Cross lunch with dinner and you get linner. Cross spoon with fork and you get a spork. But what about when you cross a soccer ball with an electric socket?
A group of non-engineering Harvard students engineered one of the most ingenious things I have seen in a lile (long+while). The Soccket is a soccer ball on the surface, energy storage device on the inside. Just thirty minutes of kicking the ball around will generate 3 hours worth of battery for lights or other electronics later.
So the Ivy’s are living up to their reputation. Pure genius if you ask me. Soccer is life for many in regions of world that could use electricity the most.
Come September 2012, deep-sea diving won’t just be for the coastal populations and tropical vacationers. In fact, anyone from the land-locked to the hydrophobic donning nothing more than their pajamas and having access to an internet connection can transport themselves deep under the sea via 360-degree panoramic views of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The Catlin Seaview Survey is expected to launch in September, providing never-before-seen footage of Australia’s 1,429 mile-long reef. They and their primary partner Google are hoping this project will help raise awareness about climate change and its impacts on our planet’s oceans as well as provide a base-line for future studies that will allow for more precise analysis of climate change impacts.
Lionfish, Tiger Sharks and Robots! Oh, my!
The Catlin Seaview Survey has three primary components:
A shallow reef survey to capture the reef in 360-degree panoramic views with specially developed robotic cameras. The images will serve as a baseline for scientists all over the world to study.
A deep reef survey to capture effects of climate change on an ecosystem that has previously been difficult to study due to its depth. The study will provide information on the structure and biology of the deepwater reefs on the Great Barrier Reef and assess their susceptibility to climate change.
A megafauna survey to tag and track manta ray turtles and tiger sharks using satellite tags and live tracking in relation to oceanographic data. This will provide insight into how larger animals are changing their distributions as the seas are warming.
The Armchair Diving Experience
As a virtual diver, one can explore the Great Barrier Reef’s depths using the project’s YouTube channel, Panoramio, Google Earth, Google Maps and the custom-made 360-degree viewer. The expedition already has a demo available from their six-day pilot mission where they discovered a new species of pygmy seahorse and four new types of coral.
When armchair divers have explored the extent of the 1,429 mile-long by 100-meter deep Great Barrier Reef coral system, they are welcome to add to the scientific knowledge base by helping with coral measurements and fish counts. In this way, the public is provided with the opportunity to discover the 93% of the reef yet unexplored right alongside the scientists.
The Last Frontier
This is it. The last frontier to be discovered on our planet and we’re afforded with the opportunity to explore it together. Depending on the success of the Catlin Seaview Survey, virtual diving may spread to cover other coral ecosystems as well. This survey throws a much-needed spotlight on the state of our planet’s coral reefs; an ecosystem that some scientists are projecting may completely disappear by the end of the 21st century due to the combined effects of climate change and human interference. In the words of one of the project’s partners, Jenifer Austin Foulkes, “We are working to create a canvas and are now looking for scientists and others to tell the story.” The story of the health of our oceans, that is.
What motivates you to make a behavior change? Is it the potential for reward? Is it the fear of what might happen if you don’t stop? Or the hope of what might happen if you do? Is it the chance for a new identity? A new status? Volkswagen has set up a contest calling all thinkers to design games that motivate people to make healthier, safer, and more eco-friendly choices. They’re calling it The Fun Theory.
The Fun Theory
Volkswagen’s reasoning is that more people are more likely to adopt a different behavior if they have fun in the process. Volkswagen themselves is using the concept when designing their cars. Their goal is to make it more fun for people to drive environmentally friendly cars.
And the idea doesn’t have to stop with cars…
The Fun Theory contest has received some very creative entries including a Bottle Bank Arcade machine, a trash can with sound effects, a speed camera lottery, and a piano staircase next to an escalator. The difference a little added fun makes is truly impacting.
Whack-a-Mole recycling style
This Fun Theory entry fondly reminds me of my childhood days playing Whack-a-mole at the local Chuck E. Cheese’s. Except in this version you’re not armed with a mallet designed to whack a mole. In this version, all you need are some bottles in need of recycling and quick reflexes. You just may be the new high score if you can keep up with the flashing lights indicating which slot to toss your bottle into.
Talking trash cans
When a trash can speaks, you listen. And then because it was so cool and unexpected, you find the nearest piece of litter and throw that in too just to simply hear it again. More than twice as much trash found its way into this bin than the next nearest bin in the park.
