Our homes were never designed for energy efficiency. So what happens when designers, architects, and engineers approach the problem? From the European Solar Decathlon: “The house generates twice as much energy in Hungarian conditions and three times as much in Madrid as the house itself spends,” the Odooproject team states. “This amount is able to …
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From a Calgary Herald report: “The Holy Grail is figuring out how to get the public engaged on this issue. The problem is that the typical output of climate studies is statistical information that’s impenetrable to most people,” said Karen Akerlof. “If you can help people feel they’ve actually experienced what’s happening, they may be able to …
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I’m excited for the new PBS web series, A Moment of Science. It will feature short video clips on YouTube discussing basic science concepts. I love the idea of skipping television and going straight for the web audience. But I think it all depends on the videos going viral. They are off to a decent start …
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A few weeks ago, I shared a study that found nutrients in the U.S. food supply are declining. Which could explain why millions of Americans, who prefer to be thin, are overeating to get more nutrients. Another study found that industrial farming techniques – including the use of petroleum-based fertilizer – reduces nutrient levels in food, …
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One of the joys a Pandora listener experiences is hearing a song for the first time. That moment when the music genome offers up his ideal genetic match from an artist he’s never heard before. And when he clicks the bio to learn more, the AllMusic database loads up a charming piece of prose: Undeniably …
In one corner you have the heavyweight, Google Maps, with a seven-year head start and a vast amount of data. In the other corner you have the underdog with a very big bank account, Apple Maps. Round one begins with the iPhone 5 – loaded with iOS 6 – removing all traces of Google Maps and …
I love that Amazon is rekindling the newspaper subscription through the e-reader. It invokes an image of reading the newspaper in the morning, with my coffee and family at the table. But replace the newspaper with a Kindle and does it still work? If you’re a digital geek of course. And the beauty of online …
For the past two years ESPN has held internal hackathons. And while they keep saying that these hacker creations “have been incorporated across the ESPN ecosystem, SC Feed is the first to emerge largely unchanged from the concept stage.” And it looks perfect. Modeled after the Twitter apps on iPhone and iPad – and using the …
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If you thought this summer was warm, so did everybody else, from USA Today: While the USA sweated through one of its warmest summers on record, so, too, did the rest of the globe. “Considering global land surfaces only, June – Aug. 2012 was record warm, at 1.85 degrees above average.” Only the summers of …
From The Wall Street Journal: Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have persuaded 11 more of their billionaire peers to promise to give away half of their wealth, including tech luminaries Gordon Moore (co-founder Intel) and Reed Hastings (co-founder Netflix). The new 11 will join the Giving Pledge, a campaign Gates and Buffett launched in 2010 …
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