House Optimized for Ideal Solar Gain

This house on Barcelona’s waterfront, uses time-tested passive solar techniques, but it takes a high-tech leap forward using digital design and digital fabrication techniques to make it completely optimized for ideal solar gain. With its jagged cantilevers jutting out at odd angles across most of the facade (except the North corner), Solar House 2.0 looks, … Read more

Internet Providers Deliberately Slowing Traffic

Five major internet service providers in the US and one in Europe have been accused of abusing their market share to interfere with the flow of the internet for end users. The accusations come from Level 3, a communications company that helps connect large-scale ISPs like Comcast or AT&T to the rest of the internet. … Read more

The Wind Belt Blows Turbines Away!

The Windbelt is a small-scale wind turbine that can generate 40 milliwatts in 10-mph winds and only costs a couple of dollars. Working in Haiti, Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, California, saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Conventional … Read more

A Battery That Lasts Forever

If it lives up to its billing, it will help accelerate the big green future. Companies and homeowners could pull the plug on their local utility by banking electricity from solar arrays and wind farms for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. A 250-kilowatt battery system installed in … Read more

Biomass Conversion to Jet Fuel

Lignocellulose, a raw material in biomass, can be converted to biofuels and is often considered a long-term alternative to the diminishing supply of fossil fuels. The conversion process involves biomass pretreatment, hydrolysis of constituent carbohydrates and catalytic conversion of platform chemicals. Proposed strategies to convert lignocellulose to aviation fuels have underused components, preventing their commercialization. … Read more

The Distended Belly of Government

Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed … Read more

Microbial Armies Battle Infection

At almost any supermarket, you can pick up both antibacterial soap and probiotic yogurt during the same shopping trip. In a recent study, published on March 12 in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, researchers found that beneficial gut bacteria were necessary for the development of innate immune cells—specialized types of white blood cells that … Read more

Food Connections

Growing Food Connections Launches a Website to Train Communities in Food Systems Planning. With information on continuing education, doctoral programs in food systems planning and policy at Ohio State University and University at Buffalo and student internship opportunities, the website also supports Growing Food Connections’ goal to develop an educational framework for the next generation … Read more

DIY Seed Starting Kits

Learn how to make biodegradable seed starting kits out of newspaper. Consider the Source  Consider the First Source! In the beginning was the Word, and the Word choreographed an assembly of amino acids into an exquisite array of specific proteins. Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole … Read more