Category Archives: Other Stuff
Bees will soon live happier lives in beehives, with beekeepers turning to solar energy. High-tech solar-powered cooling devices might soon be the latest appliances hooked on to beehives, in an attempt to keep domesticated bees stress-free and happy. These systems will power up by soaking in the sun, and are said to result in fewer hive mites. That’s not all. Keeping the bees cool keeps them calm too. However, skeptics feel that a system like this could result in lazy bees that lose the ability to look after themselves, turning bee colonies into social structures constantly in need of attention!
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What happens to all those misprinted and old candy bar wrappers? Well, they sure don’t end up on store shelves. They probably just end up in landfills, waiting for people like designer Emiliano Godoy to pick them up and use them to create something fantastic, like the Snowjob chair. The designer used old candy bar wrappers to build this chair, a classic example of recycling. Now you needn’t worry about a sticky backside after sitting on this one. The wrappers have never been used before. They simply are factory rejects that never fulfilled their life’s purpose of keeping your candy safe.
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The Crealy Great Adventure Park in Devon, UK, is all set to go green. The theme park will now have a new building, a little away from its “theme” that will help power up the park in a green way. Plans for a 1MW solar power plant are being drawn up, that could just find its way into the 100 acre park. Renewable energy company, Low Carbon Solar, will set up this photovoltaic power plant. The plant is expected to fulfill at least 90% of the park’s total energy requirements during the months of sunshine. This includes the power required for the roller coasters and the food stalls too! Unused energy will be sent back to the National Grid. a total of 18,580m2 of solar photovoltaic panels will be set up on the roof of the park’s main buildings while carports will also integrate solar panels.
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We just stumbled across an appliance Jack might have found in the castle up the Beanstalk! A colossal ceiling fan! This one’s huge, bigger than any we’ve ever seen before at least. The fan, known as the Isis was designed and developed by Big Ass Fans, a company with a highly appropriate name, taken that it manufactures products like these. Nomenclature aside, this fan works like every other, using the principals of hot air rising to its advantage and keeping the room pleasent. Now we sure don’t need to remind you that a fan like this needs an equally big room to play home. Here’s the green touch. This fan uses lesser energy than the normally sized ones, taken that it uses curved angled wings and a patented air foil design that optimizes airflow. The fan expertly warms your home during winters and keeps you cool during the sunshine months.
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We all wash our hands. Its hygiene and is necessary. But while doing so, most of us, we wouldn’t say all, do tend to waste a few precious liters of water, unnecessarily. Here’s a faucet that makes sure you use just the required amount of water to wash your hands, without allowing those precious liters flow down the drain. The water conserving faucet uses a test-tube shaped tube that sits atop. The tube stores an exact liter of water. Opening the faucet let’s out the water from the tube. Switching it off allows for the tube to fill up with water again for your next wash. Known as the 1l Limit, this faucet was designed by Yonggu Do, Dohyung Kim & Sewon Oh. It sure could work at public wash basins, especially those that do not make use of the optical sensor switches that turn them on and off automatically.
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We’ve seen some pretty green stoves around before like the Scan 58 environment friendly wood burning stove and the BioLite stove. Here’s yet another green way to cook your meal, designed by Yonggu Do & Eunha Seo. Known as the Hot Liner, this stove is basically a flexible panel that forms the stove top. The stove works best in hot desert climates and is aimed for use in places like Africa. The belts put together increase the heat intensity, making it ideal for cooking and just right to accommodate bigger utensils. The concept won the Golden Haechi award at the 2010 Seoul International Design Competition too. Working on the concepts of a solar heat cooker, the charge generated is used for cooking purposes.
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The National Football League has decided to work towards the greener good and has rolled out plans to offset its energy expenditures this year. Adding it all up, this could easily sum up to a good 15,000 megawatt hours and the League will set of on its offsets with renewable energy certificates by Just Energy. The energy offsets could help power 1,500 homes for a whole year! The 2011 Super Bowl is being billed as the greenest NFL championship on record too with all direct and indirect carbon emissions associated with power generation at major Super Bowl XLV venues being offset with RECs or renewable energy certificates.
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The construction industry might just have greener materials to build with in future. Recently, scientists at the University of Amsterdam have come up with a process for creating fully biodegradable, non-toxic and non-hazardous thermoset resins. Made from easily available and low-cost plant material, this type of plastic can be used to make MDF panels too. It can also help replace polyurethane and polystyrene packaging, that too without pushing up production costs or time. These bio plastics range from hard foam material to flexible thin sheets and were created by Professor Gadi Rothenberg and Dr. Albert Alberts of the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Heterogeneous Catalysis and Sustainable Chemistry research group.
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warning signs from Susan Ngo on Vimeo.
Well, we’ve never seen a color changing shirt before, not counting laundry disasters like fading and such. Neither have we ever come across a shirt that detects pollution! So, stumbling across this one sure had us all amazed. Developed by two graduate students in NYU’s interactive telecommunications program, Nien Lam and Sue Ngo, just two of these currently exits. One uses a heart and the other has a pair of lungs. Each of these has blue veins that glow out loud every time high carbon levels are detected. This one sure will keep the wearer well aware of the carbon monoxide levels around!
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The Dubai Creek will now play home to solar panels that will soak in the sun’s rays and juice up the batteries of a little boat that the maintenance engineers will use. The boat, a battery powered vessel, is being tested currently by German-engineering firm Waagner Biro Gulf. The firm has also developed a system of cleaning up solar panels and keeping dust away using treated sewage water. A portacabin passes on the sewage through a reed cabin that treats the water and cleanses it. In future, the solar panels will be used to charge up bigger boats that run on electricity if all goes as planned.
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