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Blue Oak Ranch Reserve
Alpha Node Weather Tower
November 10 2008
Greenmeme spent a weekend at the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve with Reserve Director, Mike Hamilton.
Link
Nov 30, 2008
Manifesta: Caring for Fungi and Pollution
Architects Stangeland and Kropf decided to engage with this transitional state. The Naked Garden is generated by the mediation of different modes: biological propagation, mathematical abstraction and technological execution. A robot, programmed with the rules by which the fungi grow, engraves and perforates the wall already inhabited by fungi, thereby allowing light, water and wind to enter and to facilitate the basic conditions of life.
Jorge Otero-Pailos is an architect and theorist specialized in experimental forms of preservation. His contribution to Manifesta is The Ethics of Dust, an installation intended to preserve pollution and the dust that has to be swept away from the building during the renovation process. Pollution has negative connotation. Yet, it can tell fascinating stories about our social, cultural and industrial past.
Biodiversity Hotspots
Conservation International
Biodiversity Hotspots
"Life on Earth faces a crisis of historical and planetary proportions. Unsustainable consumption in many northern countries and crushing poverty in the tropics are destroying wild nature. Biodiversity is besieged."
"To qualify as a hotspot, a region must meet two strict criteria: it must contain at least 1,500 species of vascular plants (> 0.5 percent of the world’s total) as endemics, and it has to have lost at least 70 percent of its original habitat."
Video games waste energy and contribute to global warming
Larry Greenemeier
link
"Game consoles (40 percent of U.S. homes have at least one) consume an estimated 16 billion kilowatt hours per year—roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. This energy usage isn't going to drop anytime soon: Between 2002 and 2007 more than 62 million video game consoles were sold in the U.S. (Wii was the No. 1 seller, followed by PlayStation and the Xbox). The Washington Post reports that the National Institute on Media and the Family found that 92 percent of kids, ages two to 17, play video games regularly."
Greenhouse gases will heat up planet 'for ever'
The Independent
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment
But one of the main researchers – Professor David Archer of Chicago University – warns that "the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilisation so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste."
link
Nov 27, 2008
Rainwater Harvesting Proposal
This posting is originally found from Pruned. For Parque del Lago idea competition, architectural firm, Paisajes Emergentes proposes open amphitheater as a rainwater collection system. As the water level rises, the amphitheater turns into a water pool, and as the water dries up, the amphitheater reveals. Simple and compelling...
Original Posting
Paisajes Emergentes
Nov 24, 2008
The fuel tank of future
This article talks about the new innovation to store hydrogen in the material - mainly carbon nano tubes and graphne - The fascinating part of this article for me is the generative structures formed from carbon nano tubes - wondering if the form has to do with the capacity to hold hydrogen inside of the material, which has to be 6% of all.
More about this article
Nov 19, 2008
Media Lab creates Center for Future Storytelling
David Kirkpatrick (left), Chairman of Plymouth Rock Studios, Cynthia Breazeal, co-director of Media Lab's Center for Future Storytelling, and Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab, with Nexi, a mobile, dexterous social robot developed by Breazeal's Personal Robots research group. Photo / Sam Ogden
"Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human," said Frank Moss, Media Lab director and holder of the Jerome Wiesner Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences. "It is how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future. But how we tell our stories depends on another uniquely human characteristic -- our ability to invent and harness technology. From the printing press to the Internet, technology has given people new ways to tell their stories, allowing them to reach new levels of creativity and personal fulfillment. The shared vision of the MIT Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios allows us to take the next quantum leap in storytelling, empowering ordinary people to connect in extraordinary ways."
link
Nov 12, 2008
Guerrila gardner from london
London's guerrilla gardener and author Richard Reynolds proposes the hands on grassroot movement to change the ecology of the urban area.
Originally from http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/04/minidocumentary-of-l.html
Nov 11, 2008
ARTSPEAK
The arts community is responding to climate change, and changing the conversation in the process.
The point is that the artists' view is invaluable precisely because they are not experts and do not have the authority granted by science. They are only as persuasive as their images. As nonexperts—though interested and knowledgeable—they stand in for the view of the everyman. This reflects the nature of urban and natural systems. They transcend boundaries; they transcend borders, disciplines, issues, and expertise. With art, the viewer knows that she has a license to interpret, to critically evaluate the work, that her opinion matters. The same can't be said of science. Scientific arguments are presented in the public imagination as fait accompli. When definitive terms like "discovered" and "understood" are the norm, science is often a one-way conversation. The creativity on display in these exhibitions plays into the public imagination differently than the computational model, the quantitative risk analysis, or other summative representations used by environmental agencies to inform public decision-making. The art invites interpretation without oversimplification or unnecessary precision. And by combining legibility with a diverse viewership the works of art provide the opportunity for evidence-driven discussion. They invite skepticism (who trusts an artist?) and critical engagement. They incite participation, not passive consumption of facts. In a participatory democracy, strategies that raise the standards of evidence used in public debate and that engage diverse publics are worth attention. And as much as climate change is a phenomenon of the environmental commons—we are all subject to it, layperson or expert—it necessitates, and deserves, a response from the commons.
