Category Archives: Environment

IBM Provides Smartphone Data Services for Solar-Powered Robot Car Journey From Italy to China

*Smartphones to Collect and Tweet CO2 Levels as Part of Environmental Research Project*   

MILAN, Italy – 26 Jul 2010: The VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge (VIAC), an epic 13,000km journey from Parma, Italy to Shanghai, China using unmanned, solar energy powered vehicles, aims to showcase the benefits of green transport.    

Over the course of the trip, the automated vehicles will use IBM Human Centric solutions to collect data on CO2 pollutants in the regions covered along the way – Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and China – using the data to assess the health and environmental impact of CO2 in these areas.

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BP, Deepwater Horizon and the Armageddon Scenario

What exactly is going on in the Gulf of Mexico? When there are reports of media blackouts, then the natural reaction is to start investigating, and in the current environmental catastrophe, the more stones one turns, the more horrific the potential scenario becomes. While scare mongering is as pointless as it is dangerous, the truth remains that the media have the duty to inform. (more…)

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Berkeley Lab Part of California Team to Receive up to $122 million for Energy Innovation Hub to Develop Method to Produce Fuels from Sunlight

Washington, D.C. – As part of a broad effort to achieve breakthrough innovations in energy production, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman announced, on July 22, an award of up to $122 million over five years to a multidisciplinary team of top scientists to establish an Energy Innovation Hub aimed at developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight.

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Global Model Confirms: Cool Roofs Can Offset Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Mitigate Global Warming

Can light-colored rooftops and roads really curb carbon emissions and combat global climate change?  

The idea has been around for years, but now, a new study by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that is the first to use a global model to study the question has found that implementing cool roofs and cool pavements in cities around the world can not only help cities stay cooler, they can also cool the world, with the potential of canceling the heating effect of up to two years of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.

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Whether Glaciers Float May Affect Sea-Level Rise

WASHINGTON — Glaciers that detach from the seafloor and begin floating create larger icebergs than glaciers that stay on the sea floor, researchers have found. Floating glaciers also produce icebergs more erratically.  

These new observations may help researchers better understand and predict iceberg production from glaciers and ice sheets, improving estimates of sea-level rise due to climate change.

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‘Sea Levels Rising in Parts of Indian Ocean’

*Greenhouse gases are playing a role in changes, say scientists*

Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean, including the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, appear to be at least partly a result of human-induced increases of atmospheric greenhouse gases, says a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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