“Instead of treating Amsterdam as complete and starting again elsewhere, the IJburg plan has managed to find more space in a city that thought it had no more left.”
Category: environmental – Page 21
NASA is investing in eco-friendly supersonic airplane travel — By Mike Murphy | Quartz
NASA said that if all goes to plan with these studies, it sees the first business-jet-sized supersonic planes going into production by 2025, and commercial planes by 2030.
CRISPR, the disruptor — Heidi Ledford | Nature
“Researchers are considering how CRISPR could or should be deployed on organisms in the wild. Much of the attention has focused on a method called gene drive, which can quickly sweep an edited gene through a population. The work is at an early stage, but such a technique could be used to wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes or ticks, eliminate invasive plants or eradicate herbicide resistance in pigweed, which plagues some US farmers.” Read more
Elon Musk Rebuffs Critics with Fundamentals
“If he was paid by the oil and gas industry lobby he couldn’t have written a more favorable article for them.”—Elon Musk
New design ideas to avoid wasting marble — Via Abitare
New York State Governor Cuomo Announces Living Breakwaters Project Launch via bfi.org
“Living Breakwaters is a comprehensive design for coastal resiliency along the Northeastern Seaboard of the United States and beyond. This approach to climate change adaptation and flood mitigation includes the deployment of innovative, layered ecologically-engineered breakwaters, the strengthening of biodiversity and coastal habitats through “reef streets”, the nurturing and resuscitation of fisheries and historic livelihoods, and deep community engagement through diverse partnerships and innovative educational programs. The transformative educational dimension amplifies impact to the next generation of shoreline stewards while leveraging the expertise of the members of the SCAPE Architecture team, who are making groundbreaking inroads into state and federal agencies, setting new precedents for multi-layered and systemic approaches to infrastructure planning.”
LINK: Governor Cuomo Announces Living Breakwaters Project Launch
Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World
“In Designed for the Future, author Jared Green asks eighty of today’s most innovative architects, urban planners, landscape architects, journalists, artists, and environmental leaders the same question: what gives you the hope that a sustainable future is possible?”
3 Cities Using Open Data in Creative Ways to Solve Problems
Tanvi Misra | CityLab
“The idea is not just to teach city governments new techniques on harvesting open data to tackle urban problems and measure performance, but to replicate successful approaches that are already out there.“Read more
Article: Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction
Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction
Why the LHC must be shut down
Major advance in artificial photosynthesis poses win/win for the environment
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.
Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)‘s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that mimics the natural photosynthetic process by which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. However, this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate, the most common building block today for biosynthesis.
“We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study. “Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground. Read more