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Conservation

Sustainable Water - A Lesson From India

Anupam Mishra travels across water-challenged India studying rainwater harvesting methods and learning from the people behind them. He presents his findings to NGOs, development agencies and environmental groups, pulling from centuries of indigenous wisdom that has found water for drinking and irrigation even in extremely arid landscapes through wells, filter ponds and other catchment systems.
...
"In [him] lives a spirit, of quiet service, that once existed freely in our politics and our activism, a spirit that has been completely excised from one sphere and remains gravely threatened in the other."
Ramachandra Guha, in The Hindu

Young people are all for saving the environment--as long as doing so makes economic sense, according to new research conducted at Michigan State University.

Based on a survey of 18- to 30-year-olds, researchers from MSU's Eli Broad Graduate School of Management found that young consumers will not pay a premium price for an automobile simply because it is environmentally friendly. Instead, the determining factor – by far – is fuel efficiency.

The findings reveal an eco-savvy generation that has grown up and is coming to grips with the economic reality of paying bills.




Who on Earth would not like a concrete subject? The Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSH) at MIT studies fundamentals to improve on concrete use. CSH also stands for calcium silicate hydrate, the binder phase of concrete. The Great Dome at MIT, shown below in an architectural draft, contains a "cement liner" on sandstone overlay. This image shows, at the top right corner, the CSH model that was proposed by A realistic molecular model of cement hydrates in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 22. Submitted by Roland Pellenq et al. the paper is free online through the PNAS open access option.



There is a subset of people in the environmental conservation movement who hate their fellow man - they like nature but don't think anyone outside of their companies should enjoy it, they should just pay companies to raise money for advocacy.

'Blue haze' is a natural occurrence over heavily forested areas around the world but natural does not always mean good.  Still, while blue haze may be formed by natural emissions of chemicals, human activities can worsen it to the point of affecting the world's weather and even cause potential climate problems, according to a new study.

When you walk through a forest or even a large grassy area, it's not uncommon to be able to smell the plants around you, such as pine trees or other vegetation. That smell is nature's way of naturally making organic gases produced by the plants themselves, often millions of tons per day.


Reduviasporonites were tiny organisms that covered the planet more than 250 million years ago.  According to new research in Geology, they appear to be a species of ancient fungus that thrived in dead wood and the researchers believe that the organisms were able to thrive during this period because the world's forests had been wiped out.

Researchers had previously been unsure as to whether Reduviasporonites were a type of fungus or algae but by analyzing the carbon and nitrogen content of the fossilised remains of the microscopic organisms, the scientists identified them as a type of wood-rotting fungus that would have lived inside dead trees. 


I love it! As soon as I start whining about how humans are always exploiting resources without checking first for sustainability, along comes a story to prove me wrong.

The Giant Pacific Octopus or GPO, who lives throughout the Pacific Northwest (if terrestrial terms) or Northeast (in oceanic terms), has never been the target of a federally managed commercial fishery. But occasionally people murmur about it, and some clever folks have decided that we'd better know a bit more about octopus biology before such a fishery (octopussery?) comes on the scene.


Bad news has come for Illex argentinus, a cousin of my own dear Dosidicus gigas (they're both in the squid family Ommastrephidae). As the scientific name suggests, I. argentinus is found and fished off the coast of Argentina--and the 2009 season has ended with the national catch in precipitous decline from years past.


British start-up Novacem has developed a "carbon-negative" cement, meaning it absorbs more carbon dioxide over its life cycle than it emits.

Cement is a big ol' polluter - with an annual production of more than 2.5 billion tons, Reuters says, conventional "Portland" cement is responsible for an estimated 5 percent of global CO2
emissions, more than the airline industry.