Genius Now

Call for Papers: Public Libraries and Resilient Cities: Creating Sustainable and Equitable Places

“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.”

Scavenging energy waste to turn water into hydrogen fuel

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,”

Floating Islands for the Maldives

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!

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

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.

Bomb the Blocks

Guerrilla Gardening and more.

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

Urban Downsizing – will it happen?

“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.”

CNC vs 3D – one take on the “revoluion”

“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.

Cooperation goes viral

“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.

micro solar-photovoltaics – potentially cost effective, resource effective, and competitive

“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.”

blood glucose, decision making, and future orientation

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