“Public libraries are at the forefront of a number of significant and pressing urban and environmental sustainability issues, and are evolving a leadership role in addressing these through sustainable urban design practices, contributions to economic regeneration and a commitment to social equity.”

via Peter Scott’s Library Blog: Call for Papers: Public Libraries and Resilient Cities: Creating Sustainable and Equitable Places.

Including sound energy and running water…. pair this with a lowhead water turbine and things might get very interesting.

“This study provides a simple and cost-effective technology for direct water splitting that may generate hydrogen fuels by scavenging energy wastes such as noise or stray vibrations from the environment,”

via Scavenging energy waste to turn water into hydrogen fuel.

Very cool stuff  I could want one….

Not only has the entire country gone carbon neutral, educated all of their children in environmental science and furiously built retaining walls around every island, but the government is buying up land in nearby nations as a place to retreat to when the Maldives disappears. Now it appears that the intrepid Maldivians have come up with a new strategy to fight the rising tide: creating mini floating islands!

via Waterstudio.NL’s Floating Star Shaped Resort Islands for the Maldives | Inhabitat.

So they’re sitting on a deposit about 100 times the size of annual global production. The “possible shortage” isn’t from lack of ore – it’s because no one wants to build out the processing. Oh, and wait to see if what they really want to do is stripmine for it.

If developed, such deposits could help the U.S. avoid a possibly crippling rare earth shortage in the next decade. China has warned that its own industrial demands could compel it to stop exporting rare earths within the next five or 10 years.

via U.S. Sitting on Mother Lode of Rare Tech-Crucial Minerals – Yahoo! News.

Guerrilla Gardening and more.

http://www.designundersky.com/dus/2010/2/25/ludic-guerrilla-gardening-drone-warfare.html

“Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.”

A lot of issues here, from property acquisition to end use and ownership. At this stage, haven’t seen anything on depaving or soil remediation, which would add a whole new layer into what *could* be done within this kind of framework.

One of the potential dangers in this kind of redevelopment is the encouragement of semi-rural slums to replace the decaying neighborhoods – perhaps an improvement, but not much. On the other hand, this could lead to semi-planned resilient communities, and a wide variety of business opportunities, including large-scale reuse and recycling of construction materials.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100308/ap_on_bi_ge/us_downsizing_detroit

“We may not see millions of new factories in the short run, but I would bet we will see thousands.”

I don’t necessarily agree with everything he’s saying, but a lot of it makes great sense.

http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/03/web-souveniers-turning-the-web-into-physical-products/

“The study is the first work to document experimentally Fowler and Christakis’s earlier findings that social contagion travels in networks up to three degrees of separation, and the first to corroborate evidence from others’ observational studies on the spread of cooperation.

The contagious effect in the study was symmetric; uncooperative behavior also spread, but there was nothing to suggest that it spread any more or any less robustly than cooperative behavior, Fowler said.

From a scientific perspective, Fowler added, these findings suggest the fascinating possibility that the process of contagion may have contributed to the evolution of cooperation: Groups with altruists in them will be more altruistic as a whole and more likely to survive than selfish groups.”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/uoc–if030510.php

“So they use 100 times less silicon to generate the same amount of electricity,” said Okandan. “Since they are much smaller and have fewer mechanical deformations for a given environment than the conventional cells, they may also be more reliable over the long term.”

via Glitter-sized solar photovoltaics produce competitive results – Sandia News Releases.

Interesting research.  As an evolutionary mechanism, it makes sense – if you need food *now*,  planting seeds is less attractive than eating them. More likely we will see this immediately tested in marketing. If you want to sell pie in the sky,  serve pie. If you want to have them take the immediate offer because it’s to your advantage to do so, serve celery and carrots. Or something like that

Conversely, having low energy (or low blood glucose levels) may make an individual focus more on the present. The finding that a diet soda drink increased the degree of future discounting suggests that artificial sweeteners may alarm the body of imminent caloric crisis, leading to increased impulsivity.

The authors conclude that if controlling blood glucose levels may affect our decisions for later versus current rewards, then “reducing the degree of fluctuation in blood glucose may offer a possible means for the treatment and intervention of some impulsive disorders, anorexia, drug addiction, and gambling addiction.”

Sweet future: Fluctuating blood glucose levels may affect decision making.