The smartest move the commercial airline industry ever made was to convince consumers to pay extra for what used to be the minimum. It’s even got a name: “calculated misery.”
ARC conducted an aerial and underwater survey of the reef which concluded that two-thirds of it has been hit by mass coral bleaching for second time in 12 months.
Credit: Ed Roberts/ARC
The loss of coral reefs caused by rising sea temperatures could cost $1 trillion globally, a report from Australia’s Climate Council has projected, with the loss of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef alone costing that region 1m visitors a year, imperilling 10,000 jobs and draining $1bn from the economy.
The longest global coral bleaching event on record, which began in 2014 and has affected some reefs in consecutive years, has given reefs little chance to recover, and should be a “wake-up call” to act to save the natural and economic assets, the Climate Council’s Lesley Hughes said.
“The extraordinary devastation being experienced on the Great Barrier Reef is due to the warming of our oceans, driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas,” Hughes said. […]
Hydrostor’s Toronto Island system
A Canadian company called Hydrostor has a new compressed-air energy storage system that it says is half the cost of grid-scale batteries and on par with adding a new natural gas plant to a grid.
The system, called Hydrostor Terra, uses electricity when it’s plentiful to compress air and send it underneath the ground into a specially constructed tank. While the system is compressing the air, it also takes the heat generated by the compressors and stores it in a thermal management system. Then, when electricity is in short supply, the Terra system sends that compressed air back up from underground and heats the surfacing air stream using the heat that was captured in the compressing process. The heated air moves a turbo-expander connected to a generator, which creates electricity.
Hydrostor’s method of capturing heat from the compression process is what sets the Terra project apart from other compressed-air energy systems (or CAES systems). Traditionally, CAES systems burn natural gas to […]
Dutch kids at play
Credit: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
The following is an adapted excerpt from The Happiest Kids in the World (The Experiment, April 2017) by Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison.
Two toddlers have just chased each other to the top of a jungle gym while their mothers are lost in conversation on a nearby park bench. A gang of older children in tracksuits comes racing along the bike path, laughing. They overtake a young mom, who is cycling slowly, balancing a baby in a seat on the front of her bike and a toddler on the back. A group of girls is playing monkey-in-the-middle on the grass. Not far away, some boys are perfecting their skateboarding moves. None of the school-age children are accompanied by adults. This is no movie, just a happy scene on a Wednesday afternoon in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark.
In 2013, UNICEF rated Dutch children the happiest in the world. According to researchers, Dutch kids are ahead of their peers in well-being when compared with 29 of […]
Tesla’s solar tiles include a “Tuscan Glass” style
Credit: Tesla
When most people think of powering their homes with solar energy, they imagine a fleet of unsightly panels covering their roofs and yards. But that’s changing fast.
This month, Tesla will begin taking orders for solar shingles that can generate power for the home and still look like everyday roofing tiles.
But roofs aren’t the only surfaces that can hide solar cells. There’s a revolution underway to transform windows, skylights, and roads to generate electricity. The future of solar power will be built into every part of our daily lives.
“Rather than an eyesore on the roof, it becomes actually a feature of the home,” says Christopher Klinga, technical director of the Architectural Solar Association. “People are going to start wanting to put it on the front side of their home to show that they have solar.”
In the Home
Traditional solar panel arrays take up a lot of room and monopolize whatever space they’re mounted on. But with these new solar technologies, called building-integrated photovoltaics, solar […]
