article – Alternative Energies

Eve Andrews
article
magazine
January 14, 2016
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Happy birthday, Roe v. Wade! You’re in good company

Happy Roe v. Wade Day, everyone! Forty-three years ago today, the Supreme Court decided that a woman’s right to choose is protected under the Constitution. That’s not, for the record, because the U.S. Constitution makes any mention of reproductive rights, or uteri, or, for that matter, women at all — the right to choose falls under our constitutional “right to privacy.” (For a wonderful explanation of this, please read Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece from last spring.) My generation has only known a post-Roe v. Wade America, and many (hi, Debbie Wasserman Schultz) claim that makes us “complacent” as our reproductive rights are trampled by overzealous state governments. To which I would respond: Well, we may spend literal days watching Scandal, but…

Katie Herzog
american
article
January 12, 2016
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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…

Aura Bogado
article
flint-mike
January 11, 2016
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Map shows how Michigan’s lead problem extends far beyond the Flint water crisis

Flint is Michigan’s poster child for environmental disaster — a crisis that could have been avoided. As my colleague Raven Rakia has pointed out, lead exposure, which causes an array of health problems and is especially bad for children, is completely preventable. But that doesn’t mean that those responsible for public health do their jobs. In Flint, a city that’s nearly 60 percent black and where more than 42 percent of residents live below the poverty line, officials switched to a cheaper water source. That source was cheaper for a reason: The water was polluted and corrosive. So it leached lead from the old pipes when they piped it in. That burdened local residents with water that’s been making them sick for more than a year. But high levels…

Katie Herzog
article
bales
January 8, 2016
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Modern-day slavery and environmental devastation go hand in hand

Slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite slavery being illegal in every country on the planet, there are more enslaved people alive today than at any point in history. From fishing boats in Thailand to private homes in New York to diamond mines in Congo to rock quarries in India, there are an estimated 30 million people working in bondage right now. That’s right — 30 million. Modern slavery is the subject of Blood and Earth, a new book by Kevin Bales, who cofounded Free the Slaves, an organization working to end slavery around the world. Bales spoke with Fresh Air’s Dave Davies, and he said that the devastation bondage causes isn’t limited to the lives of enslaved people themselves; it also has a…

Katie Herzog
adult
article
January 6, 2016
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Carly Fiorina hijacks field trip, leads pre-schoolers to anti-abortion rally

A British reporter from the Guardian got an inside look at American politics recently when he witnessed Carly Fiorina forcing a bunch of unwitting school children to take part in a campaign stunt at an anti-abortion rally in Iowa. Later, Fiorina was accused by some parents of “ambushing” their kids. The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt writes: The alleged ambush occurred when Fiorina hosted a “right to life” forum at the Greater Des Moines botanical garden. Entering the rally, before a crowd of about 60 people, she directed around 15 young children towards a makeshift stage. The problem, one parent said, was that the children’s parents had not given Fiorina permission to have their children sit with her – in front of a huge banner bearing the image…

admin
article
buffer
January 6, 2016
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Finding a way to boost efficiency of CIGS solar cells

Researchers have revealed the structure of the buffer layer in a CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selenide) solar cell at SPring8, the world’s largest third-generation synchrotron radiation facility. They found that the buffer layer was composed of two layers: an upper Zn(OH)2 layer and a lower Zn(S, O) layer. By removing the upper Zn(OH)2 layer, the solar conversion efficiency was doubled.