Situated Technologies
Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy
by Benjamin BrattonNatalie Jeremijenko
Laura Forlano
Dharma Dailey
Nov 6, 2008
Preventing forest fires with tree power
Sensor system runs on electricity generated by trees
MIT researchers and colleagues are working to find out whether energy from trees can power a network of sensors to prevent spreading forest fires.
What they learn also could raise the possibility of using trees as silent sentinels along the nation's borders to detect potential threats such as smuggled radioactive materials.
The U.S. Forest Service currently predicts and tracks fires with a variety of tools, including remote automated weather stations. But these stations are expensive and sparsely distributed. Additional sensors could save trees by providing better local climate data to be used in fire prediction models and earlier alerts. However, manually recharging or replacing batteries at often very hard-to-reach locations makes this impractical and costly.
The new sensor system seeks to avoid this problem by tapping into trees as a self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with an off-the-shelf battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree. A single tree doesn't generate a lot of power, but over time the "trickle charge" adds up, "just like a dripping faucet can fill a bucket over time," said Shuguang Zhang, one of the researchers on the project and the associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBE).
The system produces enough electricity to allow the temperature and humidity sensors to wirelessly transmit signals four times a day, or immediately if there's a fire. Each signal hops from one sensor to another, until it reaches an existing weather station that beams the data by satellite to a forestry command center in Boise, Idaho.
Scientists have long known that trees can produce extremely small amounts of electricity. But no one knew exactly how the energy was produced or how to take advantage of the power.
In a recent issue of the Public Library of Science ONE, Zhang and MIT colleagues report the answer. "It's really a fairly simple phenomenon: An imbalance in pH between a tree and the soil it grows in," said Andreas Mershin, a postdoctoral associate at the CBE. The first author of the paper is Christopher J. Love, an MIT senior in chemistry who has been working on the project since his freshman year.
To solve the puzzle of where the voltage comes from, the team had to test a number of theories -- many of them exotic. That meant a slew of experiments that showed, among other things, that the electricity was not due to a simple electrochemical redox reaction (the type that powers the 'potato batteries' common in high school science labs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery). The team also ruled out the source as due to coupling to underground power lines, radio waves or other electromagnetic interference.
Testing of the wireless sensor network, which is being developed by Voltree Power (http://voltreepower.com), is slated to begin in the spring on a 10-acre plot of land provided by the Forest Service.
According to Love, who with Mershin has a financial interest in Voltree, the bioenergy harvester battery charger module and sensors are ready. "We expect that we'll need to instrument four trees per acre," he said, noting that the system is designed for easy installation by unskilled workers.
"Right now we're finalizing exactly how the wireless sensor network will be configured to use the minimum amount of power," he concluded.
The original experiments were funded by MagCap Engineering, LLC, through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
Nov 5, 2008
In Defense of Difference
Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species.
This past January, at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May 2007 a cavalry of the Janjaweed — the notorious Sudanese militia responsible for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous people of Darfur — made its way across the border into neighboring Chad. They were hunting for 1.5 tons of confiscated ivory, worth nearly $1.5 million, locked in a storeroom in Zakouma National Park. Around the same time, a wave of mysterious frog disappearances that had been confounding herpetologists worldwide spread to the US Pacific Northwest. It was soon discovered that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus native to southern Africa, had found its way via such routes as the overseas trade in frog's legs to Central America, South America, Australia, and now the United States. One year later, food riots broke out across the island nation of Haiti, leaving at least five people dead; as food prices soared, similar violence erupted in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia.
All these seemingly disconnected events are the symptoms, you could say, of a global epidemic of sameness.link
A Fast, Programmable Molecular Clock
"UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast, and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source, or other environmental conditions change."
Technology Review 10/29/08
Link
BudBurst
Citizen science to study climate change
from Boing Boing:
POSTED BY DAVID PESCOVITZ, MARCH 11, 2008
Project BudBurst looks like an interesting citizen science project to engage the public as researchers on climate change. Participants volunteer to look out for first bud bursts, first leafing, first flower, and seed or fruit dispersal in their area. Those are all phenological events, meaning biological phenomena that are sensitive to climate variations. From Project BudBurst:
Phenology is the study of the timing of life cycle events in plants and animals. In other words, studying the environment to figure out how animals know when it is time to hibernate, and what ‘calendar’ or ‘clock’ plants use to begin flowering, leafing or reproducing.
