Daily Archives: December 8, 2008

Image: A hungry squirrel in Virginia (Corbis)
Is Mother Nature calling it quits? Along with the baffling collapse of bee populations worldwide to other strange natural phenomena, we can now add the bizarre disappearance of acorns in widespread areas along the eastern seaboard – Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia, and even as far away as the Midwest.

“I’m used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it’s something I just didn’t believe,” says Rod Simmons, a field botantist based in Arlington, Virginia, where at this time of year, acorns are usually eve

They write: ” There are numerous services that allow you to pay into a fund offset your carbon footprint. But how does it actually work?” As only they can, the respectable journalistic source explains the intricacies of carbon offsets. See the whole thing at the Onion

Artists do the darndest things, including clever recycling.

SYMPHONY FOR 54 SHOES is a kinetic artwork that involves 27 pairs of shoes collected from a variety of second hand and thrift stores.

Swiss company Recycline has taken a rather interesting PET bottle and turned it into a range of products, from newspaper racks to vases to napkin rings. They range in price from 6 to 120 swiss francs but no doubt the MAKE types will have them knocked off before Christmas.

It is a sort of showroom for a residential project, the likes of which are often built and then thrown away. This one is designed for easy demolition and recovery after use.

TreeHugger loves furniture that serves multiple functions; with Julia Hamid’s Trio Sofa you can work, eat, relax, you may never have to get up again.

Photo via kevin1024

IBM and Harvard University would like to bum your computer for their science project that could revolutionize green energy. So, if you think it’d be neat to be one of the factors in changing the world, you can volunteer your computer. Read on for how, and more importantly, why.

A few years ago, Julia Christensen wrote a book about big box reuse. She slept in pup tents or cheap motels to document their conversions into everything from Museums of Spam to gyms to charter schools to megachurches. It is not an easy thing to do, as she told Grist:

“The challenge is size,” says Christensen. “It really is hard to find an institution that uses 200,000 square feet of space, and since they’re built for single purposes they’re hard to use for multi-purposes.”

Image courtesy Voltaic Systems.

Would you love to have a solar-powered laptop bag that really works? Here’s your chance to get the hottest, most-effective bag on the market (it literally just hit the shelves) at a sweet deal. The new-and-improved Generator by Voltaic Systems uses bleeding-edge technology to charge your computer faster than any other bag out there. With a battery that juices up in as few as five hours, this is by far the most advanced solar-powered laptop bag available.

Read on for more details about how you can get this bag for less through TH Deals.

photos: Amelio Solar

Now here we go! Renewable Energy World is reporting an announcement by the Al-Husseini Group and Amelio Solar that they will be partnering to build a gigawatt scale solar PV power plant and a thin-film solar PV manufacturing facility in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (Couldn’t resist writing the full name of the country most readers just know as Jordan.)

Here are the details on the power plant and the solar factory: