Photo via the New Republic It's a widely held notion that politicians have long been in the pocket of Big Oil. And there's good reason for that perception: oil companies' huge campaign donations, vast lobbying power, and close ties to politicians have ensured that their taxes remain low , that hidden subsidies are around to provide extra funding, and that they receive preferential treatment in US energy policy. But there could be a new, ... View original post here: The Next Big Oil: Big Smart Grid?
So there really isn't anything that deep to this image. It's just a (more or less) life-sized blue whale eye. And on the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society site you can educate yourself/be mesmerized/ waste some time for a while staring at it while the entire life-sized animal scrolls across your browser window. Believe me, it's way cooler than you might think:... Read more from the original source: Ever See a Blue Whale Life-Sized on Your Computer? Now You Can
published September 2, 2010 and has No Comments
"We all live downstream from one another," says Alexandra Cousteau. In other words, what we do to the water, we do to ourselves. A third-generation Cousteau explorer, Alexandra is an ambassador of the sea. She's the host of Planet Green's Blue August , is currently traveling the world as a documentarian with her organization Blue Legacy , and, when ...
Read more...published August 31, 2010 and has No Comments
Image via Ecorazzi Brazil has received a whole lot of negativity regarding the Belo Monte dam. The $17 billion complex would divert nearly all of the flow of the Xingu River, a massive river known for its biodiversity, to generate hydroelectric power. A new video narrated by Sigourney Weaver illustrates through a 3D tour using Google Earth video the ...
Read more...published August 31, 2010 and has No Comments
Image via UCSD What happens inside a whale's head when it encounters sound? The mammals have highly developed capabilities of detecting and processing sound waves, something that helps them communicate over long distances, but which also spell their demise in an ocean filled with intense, loud human-generated noise. We've seen research that shows scientists looking into how too-loud noise ...
Read more...published August 31, 2010 and has No Comments
Image via National Geographic What Hurricane Katrina and many other hurricanes have told us is that wetlands are on the coastlines for a reason -- they act as a vital buffer protecting land from storms coming in from offshore. The fact that wetlands in the south have been developed or otherwise ruined has been a contributor to the amount ...
Read more...published August 25, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo via TED We've featured the work of cartoonist Jim Toomey before. He has a knack for educating readers on the issues surrounding marine litter and ocean pollution without the lecture-y tinge that too often turns people away. But how does he do it, and why? Toomey was on the Mission ... Read the full story on TreeHugger View ...
Read more...published August 25, 2010 and has No Comments
Images via SENSEableCity MIT's Sensable City Lab directo Carlo Ratti and associate director Assaf Biderman have come up with the SeaSwarm, a robot that uses nanofibers to absorb 20 times its weight in oil, and their hope is that it can be developed into a viable solution for cleaning up the Gulf oil disaster. The 7-foot-wide robots sport at ...
Read more...published August 25, 2010 and has No Comments
Analysis by Berkeley Lab revealed the dominant microbe in the dispersed Gulf of Mexico oil plume was a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales family. Image: Terry Hazen via Science Daily . In what seems a deus ex machina or perhaps deus ex gaia moment, scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report that the miles-long deep sea ...
Read more...published August 23, 2010 and has No Comments
Images via Dreamfarm The return of water fountains across cities has been the buzz lately, with places like London restoring old fountains and New York setting up new ones, though those are only temporary . It seems as though taking back the tap is finally catching on, and access to See more here: Tapi Tap Squeezes a Drink from Any ...
Read more...published August 18, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Tim Keegan via flickr We've known the world's mangrove forests have been declining for some time, but new satellite imagery from the US Geological Survey and NASA shows that the situation is worse than we thought: More accurate mapping tells us there are 12.3% fewer mangroves than previously believed.... Read the full story on TreeHugger More here: Earth Has ...
Read more...published August 18, 2010 and has No Comments
Image via University of Hawaii at Manoa, Credit: Virginia Carter As corals face a daily bashing through warm, polluted waters, the scientists at University of Hawaii at Manoa and the Smithsonian Institution are building up a bank of frozen sperm and embryos of Hawaiian coral species, just in ... Read the full story on TreeHugger See the original post ...
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The office building, going for LEED Platinum, is built on top of a brick factory from another era. It rises to the challenge. Go here to read the rest: The Centre For Green Cities At Evergreen Brickworks Demonstrates How To ...
"The stakes are very high and scientists are not the best people to deal with the social, ethical or political issues that geoengineering raises." View original here: Geoengineering is a Technical Fix for a Political Problem
