Tag Archive

Unconventional gas

Image by Obscura/ Frederik Hilmer via Flickr

This changes everything
Natural gas is becoming less like oil and more like coal, which is a good thing
WOODY ALLEN, in earlier, funnier days, told a joke about two women in a resort in the Catskills bemoaning the cuisine: “The food at this place is really terrible,” [...]

Bloom Box fuel cell officially launched

True to its word the formerly secretive Bloom Energy launched its Bloom “Box”
(hereafter known as the Bloom Energy Server), today with an event at eBay’s California HQ attended by Governor Schwarzenegger and Bloom Energy board member Colin Powell. Although the launch didn’t see any great revelations to add to the 60 [...]

Can We Feed and Save the Planet?

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Challenges of population control and food production need to be tackled in tandem
We are eating ourselves out of house and home. Recently, in the September 24 issue of Nature, Johan Rockström and his colleagues proposed 10 “planetary boundaries” to define safe limits of human activity. (Scientific American is part of the [...]

How Can Humanity Avoid or Reverse the Dangers Posed by a Warming Climate?

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With greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, strong efforts will be required to reverse global warming
Wetlands from Bangladesh to Florida submerged. Drought and devastating heat in important granaries such as the Yangtze floodplain in China or Ukraine. Rains that come too often or too hard in India or the U.S. Northeast. The list [...]

Bioengineers Succeed in Producing Plastics Without the Use of Fossil Fuels

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A team of pioneering South Korean scientists have succeeded in producing the polymers used for everyday plastics through bioengineering, rather than through the use of fossil fuel based chemicals. This groundbreaking research, which may now allow for the production of environmentally conscious plastics, is published in two papers in the journal Biotechnology and [...]