flickering pictures

With the world’s oceans expected to rise dramatically this century, the new president of the tiny island republic of Maldives is getting proactive about climate change.
The Guardian reports:

The U.N. forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59cm [nearly two feet] by 2100, due to global warming. Most parts of the Maldives […]

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Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius.
And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore.
From the Times of India:

The […]

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And they say there’s no such thing as climate change…
For 12 weird and wonderful hours last week, a Kenyan village turned into a winter wonderland.
From a Reuters story picked up by Yahoo! News:

A huge hailstorm turned parts of central Kenya white, thrilling residents most of whom had never experienced such conditions, officials said on Wednesday.
[…] […]

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Not to be a jerk or anything, but it kind of seems like a stupid question: should we find new ways to feed and maintain our addiction to oil, or decrease our reliance on the fossil fuels that are empoverishing our people and altering our fragile climate?
These folks think they have the answer:

I work in […]

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Gas prices through the roof? Trust a practical country to come up with a practical solution.

From the Times of India:

The engines of the buses have been tuned to allow a maximum speed of 60 km only, an official said here on Wednesday.
The tuning of the engines would give 0.40 km mileage per litre. “The […]

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Researchers in Idaho have created inexpensive photovoltaic plastic sheets with nanoantennas that collect waste energy from factories and power plants as well as the sun. They store energy 24 hours a day — whether the sun is shining or not.
This could be a huge breakthrough for clean, green solar power, since critics have long […]

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No, it’s not the latest arctic documentary. For just the second time in recorded history, ice floes blocking the Northwest Passage, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in Northern Canada, are expected to melt away.
The Globe and Mail reports:

“It really is just one more indication how quickly we’re losing the sea […]

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A California company called LS9 says it has done the impossible: come up with cheap, homegrown, renewable “carbon-negative” oil to satisfy the world’s growing fuel needs. With bug poo.
From the Times:

To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs -– very, very small ones –- so that when they feed on agricultural waste such […]

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According to BusinessWeek, microfibre rags can remove both dirt and germs, and clean “surfaces mechanically, not chemically, by scraping them with microscopic precision.” In fact, they completely eliminate the need for harsh chemicals like Tilex, Clorox, Windex, Ajax and all those other nasty cleaners that end in “x.” So why are the cabinets […]

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On October 26, 2007, the CBC ran a story on the ZENN, a clean, silent, fully electric car made in Quebec. The award-winning car was being sold in the U.S., Mexico and Europe, but had been waiting a staggering 18 months for Canadian safety approvals to come through. Two weeks after the CBC […]

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