living – Alternative Energies

Suzanne Jacobs
australia
country
January 21, 2016
0 Comments

The human population is aging. Can our cities handle it?

If there’s anything that our inability to tackle climate change has taught us, it’s that we are exceptionally good at ignoring — or straight up denying — problems that lie in our future, especially when they affect generations other than our own. So I hate to say it, but we’ve got another one coming: The human population is aging, and our cities aren’t ready for it. Here’s the scoop from the Washington Post: By 2030, more than 1 billion people (one in eight) will be aged 65 or older, and by 2050, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas. What’s needed between now and then, according to a new report from McGraw Hill Financial Global Institute, is new thinking about how…

Katie Herzog
coast
first
January 20, 2016
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Sorry! Winter Storm Jonas doesn’t make climate change a liberal hoax

Good news, folks! It turns out that climate change is a big ol’ liberal hoax after all. Need proof? Just look out your window: If you’re anywhere east of Tupelo, you’re probably seeing a bunch of white stuff falling from the sky, compliments of Winter Storm Jonas. We call that “snow,” and it proves once and for all that “global warming” is a conspiracy dreamed up by known communist Al Gore to bring down the world economy. Guess we can just pack up our desks and go home. At least, that’s what America’s climate deniers would have you believe. This logic seems to rear its ignorant head every time there’s a major snow storm, such as last year when…

Katie Herzog
climate
death
January 16, 2016
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Climate deniers attack NASA scientist dying of cancer

Readers of The New York Times were treated to a deeply touching essay this week by Piers Sellers, a NASA astronaut and climate scientist who was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Sellers wrote: This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal lens. At some level I was sure that, even at my present age of 60, I would live to see the most critical part of the problem, and its possible solutions, play out in my lifetime. Now that my personal horizon has been steeply foreshortened, I was forced to decide how to spend my remaining time. Was continuing to think about climate change worth the…

Katie Herzog
american
article
January 12, 2016
0 Comments

Dutch children learn about life and death through lion dissection

Until today, the most peculiar thing I’d heard about Denmark was that parents leave their children to sleep outside in subzero temperatures — something that would get you arrested in the United States, if not put on a government watch list. But there’s something else Denmark does very differently when it comes to child-rearing: public dissections. N0 — not dissecting the children! Come on! Two years ago, a zoo in Copenhagen decided to kill a healthy young giraffe that was deemed unfit for breeding. Afterward, the zoo held a dissection, invited the public to watch the process, and then fed Marius the giraffe to some nearby lions. The world hates little more than an animal meeting its untimely death, and an outpouring of outrage…

Suzanne Jacobs
article
atmosphere
January 12, 2016
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Are we alone in the universe because all the aliens went extinct?

If we’re alone in the universe, then the big question is: Why? There are billions upon billions of Earth-like planets out there. Surely, life would have evolved many times over. But lo, Jody Foster couldn’t find any back in 1997, and today, almost 20 years later, we’re still searching. This conundrum is known as the Fermi Paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked “Where is everybody?” one day while eating lunch with his colleagues (note to self: nix the sad desk lunch; you’ll never get a paradox named after you this way), and scientists have been scratching their heads over it for decades. But in a new paper published this week in the journal Astrobiology, two researchers from the Australian…

Suzanne Jacobs
aztec
built
January 9, 2016
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This guy started an e-waste band, and it’s actually amazing

You know what they say — when life gives you e-waste, start a band and make sick tunes with it. Together with his band Open Reel Ensemble, Japanese programmer and musician Ei Wada uses old projectors, cathode ray television sets, tape recorders, ventilation fans, discarded computers, and any other vintage tech with bizarre noise potential to make the kind of electronic music that would make a cyberpunk swoon. According to Motherboard, Wada’s interest in music began when he was four years old and attended a gamelan concert with his family. (The influence of gamelan, a traditional form of music from Indonesia, on electronica has been well-documented.) Here’s more from Motherboard: The memory stuck, and several years later, when Wada started tinkering with…

Clive Thompson
california
climate & energy
January 4, 2016
0 Comments

No parking? Self-driving cars could have a huge effect on our cities

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you drive out to visit Disney’s Epcot center in Orlando, Fla., you will arrive at one of the biggest parking lots in America. With room for 12,000 cars, it sprawls out over 7 million square feet — about the size of 122 football fields. If you look at the lot on Google Maps, you realize that it’s nearly the size of Epcot center itself. Disney built one Epcot to hold the visitors. Then it built another to hold the cars. Disney isn’t alone in its expansive approach to parking. Parking is, after all, what cars do most of the time: The average automobile spends 95 percent of its…