Tag: ENVIRONMENT

Some San Francisco residents are upset about a promotional stunt that, in support of a video game, sent thousands of red balloons drifting across the city on Wednesday, some landing in the nearby bay. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, game developer THQ released the balloons, which had promotional cards from Gamestop attached to them, to promote its new game 'Homefront' at the Game ...

In an effort to find a convenient and profitable way to recycle discarded electronics, ecoATM has raised more than $14 million to place eCycling kiosks in stores across the U.S. Each kiosk pays people who recycle their e-waste by giving them either cash or coupons from the store where the machine is located. All you have to do is drop off that old BlackBerry, iPod or other device at the kiosk. The ...

The Internet may be moving us ever closer to a paperless existence, but, according to a newly released study, it's still not that great for trees. As Mac World reports, the study was commissioned five years ago by the Dutch city of Alphen aan den Rijn, after officials noticed that many trees in the area were exhibiting inexplicable abnormalities, including bleeding and fissures in their bark. Such ...

Software developer Nigel Leck can't stop picking fights on Twitter, particularly with skeptics of global warming. But arguing with the Web's non-believers [Ed. note: or, conversely, arch believers] became too exhausting for Leck. Instead, he decided to automate his high horse by building @AI_AGW, a Twitter chatbot specifically designed to counter tweeps who attempt to cast doubt on climate ...

E-mail may save a lot of paper, but according to the Guardian, our electronic missives do have some impact on the environment. Although authors Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark acknowledge that e-mails will never probably comprise a major component of our energy consumption, they claim that the energy required to send and receive our messages can quickly add up. According to their estimates, a ...

If a tree speaks in the woods, and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a noise? According to Engadget, some guys from EOS Magazine and Happiness Brussels have rigged a 100-year-old tree with devices that monitor environmental conditions and then post the data to sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr via text and photo updates. Talking-Tree.com is the hub for your peek into the daily life of ...

According to officials at Greenpeace, Facebook needs to change its environmentally unfriendly ways. As the AP reports, more than 500,000 users have joined Greenpeace-sponsored groups calling for the social network to use renewable energy to power its new U.S. data center. On Wednesday, Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, reminding him that ...

For people of a certain age, the mention of cross-country road trips instantly evokes the memories of youthful hedonism, the fragrances of patchouli and the stench of an old, gas-guzzling Volkswagen van. A group of college students in Canada, however, recently went through the rite of VW road trip passage in a decidedly more eco-friendly way. As Techi reports, members of the Electric Car Club at ...

A boat constructed from thousands of plastic bottles has completed its journey across the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco to Sydney Harbor. According to Popular Science, the Plastiki, which is a catamaran made from about 12,500 plastic bottles, sailed more than 9,000 miles in four months to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- a pile of waste the size of Texas that's floating ...

A U.K. industrial design student has discovered a way to harness energy each time a toilet is flushed or a bathtub is drained. According to Creative Boom, Tom Broadbent's HighDro Power works much like a miniature hydroelectric dam, inside your building's sewage pipes. When water drains from a toilet, tub, sink or any other appliance, it travels down the pipes, through the device and spins four ...

Environmentalism has a new face, and his name is J Brave. Instead of penning an ode to his gas-guzzling Escalade or Hummer, Brave, you see, decided to wax poetic about the luxuries of "Dippin' in My Tesla." Much to our delight, "helpin' the planet" while "feelin' real sporty" in your electric car is, apparently, well within the Code of Thug Life. The song itself is awesomely awful (dare we even ...

Let's face it. Casually riding your bike around on a calm, summery afternoon might be a pleasant experience. But wouldn't it be a whole lot more pleasant if you could pedal around town and produce seizure-inducing synthesized music at the same time? With a device called the Velosynth, you can. As explained in this slightly annoying demo video from the creators at EFFALO, the Velosynth "allows ...

The first step to solving the Gulf Coast oil crisis, as with any problem, is figuring out just how large and expansive the spill really is. As scientists, lawmakers, and Kevin Costner continue to debate the best way to stop the gushing, a group of academics at MIT are doing their part to track the disaster as it unfurls. The project, called Grassroots Mapping, uses camera-equipped kites to ...

With oil continuing to spill into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are struggling to contain an already unprecedented environmental disaster, and part of that is understanding and monitoring the Gulf's conditions. According to Tech News Daily, researchers from Rutgers, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Delaware, the U.S. Navy and other institutions have recently deployed eight ...

If you pay exorbitant amounts for ink cartridges, you might as well make sure they go to good use, right? That's exactly what Australia's National Park Service has decided to do -- by utilizing used cartridges to create a 347 mile (170 kilometer) bike path between Alice Springs and Simpsons Gap in the Northwest Territory. Australian company Repeat Plastics Australia is constructing the trail out ...