Climate Technology
All Stories
-
New solar cells can be printed right onto buildings
The world's largest dye-sensitized solar cell has just made an appearance. These cells have a couple of major advantages over traditional solar cells: one, they're incredibly cheap, and two, they can be printed right onto the materials used to make a building. Right now they’re being incorporated into girders manufactured by Tata steel.
-
Solar-powered laptop lets you play outside while you work
What's the best way to piss off a computer scientist? Buy her a laptop that only works when it gets enough sun. It's the perfect gag gift for the basement-dwelling, vitamin D-deprived coder in your life.
-
Texas' fracking disclosure law has huge omissions
Yesterday we told you about Texas governor Rick Perry doing something right for once -- he passed of a law forcing drillers to disclose the chemicals used in the controversial and environmentally destructive practice of hydraulic fracturing. Turns out the law has a bunch of loopholes that corporations are duty-bound to exploit in accordance with their legal obligation to maximize shareholder value, even if doing so threatens people’s health. Maybe you've heard this story before?
-
Dumpster diver says: Trader Joe’s must stop wasting food
I feed my family food from the dumpster, as explained in my new documentary "Dive!" But we need supermarkets to stop throwing good food in the dumpster in the first place.
-
The small-c conservatism of U.S. power companies
The U.S. power sector is biased in favor of the familiar. It's not well-suited to producing the risk-taking and innovation we need in clean electricity
-
The Pope is getting a hybrid car
The next popemobile will be a hybrid -- not just a hybrid between a pick-up truck and a dunking booth, like usual, but a gas/electric hybrid car that can go around 16 miles in all-electric mode.
-
Small nuclear reactors get their first customer, but are no panacea
Small nuclear reactors are the mobile homes of the the nuclear power universe -- they can be built in factories rather than on-site, then shipped to their destination and hooked up to the local power grid without any expensive upgrades to transmission infrastructure.
-
EcoCar winner produces totally normal car that gets 81 MPG
Because Americans are big babies who would rather strangle their economy with energy shortages than drive a car that is even vaguely weird, the Department of Energy's EcoCar challenge asked a bunch of universities to build the most energy efficient car possible using a stock General Motors body and a bunch of fairly typical parts.
-
Bamboo iPhone speaker amplifies music with zero electricity
The iBamboo speaker makes use of the naturally resonant properties of bamboo to provide zero-electricity amplification for the iPhone 4. Yeah, you could get more gadgets to go with your gadget, but this is probably cooler -- no wires, no energy use, and it adds as much Zen cool to your desk as a tiny portable waterfall (which would need to be plugged in anyway).
-
How oil and gas companies that deny climate change are adapting to it anyway
Next to agriculture, the industry most vulnerable to climate change is, arguably, the extraction of the very fossil fuels that are causing it, says Michael Cote at GOOD. And while this industry is spending millions to deny that climate change even exists and to block efforts to deal with it, it's also going to need to spend billions to cope with its effects.
Sure, climate change sucks harder than a collapsed star, but at least it's leading to ironies so vast that only particles of sputtering dumbfoundedness can escape.