Peter Eisenberger, a distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, has build two machines in Menlo Park, Calif., to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, like your car’s catalytic converter, only giant-sized.
The challenging part was figuring out what to do with the CO2 once it was captured.
A hero fisherman has saved the life of his injured mate after an epic three-hour swim through freezing waters off the Gold Coast of Australia.
A freak wave struck the men’s dinghy on Tuesday, leaving one of them with two dislocated shoulders and a dislocated hip.
They had just enough time to grab their lifejackets before the boat went under.
The streets of London were abuzz recently when the magician Dynamo, appeared to levitate alongside an iconic red bus as it circled the sights of London.
The stunt, captured on film by Pepsi, shows the 30 year-old appearing to defy gravity, floating 15 feet in the air with feet dangling and moving around.
We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all?
A new technique has been developed to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from the current 4.7 gigabytes to an astonishing 1,000 terabytes — the equivalent of 50,000 full high-definition movies.
At the end of a nightmare day of airline delays, Jessie Frank, who was in route to join her 12-year-old daughter for the girl’s last day of diabetes camp, received a last-minute reprieve on an overbooked flight thanks to a caring CEO.
“I was 8th on the standby list, showing 0 seats left. I was about to give up, but the counter agent stopped me from leaving.”
Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson had given up his seat in the cabin so Frank would able to catch the last flight to Atlanta. The Delta staff was not even aware of the mother’s desperate wish to see her daughter shining at a camp where all the kids were just like her.
With the help of the community and a Kool-Aid stand, an 8-year-old boy has reached his goal of $5,000 to help pay for his grandmother’s funeral.
Michael Diamond overheard his parents in Garfield Heights, Ohio discussing how to cover the funeral cost and took action, according to WEWS News.
What would you do if you won $1,000 in a sporting tournament? Would you go on a shopping spree, plan a vacation?
16-year-old Kevin Chung, who won the championship of a chess competition, gave it all away — to the Renown Institute for Cancer in Reno, Nevada.
A man whose personal mission is to clean up the rivers of the United States has removed more than 7 million pounds of trash. By 2010, he had already pulled 775 refrigerators and 55,000 tires from American waterways. But the work also yielded some treasure — 64 messages in bottles.
He calls it the world’s largest collection.
Chad Pregracke and the volunteers with his nonprofit, Living Lands & Waters, began unearthing the bottles in 1997 during his first clean-up, after a flood on the Mississippi River.
(WATCH the video below, or READ the story at CNN)
Related Stories: Clean River Crusader is Named Hardest Working Man in America
A mother recorded a video of her twins while they were completely engrossed in pulling rubber bands that are hanging from drawer handles.
Silliness ensues and the video become a contageous giggle-fest.
Watch the video below, from Facebook…
The 2013 Boston Marathon champion, Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia, gave his championship medal to the City of Boston Sunday on behalf of all the runners and to honor the victims of the bombing that day in April.
Lelisa’s return to Boston marked yet another admirable gesture witnessed by the city in the weeks following the marathon.
Desisa presented his medal to Mayor Thomas M. Menino in a public ceremony on the Boston Common.
For a breathtaking 23 minutes, famed tightrope artist Nik Wallenda walked on a two-inch steel cable 1500 feet above the ground to cross the Grand Canyon without a net or tether.
With winds expected to be 30 mph over the gorge, it was the accumulated dust on the cable that caused some concern, along with the “unpredictable” movement.
“It was a dream come true,” Wallenda said of the crossing. “This is what my family has done for 200 years, so it’s part of my legacy.”
Germany’s largest solar company is launching a battery set that will allow households to store surplus daytime solar energy for use in the evening, cutting energy bills.
SMA Solar says its combined inverter battery, which will go on sale later this year, will give a four-person household up to three hours of extra energy during the evening.
After being gifted a life-changing sum of $703,000 following a school bus bullying incident seen around the world, former bus monitor Karen Klein says she really hasn’t changed all that much.
No new carpet or furniture for the home she’s lived in for 46 years. No fancy car in the driveway.
Klein’s anti-bullying foundation has recently partnered with the Moscow Ballet to raise awareness of cyberbullying as the dance company tours the U.S. and Canada.
(READ the AP story from TODAY)
Related Story: Bullied Bus Driver Donates Funds to Fight Bullying
Community-minded Aussies are baling out farmers in Northwest Queensland who are faced with the choice of slaughtering their animals in the midst of massive draught and food shortages. Cash, fuel and bales of hay are on their way: The farmers now only need to ask.
A joint venture between Aussie Helpers and The Give Back Campaign launched last week has taken off, with about $1.5 million in cash and supplies being donated already through the Buy a Bale campaign.