Phenology is literally “the science of appearance.” Scientists who study phenology – phenologists -- are interested in the timing of specific biological events (such as flowering, migration, and reproduction) in relation to changes in season and climate. Seasonal and climatic changes are some of the non-living or abiotic components of the environment that impact the living or biotic components. Seasonal changes can include variations in day length, temperature, and rain or snowfall. In short, phenologists attempt to learn more about the abiotic factors that plants and animals respond to...
Phenological observations have been used for centuries by farmers to maximize crop production, nature-lovers to anticipate optimal wildflower viewing conditions, and by almost all of us to prepare for seasonal allergies. Today, this well established science is also used by scientists to track the effect of global warming and climate change on organisms and to make predictions about the future health of the environment. By tracking changes in the timing of these phenological events, scientists are able to better understand how our environment is changing.
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)
link:
Augmented Ecologies , A Kinesthetic User ExperienceGuido Maciocci
feature on Archinect
The integration of biological and technological systems in the design of an interactive human interface is explored through an installation where plants rigged up with sensors provide a kinesthetic user experience based on movement, touch, sound and light. Human interaction with the system affects an algorithmic projection and soundscape.
//Augmented Ecologies
BIOLOGICAL + TECHNOLOGICAL
The project explores the integration of biological and technological systems in the development of an interactive human interface. This notion is investigated through the design and construction of an interactive installation where user interactions with hybrid systems affect the light and sound-scape of the installation space. The design is suggestive of an information rich, technologically augmented landscape. Kinesthetic user/landscape relationships are forged within a mediated spatiality of light and sound.
link
EMOTIONAL RESCUE
If we're serious about building a society that makes scientifically informed decisions, then science needs to figure out a way to get its message across effectively.
EMOTIONAL RESCUEClimate change is being called the "perfect moral storm," and scientists may need to throw the public a lifeline.
Finally, at long last, it has happened. As the planet continues to warm, active global warming skepticism has most decidedly become uncool.
The signs were unmistakable in early February, following the release of the policymakers' summary of the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The document bluntly stated that the warming of the climate system is "unequivocal," with a nine in 10 chance that humans are causing it. A few scattered attacks on this conclusion emerged from the usual quarters—right-wing think tanks, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, congressional crackpots like Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—but they were few and far between. There was nothing remotely resembling the barrage of volleys that followed the 1995 and 2001 IPCC report rollouts.
Instead, as newly empowered Democrats pledged to make carbon-emission caps a top priority, the Bush administration tried to erase its own previous stance of global warming skepticism. Two White House officials misquoted the president himself in order to suggest Bush had always acknowledged that human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing global warming. It was a lie, but one that told a deep truth about how the climate issue has evolved over the past several years.
Those concerned about preserving the planet should find these latest developments heartening. In the long run, apparently, reality does indeed prevail. Eventually—and just as with Big Tobacco's campaign to question the health risks of smoking—the active denialists and strategic doubt-generators can be driven into obscurity, if not into outright retreat. Eventually.
That's the good news.
But as I attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco in February and listened to the climate-related discussions going on there in the wake of the IPCC report, I heard a less heartening theme being sounded as well. Despite ever-increasing scientific certainty, global warming remains a relatively low priority for the US public: Most Americans worry far more about issues like crime, taxes, war, education, and health care. And while the doubt-creation industry has gone into recession (at least for this issue), an insidious partisan divide still persists on climate change. A recent Pew survey revealed that over 50 percent more college-educated Democrats than Republicans accept that humans are to blame for rising temperatures. Without both acceptance and concern on the part of the public, politics won't move fast enough either. With each day that we fail to cut emissions, we're passing the buck to future generations. Yet we delay, delay, delay.
Ethicist Stephen Gardiner of the University of Washington-Seattle is one of many thinkers who've looked closely at the disconnect between the hard evidence of human-caused global warming and our failure to deal with the problem. He calls climate change a "perfect moral storm" because it uniquely tests our capacity to do the right thing (cut emissions). That climate change is global means we need coordination across societies that have vastly different values, priorities, and technological capabilities. That the most severe impacts won't be felt immediately means we have to sacrifice today to protect generations yet to come. And that there is still considerable uncertainty about future consequences means we can debate endlessly about how bad things are going to get. It's no surprise, then, that decades have passed without a coordinated global response that's adequate to the problem at hand.
But admitting and recognizing all of these hurdles doesn't let anyone off the hook. In fact, I've grown increasingly convinced that scientists and science defenders must realize that they are also responsible, to a significant extent, for failing to communicate the nature of this "perfect problem" to the rest of the public in a way that truly mobilizes action.
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/05/emotional_rescue.php
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