Category Archives: Other Stuff
The first hydrogen refueling station to be directly connected to a hydrogen pipeline has swung its doors open in the United States recently, designed and constructed by Toyota. Located in Torrance in California, this station does not require trucks to bring in a hydrogen gas supply, and simply hooks on to the pipeline instead. The pipeline originates at the Wilmington and Carson plants owned by Air Products. The station has been leased and will be managed by Shell and will be used to service Toyota’s fleet of 100 fuel cell test vehicles that the automaker plans to bring to the U.S. between now and 2013.
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As the world turns towards greener energy use, wind farms in Scotland have had their plugs pulled out instead! Six Scottish wind farms have now stopped energy production after the National Grid ended up overloaded with energy last month, on a windy night. That seems fair. What took us by surprise was the compensation the operators were paid by the National Grid for plugging out! Payments worth 20 times the value of the power they would have produced were paid out to the operators, one receiving £312,000, while another benefited by £263,000 from compensations. Too much of a good thing turns everything sour, that’s what the government probably learned from this incident that was pulled out from below the covers by Renewable Energy Foundation, a green watchdog organization.
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Skateboarding is fun and exhilarating and it gets even better knowing that those sets of wheels beneath your feet are green. Behold the three greenest skateboard decks around, Bamboo SK8, Habitat and Element. To start off with, Bamboo SK8’s decks are made from a custom blend of 3 ply bamboo and 2 ply Canadian Maple held together by water based glues making them durable and eco-friendly. Besides that, part of the sales income is being donated by the company to help rebuild Japan. Habitat’s skateboard decks are lightweight and have a great grip, made from water based glues and custom blends of bamboo, cork, hemp and Canadian Maple, again, an eco-friendly way to skate. Element’s Helium skateboard deck line use five air chamber cores and use a reduced amount of wood too.
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Glaucoma patients have oodles of troubles with their eyesight, owing to damage caused to their optic nerves that ultimately causes vision loss. However, all hope isn’t lost, not with solar energy and nanotechnology being so prevalent today! The solar-powered eye sensor design we came across could be the next best way to reinitiate a patient’s eye-sight. These little devices measure the size of a cubic millimeter and are capable of taking in measurements every 15 minutes while uploading the readings daily via 400MHz and 900MHz frequencies. The device uses an antenna of 47 microwatts and transmits signals with the pulse of the capacitor.
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Little did we know just how polluting being a human-being really is, even hybrid cars are greener than us these days! A professor of physiology at the University of Milan, Alberto E. Minetti, came up with the astounding fact that a group of four people running, harms the environment a lot more, leaving behind a darker carbon footprint, than having them drive in one hybrid car! The emission let out by a hybrid car carrying four people is slightly lesser than that created by four men running a mile. And yes, statistics also claim that women pollute lesser then men.
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Researchers at MIT plan to leave the solar-panel-building task to viruses, stating that such organisms could help carefully layout carbon nanotubes and help align them too! MIT envisions legions of viruses setting out to build solar panels and help ensure nanoscale components work fine. Using nanotubes could help push the scales upwards for solar-panel efficiency. Maintaining these however can be a pain though, and is best left to the little viruses to do. The nanotubes, basically rolled-up sheets of graphene, help improve solar cell efficiency by quite a commendable extent.
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Proctor and Gamble have decided to give their brand Pantene a touch of green. The hair-care brand will soon begin shipping its first plant-based plastic containers in Western European stores. The new packaging to be used by the brand is mainly sourced from sugarcane and will help pull down the company’s fossil-fuel consumption by 70 percent. Besides that, switching to this new packaging material will also help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 170 percent. The packaging will stick to its old look, except for an added green label, which might just go unnoticed too.
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Growing a plant at home isn’t all that easy. To stay alive, you need to shower all the attention, love and water on your green buddy, making sure it stays hydrated. And if that’s just too much to fit onto your busy schedule, here’s a way to grow some green at home, that doesn’t take up too much of your time. This vertical garden designed by Brooklyn designer Danielle Trofe is called the Life Screen and works as an automated sprinkler system. The system waters the plants that you grow in the provided pods at a preset time every day or week, as per your preference. Excess water trickles down to a collection tank through a set of plastic tubes to prevent water wastage.
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The Indian defense forces have struck upon a novel way to cast a spying eye with the help of solar energy. Solar-powered spy drones could be the newest addition to the IAF (Indian Air Force), capable of cruising the sky for several days at a time. This high-altitude long endurance (HALE) solar-powered UAV will help provide for a cost-effective and flexible 24×7 ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance) platform. Currently, a drone which can undertake a 15-day continuous flight over 30,000-feet is being developed by DRDO.
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“Get on that hamster-wheel if you want the music playing!”- A subtle message sent out at the 2011 Coachella Music Festival. The music festival held in California made use of a one-of-a-kind DJ booth powered up with human-energy! Designed by Global Inheritance in collaboration with Coachella, this DJ booth made use of an energy-generating playground to power up. In order to supply sufficient energy and keep the music playing, people from the crowd stepped on bicycles hooked on to power generators, stepped on to human-sized hamster-wheels, energy-generating swings and hand-cranks. It did seem like to be a gym-like environment, with the music encouraging the people to break out into a sweat and power away!
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