide a day — the same amount as emitted daily by an average family car, says the University of Sheffield’s Tony Ryan — and the pollutants wash off your clothes the next time you do the laundry. “Not a bad haul for simply getting dressed in the morning,” says Clay Dillow at PopSci.
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Generation X: They’re the Americans who “grew up with MTV, Nirvana, and the dot-com bubble,” says The Atlantic. These individuals are better educated than their parents and work longer hours. They sit on their children’s school boards and are often active in their communities. “But, when it comes to climate change, Gen Xers voice a resounding ‘meh.’”
In a recent survey, just 16 percent of polled Gen Xers said they followed the issue of climate change “very” or “moderately closely,” which is a 22 percent drop from 2009. People who said they did “not closely” follow the issue in 2009 were at 45 percent; in the most recent results that percentage climbed to 51 percent. So not only do fewer Gen Xers pay attention to climate change, but more and more are completely indifferent to the issue.
