Bioreplication – Mother Nature’s Way Of Helping Us Help Her

Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State University, working with Professor Carlo G. Pantano, graduate student Drew Patrick Pulsifer, and Professor Raúl José Martín-Palma of the Universidad Autónomia de Madrid, Spain, found that corneas of the blowfly was ideal for increasing power production for the next generation of solar cells. Blowflies have compound eyes that are roughly hemispherical, within each half sphere the surface is covered by macroscale hexagonal eyes with nanoscale features that allows the flies a 270° field of view. Mimicking this would allow solar cells to collect vast amounts of sunlight from a lot of different angles. This amounts to an extremely larger area and maximized efficiency while occupying the same footprint as a flat surfaced solar cell. (more…)

Hurricanes and Snow Storms Are Getting Stronger And Lasting Longer

Home Sweet Home!

It’s 5:35 in the afternoon and for the last 10 hours we have been working on getting the generators up because power has been out since 2 in the morning. Kicking ourselves because the generators have not been prepped since Ike hit us 17 months before. But now they’re working and everybody is thawing out. Except for the noise and regretfully, the noxious exhaust, everything is like normal because home is an RV.

A local news channel always ends the newscast with one of the anchors giving his ignorant 2 cents on whatever His Arrogance deems worthy of his biting critique.

Sure enough, he is now spouting a fact that the snow and ice we are experiencing in East Texas, (which would be normal in Minot, North Dakota), is proof that global warming is nonexistent and made up by followers of Al Gore to make him a billionaire. ??? — WHAT? — Really?!! — Oh good! My middle finger just came back to life. Hope the rest of my digits follow suit, that could be embarrassing.

Only way out!

People please, nobody said only the tropical storms would get worse. ALL STORMS are getting STRONGER and LONGER. The same words that have been said all along. And as for you Mr. Head-In-The-Sand, the Earth is annoyed and like a flea on a dog, she will scratch your pompous ass right off her surface, too bad she will take the rest of us with you.

Mother Nature will right herself, one extreme way or another.

… as the green future unfolds.

Cooling The Parking Space With Sun Power

Started in 2005 Envision Solar, headquartered in San Diego, California, has a vision of a sustainable future and an end to energy poverty. Their mission is to invent, develop and build Solar Integrated Infrastructure & Building Systems (SIIBS), through cost effective design, fabrication and construction methodologies. Envision Solar has established a robust platform for building a worldwide presence in the solar and clean technology industries by offering numerous products and services in all major market sectors, including commercial, institutional and residential. (more…)

Roman Genius + Yankee Ingenuity = Better Green

Most of us are used to air heated homes, either heated by a baseboard heater or wall radiator, which is then distributed by convection, or forced air (the most common heating system in the US), which is blown from a duct by a fan. But as they heat, they also blow dust, allergens, and hot air around. They produce uneven noisy heat, and waste energy in a number of ways. (more…)

It is Time to Respect Mother Earth!

In the 1960′s James Lovelock during his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars, formulated the Gaia Hypothesis (named after the Greek supreme goddess of Earth). Based on the idea that Earth is a self-regulating living system, a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and land, in totality regulates the conditions on the planet to make its physical environment (in particular temperature and chemistry of the atmosphere) on the planet more hospitable to the species which constitute its “life”. (more…)

Made in 1964, ‘The Incredible Mr. Limpet‘, a film set during World War II is about a man named Henry Limpet, who would rather be a fish than human. One day his dream comes true suddenly when he falls off the pier at Coney Island and transforms into a fish. From this point Henry finds his destiny, finding true love and working for the US Navy to help defeat Nazis submarines with a super-sonic roar. I loved this movie when I was a kid. Don Knotts looked astonishingly like his animated fish character, Mr. Limpet.

So, what’s this got to do with an environmental blog, you ask? Well, a school of mechanical, battery-powered robots in the shape of fish, that look surprisingly like a bunch of Mr. Limpets (without the glasses), will be released into the waters in the northern Spanish port of Gijon to help monitor pollution. Chosen because port authorities there had expressed an interest in the technology, and assisted with a 2.5-million-pound ($3.6 million) grant from the European Union, allows the robotic fish to patrol the harbor. (more…)

Protecting our environment in some ways is akin to saving an endangered species. For
instance, it’s really not a good idea to try to feed raw meat to a snow leopard from
your bare hand. Maybe I’m a little sensitive because I live in Tornado Alley, but
this guy, well never mind let me just tell you….

A former NASCAR driver in Charlotte, N.C. has spent tons of money building a car
called Tornado Attack, to drive head long into a tornado in the name of stupid, I
mean science. He says of the car, “Tornado Attack was designed to attack tornadoes,
that’s why it’s an attack. And we hunt tornadoes, we don’t chase them. We hunt (more…)