Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 676

China’s shopping craze turns into environmental nightmare

Where is Waste Management (WM) when you need them. Looks like a golden opportunity for those in the trash and recycle industry.

BEIJING — China’s Singles Day, the world’s biggest shopping extravaganza that fell on Nov 11, saw bargain hunters spend 10 billion yuan (S$2.07 billion) in just seven minutes on the country’s largest online-shopping site, Alibaba’s Tmall, last Friday after midnight.

But the spending orgy could choke landfills and take a huge toll on the environment, employees of waste-disposal and recycling firms say.

China’s version of the United States’ Black Friday will result in one billion parcels travelling from retailers to customers’ doorsteps over the course of the next few weeks, according to the China Express Association (CEA).

Changing Cell Behavior Could be Useful for Stem Cell Research, Biofuel Production

For example, ordinary baker’s yeast cells normally produce a lot of alcohol, a biofuel, when fed sugar extracted from the edible kernels of corn plants. NetSurgeon designed genetic surgeries that convinced the cells to make more alcohol when fed a type of sugar found in the inedible leaves and stalks.

The research is published in PNAS Early Edition.

Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050

The wealth gap worries Forbes, not your usual wide-eyed socialist.

How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?

Human activities are behind the extinction crisis. Commercial agriculture, timber extraction, and infrastructure development are causing habitat loss and our reliance on fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change.

Public corporations are responding to consumer demand and pressure from Wall Street. Professors Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg published Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations last fall, arguing that businesses are locked in a cycle of exploiting the world’s resources in ever more creative ways.

Making energy-harvesting computers reliable

A revolutionary and emerging class of energy-harvesting computer systems require neither a battery nor a power outlet to operate, instead operating by harvesting energy from their environment. While radio waves, solar energy, heat, and vibrations have the ability to power devices, harvested energy sources are weak leading to an “intermittent execution”, with periodic power failures and unreliable behavior.

Brandon Lucia, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D. student Alexei Colin created the first designed to build reliable software for intermittent, energy-harvesting computers. Colin will present the work at the 2016 SPLASH conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on November 3rd.

“Energy is not always available in the environment for a device to harvest,” explains Lucia. “Intermittent operation makes it difficult to build applications because existing software programming languages—and programmers themselves—assume that energy is a continuously available resource.”

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