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The sun will set early in Haiti tonight. By 5:23 PM, night will have come to the island nation, and while night comes to virtually every part of the world virtually everyday, throughout much of Haiti, the darkness will be much deeper. It’s been nearly two years since the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed [...]
If you’re eating a food that came in a wrapper while reading this, you probably eating palm oil — at least there’s a 50/50 chance you are. About half the packaged food found in a supermarket contains palm oil, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and a lot of that product comes from the lush [...]
Ah, solar panels: so clean, so elegant—and so bloody expensive. Covering your roof with photovoltaics may save you money in the long run, but it requires the installation of a lot of heavy and expensive equipment up front. Thin-film solar panels, printed on sheets at industrial scales, are slowly making inroads, but suppose you wanted [...]
Want to save the Earth? Easy, just buy a couple of ice trays. To the long list of human inventions that are wrecking global climate—the internal combustion engine, the industrial era factory—add the automatic ice maker. Climate modelers have long known that households are far bigger contributors to global warming than most laypeople realize. For [...]
Sure, Japanese vending machines got a bad wrap awhile back for selling schoolgirls’ underwear, but that was then. If you’ve been to Tokyo recently, you know and love the machines’ for their convenience and ingenuity. For example, unlike their un-evolved counterparts in most of the world, Japanese vending machines have a couple of rows dedicated [...]
If, like me, you’ve contracted an unbreakable addiction to Apple products, then this really is the most wonderful time of the year. As always, Steve Jobs has timed the release of some new products for the holiday season, including the ultra-light MacBook Air which—full disclosure—I’m typing this blog post on right now. Add that to [...]
Part of the challenge of the environmental movement in the developed world is to get people to look more deeply into their lifestyles and consumer choices: to see, for example, that cellophane-wrapped beef probably comes from a cow that fed on grain grown on land cleared of rain forest, which accelerates climate change. But while [...]
The Spokane river had a soap scum problem. Over the years the runoff of nutrients like phosphorous into the eastern Washington state waterway has encouraged the growth of algae, leading to green, icky waters in a process science teachers would call eutrophication and swimmers would call icky. As the algae proliferates and then dies, their [...]
