Month: March 2012

  • Holy Land Leaders: Muslims, Jews, Christians Link to Save the Planet

    Can mobilizing the world’s faithful save the planet where activists without faith have failed? Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders will be speaking out on climate change next week, while conveying their shared visions on renewable energy at the Interfaith Climate and Energy Conference. It will be held in Jerusalem on Monday, March 19th and you…

  • Supercapacitors or Batteries

    A battery is a device that stores energy and makes it available in an electrical form. A capacitor is a device that stores energy in the electric field created between a pair of conductors on which equal but opposite electric charges have been placed. A capacitor is not a battery and is of a more…

  • Solar Roadways: Energy and Transportation Solution in One

    SANDPOINT, ID— There are 28,000 square miles of roadways spread across the 48 continental states. With the cost of traditional paving materials going up and their availability going down, innovator Scott Brusaw sees solar highways as the solution to several energy and transportation problems.

  • Salt-tolerant wheat a breakthrough for better yields

    Australian scientists have successfully carried out field trials of a salt-tolerant durum wheat, boosting grain yield by 25 per cent in salty soils. Durum is one of the most widely grown cereals in the world, but in saline soils it is vulnerable to salt build-up in the leaves, which can hinder growth and reduce yields,…

  • Study: Climate Change will Exacerbate Respiratory Diseases

    A new study highlights the growing danger of respiratory disease as the Earth gets warmer. Higher temperatures, in and of itself, do not make a person more likely to come down with something like asthma, allergies, infections and the like. The danger will come from the increase in ground level ozone in urban areas, higher…

  • Brazil’s Growth Offers Wealth and Worry in The Northeast

    Two years ago I predicted this would be the Brazilian Decade, and so far Brazil’s stunning success has proven me correct. It is not just about the large international events like the World Cup and Olympics that are on the calendar in 2014 and 2016. Brazil has become a creditor nation; once a net food…

  • Records from Henry David Thoreau Reveal New Evidence of Climate Change

    Henry David Thoreau was a famed naturalist, philosopher, and author who resided in Eastern Massachusetts from 1817 to 1862. He was also a leading abolitionist and advocator of civil disobedience in defiance of an unjust state. He is perhaps best known for his views on simple living uncluttered by overdevelopment embodied in his famous book…

  • Drought-hit England announces first wave of emergency measures

    The first emergency measures to support the drought-hit south of England were announced today in an attempt to preserve dwindling water supplies. Seven firms – Southern Water, South East Water, Thames Water, Anglian Water, Sutton and East Surrey, Veolia Central and Veolia South East – jointly announced the introduction of water restrictions from April 5,…

  • Tar sands emit more carbon than previously estimated

    Environmentalists have targeted the oil-producing tar sands in Canada in part because its crude comes with heftier carbon emissions than conventional sources. Now, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has found an additional source of carbon that has been unaccounted for: peatlands. Mining the oil in the tar…

  • Power Grid Must Adapt To Handle Renewable Energy

    The National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C., once asked its members to pick the greatest engineering achievement ever. Their choice? The electrification of the country through what’s known as “the grid.” Ernest Moniz, director of the Energy Institute at MIT, says they were right on the money.