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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(2)
Plague/Virus:(1)
Climate Chaos:(14)
Resource Depletion: (4)
Biology Breach:(7)
Recovery:(7)
This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
global warming  ~ contamination  ~ climate impacts  ~ carbon emissions  ~ ecosystem interrelationships  ~ capitalist greed  ~ technical cleverness  ~ sustainability  ~ smart policy  ~ overfishing  ~ governmental idiocy  



ApocaDocuments (7) for the "Recovery" scenario from this week
[see full week] ~ [see full Recovery scenario and stories]
Sun, Jun 14, 2009
from Economist:
Flying for ever
...Solar-powered aircraft have flown before. The pioneer was Paul MacCready, whose Gossamer Penguin made the first manned flight in 1980 in California, with his then 13-year-old son at the controls. A derivative, Solar Challenger, crossed the English Channel in 1981. But nothing like HB-SIA, as the Swiss aircraft is known, has ever taken to the air. If it works as expected, another version will be built and this will take off, climb to 10,000 metres and, by storing some of the electricity generated during the day, continue flying through the night. Its pilots, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, plan to cross the Atlantic in it and later to fly it around the world.... The wings of this aircraft are almost as big as those of an airliner, but they are covered in a film of solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity to drive its engines. ...


Just so the cells aren't affixed with wax!

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Sun, Jun 14, 2009
from Washington Post:
White Rooftops May Help Slow Warming
Could climate change be staved off by making the United States look like a scene from "Mamma Mia!"? That was suggested in a recent talk by Energy Secretary Steven Chu -- although, because he was speaking to Nobel laureates, he did not mention the ABBA musical set in the Greek islands. He said that global warming could be slowed by a low-tech idea that has nothing to do with coal plants or solar panels: white roofs... Climate scientists say that the reflective properties of the color white, if applied on enough of the world's rooftops, might actually be a brake on global warming. ...


Plus, I'll wear my jaunty white beret!

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Sat, Jun 13, 2009
from TIME Magazine:
Congress Finally Gets Tough on Food Safety
Every few months, it seems, a new food-contamination scandal grips the nation, playing out in the same troubling way. Someone dies of a food-borne infection with a scary Latin name. The government recalls a dinner-table staple and traces its contamination to dirty irrigation water or a processing plant. Everything returns to normal until the next case of killer spinach or poisoned peanuts stalks the nation. Despite the toll -- 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospitalizations a year -- Congress has typically been unwilling to strengthen controls on the growing, manufacturing and handling of food in the face of powerful industry resistance. But as profits and consumer confidence have plummeted with each new outbreak, the political climate has changed -- so much so that earlier this week, a House panel reached unusual bipartisan consensus on the most sweeping reform of the food-safety system in at least 50 years. ...


I'll belch to that!

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Thu, Jun 11, 2009
from McClatchy Newspapers:
U.N. environment chief urges global ban on plastic bags
Single-use plastic bags, a staple of American life, have got to go, the United Nations' top environmental official said Monday. Although recycling bags is on the rise in the United States , an estimated 90 billion thin bags a year, most used to handle produce and groceries, go unrecycled. They were the second most common form of litter after cigarette butts at the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy, a marine environmental group... According to the report, "Plastic, the most prevalent component of marine debris, poses hazards because it persists so long in the ocean, degrading into tinier and tinier bits that can be consumed by the smallest marine life at the base of the food web." ...


Kind of like Zeno's paradox about the arrow in flight.

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Tue, Jun 9, 2009
from Associated Press:
Activists draft their own climate treaty
If delegates from 190 countries have trouble reaching a new global warming agreement, they can turn to a ready-made treaty prepared by environmental activists. Negotiators can take comfort from knowing it wasn't easy for the activists either. Nearly 50 representatives of nonprofit groups in about 20 countries worked for months to draft a mock treaty they believe national delegations can accept. Their document was being released Monday at the latest round of U.N. negotiations in Bonn, Germany. ...


Like THAT's gonna get a lot of attention.

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Tue, Jun 9, 2009
from London Daily Telegraph:
Biomimicry: why the world is full of intelligent design
We humans like to think we're pretty good at design and technology – but we often forget that Mother Nature had a head start of 3.6 million years. Now, the way that geckoes climb walls, or hummingbirds hover, is at the centre of a burgeoning industry: biomimicry, the science of "reverse-engineering" clever ideas from the natural world....biomimicry is becoming fashionable. "Imitating natural systems is about trying to mimic the amazing effectiveness of ecosystems, where the waste from one system or animal is used as the nutrients for another," says Michael Pawlyn, the director of a sustainable architecture firm and one of the designers of the Eden Project in Cornwall. "Often, by applying ideas from ecosystems you can turn problems into solutions that are better both environmentally and commercially." ...


We're the eco-copycats!

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Mon, Jun 8, 2009
from Technology Review:
Roll-Up Solar Panels
Xunlight, a startup in Toledo, Ohio, has developed a way to make large, flexible solar panels. It has developed a roll-to-roll manufacturing technique that forms thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells on thin sheets of stainless steel. Each solar module is about one meter wide and five and a half meters long. As opposed to conventional silicon solar panels, which are bulky and rigid, these lightweight, flexible sheets could easily be integrated into roofs and building facades or on vehicles. Such systems could be more attractive than conventional solar panels and be incorporated more easily into irregular roof designs. They could also be rolled up and carried in a backpack, says the company's cofounder and president, Xunming Deng. "You could take it with you and charge your laptop battery," he says. ...


Better efficiency than asphalt shingles, at least!

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