Most people use Google Street View to scope out city roads and buildings. But biologists have found a new purpose for this free, online tool: surveying hard-to-study habitats such as cliffs.
The Google Maps Street View feature offers a massive collection of photos, taken along roads around the world, which allows users to “see” […] Read More »
In Shwetak Patel’s Seattle home, it’s possible to turn on the lights, crank up the heat, and run the dryer—all while getting real-time feedback on the cost of his daily routine on a computer screen. Patel, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, is turning this knowledge into power. Or in this case, […] Read More »
Suppose a light bulb burns out in your house and you want to replace it with the most environmentally sustainable option. Compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) and light-emitting-diode bulbs (LEDs) use about 75 percent less energy than a comparable incandescent light bulb. Sounds like a no-brainer to use a CFL or an LED, right? Not […] Read More »
The hagfish is not exactly a style icon. It’s an ugly, eel-like creature that eats carcasses on the ocean floor and spews slime at its predators. But hagfish-slime fibers could one day be used as a sustainable material for clothing and other textile-based products, researchers say.
Hagfish are covered with glands that produce a […] Read More »
New York architectural-material technology firm Decker Yeadon has designed a double-skin glass façade system for large buildings that opens and closes autonomously in response to changes in interior room temperature.
Current double-skin façades consist of interior and exterior glass walls with a simple air cavity embedded with louvers. The Homeostatic Façade System includes mechanisms […] Read More »
It’s not necessary to jump on Pavegen tiles in order to make them produce energy or light up like fireflies. Simply stepping on them will do. But often people standing on Pavegen tiles—at international festivals and publicity events, in subway stations and school hallways—do find themselves jumping up and down. It’s fun to see […] Read More »
By James McWilliams
Every now and then, an innovation comes along that fundamentally redefines the way humans live. Some curious tinkerer has a breakthrough and harnesses fire, steals electricity from the sky, or compresses steam to power an engine. Or, as a German chemist named Fritz Haber did on July 3, 1909, reaches into […] Read More »
By Sarah DeWeerdt
Artists and ecological restorationists have a lot in common: both work experimentally with materials that are sometimes unpredictable. But there are tensions between art and restoration, too. To be effective as art, a piece has to stand out to human eyes. To be effective as restoration, it has to blend in […] Read More »
Many people look at skyscrapers and see symbols of human ingenuity and power. Richard Lunt sees actual power—in the form of electricity. Lunt, an engineering professor at Michigan State University, aims to develop solar windows capable of turning tall buildings into zero-emissions power plants.
Embedding an electricity-generating solar cell in a window is not […] Read More »
When you look at an athletic shoe, think oil. Some shoes contain cotton, leather, and/or trace amounts of natural rubber. But what you lace up before pounding the pavement is probably an assortment of industrial chemicals derived from hydrocarbons.
Two petroleum-based synthetics—polyester and polyurethane—make up 36 percent of the weight of a typical […] Read More »
People are not used to thinking about plants as dynamic, responsive, and sensitive beings. Some intrepid botanists have tried talking to their plants, but the foliage never gave much feedback. Yet scientists keep uncovering amazing ways that plants, in their unassuming manner, actually sense their surroundings.
Engineers and artists have also grown interested in […] Read More »
Hood River, Oregon, is a small town in the Columbia River Gorge that bills itself as the windsurfing capital of the world. As a teenager, Corwin Hardham was a Hood River regular. Zipping back and forth across the river, blown by the winds funneled through the gorge, he got a first-hand sense of their […] Read More »
No matter what your style, your clothes make a difference—ecologically, that is. We buy a lot of clothes. In the U.S. alone, 19.4 billion garments were sold in 2011; 97 percent of them were manufactured abroad. We wash a lot of clothes: the average American family runs almost 400 loads of laundry per year. […] Read More »
In 2004, Saul Griffith, a young Australian who was working on his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won a thirty-thousand-dollar award that is given each year to a student who has shown unusual promise as an inventor. Griffith was an obvious candidate. Neil Gershenfeld, one of his professors, described him to me […] Read More »
The worldwide shipping industry—the fleet of giant ships carrying more than half the goods moved around the world each year—owns more than 17 million shipping containers. About 20 percent of those containers are empty, and they’re not always in the right place to be loaded with goods for the next shipment. Moving one of […] Read More »
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