“The need is critical as Queensland suffers under a massive combination of no export of their cattle, drought, no wet season and bush fires which burnt their feed,” according to Brian Egan, head of Aussie Helpers.
Donations can be made by visiting www.buyabale.com.au
(READ the story and hear an interview at ABC.au)
Photo borrowed from 2012 Related Story: Trucker Convoy Brings Donated Hay to Oregon Ranches Devastated by Fires– credit: Stephanie Falck
Because artwork isn’t available to those who can not get to galleries, a pair of artists from Madison, Wisconsin have launched “Little Galleries” to bring mini installations in small structures along the street.
The public art space by Rachel Bruya and Jeremy Wineberg is a structure about six feet tall, with an 18-inch-high glass box on the top that’s big enough to display prints, small paintings or sculptures.
Janette Camba, a temporary worker and familiar barista at Tim Hortons, for more than three years, is now back in her home country of the Philippines, recovering from a life-saving kidney transplant, paid for by almost $30,000 in donations raised in North Vancouver.
Her boss launched a desperate last-ditch fundraising effort to save her life after a fatal kidney disease was revealed.
(READ the story in the Vancouver Sun)
Over the past 25 years Partners In Health (PIH) has been working to bring the benefits of modern medical science to poor residents who need it most in mountainous Central Haiti. But here’s the problem: The electric power there is intermittent at best, with random outages for three or more hours every day.
By turning to renewable solar energy to solve these problems the new teaching hospital in Mirebalais, 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince, has landed itself in the forefront of health care innovation around the world. Stretched across the roof of the 200,000-square-foot University Hospital is a vast array of 1,800 solar panels — making it the largest solar-powered hospital in the world that produces more than 100 percent of its required energy every day, an impressive feat for a hospital in the middle of Haiti.
Over the years, as Rick Murphy helped expand his family’s auto business in Edina, Minn., outside Minneapolis, he wanted to install solar panels to cut the electricity bills, but the upfront cost was too high.
Then a developer, Blue Horizon Energy, made a proposal: Grandview Tire and Auto, using a new loan program, could borrow the $34,000 to install the system and pay it back over 10 years, but instead of making traditional loan payments, they would be made through his property taxes.
The chemical secrets of a concrete Roman breakwater that has spent the last 2,000 years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea have been uncovered by an international team of researchers led by a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Analysis of the samples pinpointed why the best Roman concrete was superior to most modern concrete in durability, why its manufacture was less environmentally damaging – and how these improvements could be adopted in the modern world.
“It’s not that modern concrete isn’t good – it’s so good we use 19 billion tons of it a year,” says Paulo Monteiro of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The problem is that manufacturing Portland cement accounts for seven percent of the carbon dioxide that industry puts into the air.”
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is one powerful incentive for finding a better way to provide the concrete the world needs; another is the need for stronger, longer-lasting buildings, bridges, and other structures.
“In the middle 20th century, concrete structures were designed to last 50 years, and a lot of them are on borrowed time,” Monteiro says. “Now we design buildings to last 100 to 120 years.” Yet Roman harbor installations have survived 2,000 years of chemical attack and wave action underwater.
The Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock. For underwater structures, lime and volcanic ash were mixed to form mortar, and this mortar and volcanic tuff were packed into wooden forms. The seawater instantly triggered a hot chemical reaction. The lime was hydrated – incorporating water molecules into its structure – and reacted with the ash to cement the whole mixture together.
Descriptions of volcanic ash have survived from ancient times. First Vitruvius, an engineer for the Emperor Augustus, and later Pliny the Elder recorded that the best maritime concrete was made with ash from volcanic regions of the Gulf of Naples (Pliny died in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that buried Pompeii), especially from sites near today’s seaside town of Pozzuoli. Ash with similar mineral characteristics, called pozzolan, is found in many parts of the world.
Using experimental facilities from UC Berkeley, Saudi Arabia and Germany, they found that Roman concrete from Pozzuoli differs from the modern kind in several essential ways. One is the kind of glue that binds the concrete’s components together, with the Roman mineral mix producing an exceptionally stable binder. The results revealed a mineral mix with potential applications for high-performance concretes, including the encapsulation of hazardous wastes.
“For us, pozzolan is important for its practical applications,” says Monteiro. “It could replace 40 percent of the world’s demand for Portland cement. And there are sources of pozzolan all over the world. Saudi Arabia has mountains of it.”
Stronger, longer-lasting modern concrete, made with less fuel and less release of carbon into the atmosphere, may be the legacy of a deeper understanding of how the Romans made their incomparable concrete.
(Learn more: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)
A Littleton, Colorado man popped the question asking for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage using 8000 Post-it Notes arranged to ask, “Marry Me?”
Not only that, it took him several months to write “I love you” on each individual sticky note.
His surprised bride-to-be said yes.