Speeding ticket in reverse
What happens when you don’t speed and a certain camera is paying attention? It’s not a ticket that will arrive in your mailbox but it may be a check funded by those drivers who did receive a ticket in theirs. This is the new speed camera lottery. Speed and you pay. Don’t and you might grow richer.
Escalator or musical steps?
Musical steps, duh! Apparently, I’m not alone in thinking this because there was a 66% increase in the use of the stairs after the piano was installed.
If the grass is always greener on the other side then grab your things because ‘the other side’ is where we need to be if these new solar panels take off. An MIT researcher named Andrea Mershin may have just sparked what could be the next big revolution in energy production and its main ingredient is anything green.
Magical Ingredient
PS-I is the name. Also known as the tiny structures within plant cells that carry out photosynthesis. Paint the stuff on a surface that can produce an electric current when exposed to light and you’ve got yourself a solar panel. Ok well, there is one more step. The PS-I in the ‘green’ must concentrate before it can be of use and the more PS-I exposed and able to drink up sunlight, the more power generated.
Magical Solution
Mershin was inspired by none-other than a forest of pines when he came up with the design for his new take on the solar panel. Picking up where fellow MIT researcher Shuguang Zhang left off, Mershin created a web of electron-carrying nanowires coated in PS-I that allow sunlight to trickle down to a sunlight sponge of titanium dioxide that then connects to a circuit and voila! Hello cheap power.
Pine Trees?
Where do the pine trees fit into this scheme of nanowires and sponges? Well, the issue with Zhang’s initial model was its less-than-efficient design. Useful amounts of sunlight weren’t able to trickle down to the underlying circuit when the PS-I complex was merely spread across the surface of the panel. As it turns out, the trick to maximum trickling is to mimic a pine tree. Some pines have smaller branches extending down the entire trunk. Those branches drink up the sunlight that manages to trickle down through the upper branches. Mershin recreated the multi-layered branch system of a pine tree with PS-I coated nanowires to expose more PS-I to sunlight. There you have it: from pine forest to nanoforest.
Not so fast…
Although Mershin’s ingenious design was 10,000 times more efficient than Zhang’s initial model, there is still a long way to go before this technology is ready to leave the lab. For one, it produces a mere 0.1 percent of sunlight’s energy to electricity. When you compare that to the 10 to 15 percent that today’s solar panels produce you begin to see just how much development still needs to occur. Due to simplicity of Mershin’s process, many more scientific minds are able to work on an even more efficient model.
Where we’re heading
When those same scientific minds do finally improve the efficiency, low-tech electricity will reach areas of the world that previously had never produced or consumed electricity. The future PS-I powered solar panels would require some grass clippings, an inexpensive filter membrane for the PS-I concentration, and some chemicals to stabilize the PS-I molecules all neatly packaged in a small plastic bag with some cartoon instructions. As Mershin sees it, “within a few years a villager in a remote, off-grid location could take that bag, mix it with anything green and paint it on the roof to start producing power, which could then charge cellphones or lanterns.”
NYC is growing a bit taller with their new plan to garden over 1,200 acres of the potentially fertile, rolling rooftops currently lying vacant across the city. It’ll be a million-dollar view for NYC’s newest vegetation. Due to city law and the ‘bigger is better’ mantra of most big-city builders, many buildings in NYC were constructed to meet their maximum allowable height. Now, they are being given a few more feet to play around with as long as their plans include and only include growing plants.
There are restrictions on which buildings are allowed to grow. The city’s planning department has limited the high-altitude gardening to commercial buildings only. Mostly because of the temptation residential building owners may have to develop amidst the lush, once ugly-and-concrete rooftops and thus redefine the meaning of penthouse property.
Beyond the benefits of an influx of home-grown vegetables and jobs, NYC may have also found a solution to relieving some of the pressure on it’s sewage system during periods of heavy rainfall. The new rooftop gardens will include rainwater catchments and reuse systems.
Life is meant to be lived fully. I know I for one have sometimes allowed the small stuff to drag me down and stress about the future to pollute my thoughts and get in the way of a life fully lived. But it’s a new year! A fresh start to get rid of the bad and let in the good. So get out there and create the experiences of your dreams this 2012. Happy New Year everyone!!!
The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. -Eleanor Roosevelt
Holy guacamole! These girls know how to shush a room. Two courageous 20-somethings from the United States, Anjali Appadurai and Abigail Borah are two memorable figures of the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban, South Africa. The conference wrapped up just this past weekend. Making a name for themselves in the final hours of the meeting, Appadurai and Borah somehow managed to very articulately and passionately voice the pressing need for urgent climate change action. They do come across as slightly radical but allow me to shed some light on what’s at stake here. The severity in their voices may make sound a little more reasonable.
