Posts by — rosario

Ingrid Holmes

GIB is shaping up to be a “Super-quango” spearheading one trillion British pounds of investment in the green infrastructure. The US could learn from the plan — it will have a clear remit to focus on investments that grow the green economy, and is less likely to fall for greenwash proposals. (more…)

Every village in China has one, but Biodigesters are an unfashionable energy source — now they may be due for a comeback.

Pigs are power stations, too

As a system for getting energy from organic waste Biodigesters have two main components that people prefer not to discuss: human waste and methane. (more…)

Better Off

The average American home contains 25 consumer electronics devices. So whether you are off-grid or on, start by reducing energy use on existing gadgets and lifestyle.
First, get a grip on your current electricity usage. A box called The Kill A Watt Power Usage Monitor, from P3 International, makes for a nifty parlor game of Guess Watt with anything that plugs into a socket.
You�ll be surprised how much energy some devices use even when idle or turned off. Consumer electronics suck as much as 25 percent of their power when not in use, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. For computers, the figure can be much higher – up to 85 percent for a PC that’s always left on. (more…)

Diamond hunters in Greenland

Helicopters have been hard to hire in Greenland this summer. In most countries that would not be a big problem, but for the locals on the world’s biggest island – where there are no road networks and sparse settlements are often 100 miles apart – it can make life tricky.

The scarcity has been caused by a diamond rush with prospectors, mostly from North America, believing they can strike it rich. As the ice cap recedes due to rising temperatures, rock covered for centuries could produce spectacular finds. The interest in the Greenland tundra was sparked partly by the announcement this year of the discovery of a 2.4-carat diamond at Garnet lake in west Greenland, the largest of 236 diamonds found in a trial dig in the area by Hudson Resources of Vancouver.

While the Hudson company was willing to announce its find, presumably to encourage its investors, most prospectors are less keen to discuss their activities in this vast mineral rich wilderness. (more…)

Last year’s battle

Teams from 20 universities have spent the summer building enough homes for an entire solar village. The off-grid, self-powering homes will be on display for 10 days in October on the National Mall in Washington D.C., competing in the Department of Energy’s 2007 Solar Decathlon.

The point of the competition is not to create new building technologies. Entrants have to use commercially available products to prove that their sun-powered home can be commercially reproduced. For Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) university with its access to super-efficienct, NASA-grade solar panels, that was a disadvantage. (more…)

with his clipboard

Dr. Stephen Leatherman, aka Dr. Beach, has studied beach erosion for 40 years and completed two national surveys of the American coast. He is the head of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University. For the past two deades he has been meticulously surveying the best beaches in America, giving them scores acroess 40 criteria from the softness of the sand to the slope of the dunes. The full listing is at the end of this article. (more…)

Kid lawyer saves dad

Recently I took the boys on their first wild camping trip on Dartmoor, writes Electric Kevin on his blog. I had picked Postbridge as a good location for mix of open moor, forest and stream. How wrong could I have been ! We pitched by a wooded area and had started our fire, the boys had been running around excitedly for about an hour making noise as excited 8 year-olds are want to do. I was startled by the sound of a 4×4 being driven furiously towards us via a track from the woods – it skidded to a halt by our tent and the middle-aged driver was apoplectic, “You can’t camp here – (more…)

Go to Forbes.com to view the slideshow

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Hooked on memes

Gadget freak Dan Tynan reports on a few days enforced abstinence from Broadband. (This story first appeared in PCWorld and is reproduced with permission of the author): WE WERE SITTING in a charming little pub in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland. As the band cranked through bad covers of American pop tunes, we sipped Guinness, checked e-mail on our laptops, made cheap Skype calls to friends halfway around the world, and IM-ed with reckless abandon. We had discovered Web nirvana. (more…)