Up until this moment, the actions the world has taken to combat climate change and keep global carbon concentration in the atmosphere at a ‘safe’ level have been frustratingly weak. Every international meeting has become a childish argument that pits the developing nations in one corner and the developed nations in another. The argument goes a little like this:
Developed Nation: “I’m not doing anything until everyone has to do something.”(This is really the United States, Canada and Australia)
Developing Nation: “Well, you got to develop with cheap fossil fuel. Now that we’re in a position to develop that way, we can’t??? …. And you’re going to continue???? ” (This is India and China)
Developed Nation: “You know what? I’m kind of busy with other things right now. Can I pencil you in for this little climate agreement in… hmm… when do I have an opening? Ah! 20 years from now looks to be free. Sound good?”
Developing Nation #1: “jka;kldiem 20 years!?!? My home will be underwater in 5!!
Developing Nation #2: “double-u tee ef. My country is already suffering the worst droughts we’ve ever experienced! We’re hungry!!”
Developing Nation #3: “Rich nation say what??? My entire country’s population has been displaced after yet another hurricane beat us to scraps and rubble, not to mention the number of lives we lost!!!”
Developed Nation: “eh…umm…eh…That’s too bad…eh…eh… I’m sorry to hear about your loss…. Now about MY economy.”
That’s a rough picture of what seems to occur at every meeting. The developed nations (*clears throat* United States) operate nonchalantly and with an air of calm. The developing nations operate with as much ferocity as if their lives were on the line. Oh wait. They are. The issue is complex because it is the countries that didn’t create our current climatic changes that are suffering the greatest impacts and will continue to suffer increasingly more devastating impacts. The prescribed ‘safe’ global carbon concentration high-end target is 350 ppm. This concentration would limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. 350 and 2. Two numbers that the small island developing states and countless other developing nations are fighting ferociously for and understandably so.
Hopes were not high heading into this round of the climate talks in Durban. In fact the highest of hopes included a possible settling of the Green Climate Fund (A piggy bank for rich nations to drop money into and whose contents would then be distributed to impacted nations for recovery, green development, and adaptation). Rumors were circulating that the Kyoto Protocol was even at risk of completely falling apart. The Kyoto Protocol was a plan set up in 1997 at the COP3 meeting in Kyoto, Japan to establish binding emissions targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European Union. The United States opted to sit out of this agreement, mush to the world’s dismay. The first commitment period is ending in 2012. As a result, one of the top priorities for this meeting in Durban was to create a replacement plan that would bind countries to renew and expand their emissions reduction targets.
Now, as we sit on the other side of the 17th Conference of the Parties, we have an extension to the Kyoto Protocol for another 5 or 7 years (In the wake of Durban, Canada dropped out of Kyoto for interests most likely related to those precious tar sands and dreams of dollar bills ya’ll), an empty Green Climate Fund, an Adaptation Committee to coordinate global adaptation efforts, rules for a global program to limit and monitor deforestation, and the creation of a Climate Technology Center whose purpose is to set greenhouse gas emission reduction projects into motion. And….. drum roll please….At the 11th hour, all parties agreed to the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (DPEA).” Much like Kyoto, in that the DPEA will establish binding emission reduction targets. Much unlike Kyoto, in that both developed AND developing nations are now included in the emissions reductions. The deal calls for an official treaty to be forged by 2015 and full implementation by 2020.
These results are remarkable and do admittedly exceed expectations but they are still just not nearly ambitious enough. Under all agreements that were made, we are headed for a temperature rise of 3.5 degrees C by 2100. We need emissions to peak by 2020 not begin putting on the brakes.
The whole climate negotiation process is ‘stuck’. It is going to take mass movements by the ‘silent majority’ to get things moving. What do I mean by the ‘silent majority’? I mean the people who Anjali Appadurai and Abigail Borah represent, half of the world’s population, the youth.This is a global problem. One that takes everyone’s participation in solving. This makes it especially challenging but not impossible.
In the words of one of my favorite heroes, Nelson Mandela:
Sometimes it takes stumbling upon an extremely well-done video located on a certain floating campus out in the middle of some ocean somewhere playing to the sound of your favorite song of all time to remind you just how much something means to you. Know what I mean? Probably not so I’ll fill you in…
This is Semester at Sea. The experience that has shaped is shaping my life in ways I never could have dreamed of. This video pretty much opened the floodgates of emotions, memories, lessons and an embarrassing amount of wet, soppy tears (If it was still Thanksgiving, I know what my slip for the ‘Thankful Tree’ would have been. Something involving my sobfest and you fortunately not seeing it). Talk about depths of emotion! I had no idea all of that was bottled up inside me just casually waiting for this morning and that video to break surface.
Life is absolutely, unconditionally, no question, straight up about community and feeling a part of the community. And by community, I’m talking as large as the scales go. A.K.A. global. I have a feeling even those of you reading this who haven’t traveled with Semester at Sea can sense the genuine community spirit that shines through in that video. We are all represented. Whether you are from a small village in Ghana or a big city in the United States. It truly doesn’t matter what country you hail from or what language you speak because we are all connected by one undeniable fact: We are all citizens of the same planet or if you’d prefer, in honor of lunch time everywhere: We are all ingredients on the same sandwich. We need each other to taste good. It’s that simple. I’ve seen what large masses of people can do when they join together for a cause. You’ve seen it too. It’s incredible. It’s limitless. It’s what the world needs more of. Recently, there have been so many good examples of this. The Penn State community banding together to raise over $500,000 for victims of sexual abuse in the wake of the Sandusky scandal, is just one. Delaying the Keystone Pipeline is another. The Occupy movement is yet another one. I think you can supply the rest. And these examples don’t even involve the scale we could go and you see what they’re accomplishing. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we all banded together? It’s almost like trying to fathom the universe. It makes your head spin.
Semester at Sea does a great job of strengthening that connection between every member of this global community to which we are all members. Not one person is excluded. Cue the warm fuzzies, right? Semester at Sea has helped me to fully realize my membership in this community and this video reminded me just how grateful I am for that. I have never been in such an atmosphere that bursts with as much community spirit. It truly became a family for me. That’s why Semester at Sea works every time. They throw hundreds of people on a ship, send ’em around the world, give ’em the opportunity of a lifetime after opportunity of a lifetime, and watch as with each passing voyage, new global ambassadors find their footing in the world from such a fresh perspective. You saw the sense of community in that video. That existed just the same on my voyage. And on every other, I am doubtlessly sure. It already exists here in this world somewhere too. Probably deeper than the depths of my deepest emotional surprise this morning. Hard to believe, but most likely true. I’m ready to fish for it. Are you?
I just want to say to every single reader that I love you and I am so glad you and I ended up on the same earth at the same time. Let’s do big things, family!
Ethical mind game of the day: You’re a cop in South London and you catch a man armed with scrub brushes, old socks, cleaning fluid, and a high pressure hose defacing the wall of a tunnel. There are absolutely no signs of spray paint or wallpaper paste aound. On the surface, his end product does look a lot like graffiti so you proceed to make the arrest on the charge of criminal damage. Then the man says, “The marks were made by pollution. If you want to arrest the perpetrators of this crime, you should get with the people who created this pollution. The only thing I’ve damaged is dirt.” What do you do? Do you really have a criminal on your hands? Has he technically done anything wrong?
Two cops in South London did face this dilemma when they caught Paul Curtis, aka Moose, scrubbing the dirt off of a grimy tunnel wall in Leeds. Only he wasn’t just scrubbing it, he was artistically manipulating the dirty surface into something much more aesthetically pleasing. The cops did initially arrest him but a plea to use the bathroom at a nearby pub resulted in some extra time for the cops to reconsider their decision. Eventually he was let go and Moose has been ‘cleaning things’ all over the world ever since. Here are just a few examples of his work from places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, :
Moose’s grafitti in reverse has gotten him worldwide recognition and he has since teamed up with corporations and local causes to help get certain messages out. He especially enjoys working with environmental groups. According to Moose, “The environmental message [in my art] is unavoidable. I’m writing in grime.” He goes on to say, “I could stand around all day long telling people how what we’re doing is ruining the planet, but if I can intrigue them enough to look closer, and then shock them with the contrast between where the wall was cleaned and where it was dirty … It’s just a quirky little way of getting the point out to people.”
I’ll tell you what, Moose could probably make some pretty incredible masterpieces on my shower door or even on the screen of the computer I am currently using to write this post. Maybe that would send the message I should clean up every once in a while… On second thought it would most likely encourage me to find more ways to create surfaces for him to express himself. That’s really all I’m doing when I decide to forego cleaning. It’s all for the benefit of Moose. Okay, I should probably stop before I single-handedly undermine his cause and purpose.
Moral of the story: Clean up our world! Thanks Moose for reminding us what clean looks like.
Peaces of the Puzzle 