30 July 2010

Photo: Michael Graham Richard The Little Car that Could The Toyota Prius hybrid has been sold in the U.S. for 10 years (even longer in Japan, where it was first introduced in 1997), and during that decade this car went from a small niche player considered 'weird' by most people (I remember back when the #1 question was "do you have to plug it in?") to a best-seller halo car whose technology has found its way in many other models, including vehicles made by Toyota's competitors. During that decade in the U.S., Toyota has sold about 900,000 Prius hybrids there, and about 1.8 million w... Read the full story on TreeHugger

30 July 2010

John Bowron's Off-Grid Cottage Scott Huler, author of On the Grid, makes a very important point in a guest post on The Infrastructurist : Nobody is really off the grid. Well, maybe the Amish, but almost nobody. Everyone else is part of an enormous mesh of grids that every back-to-the-land off-gridder is dependent on.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

30 July 2010

Image via Unplggd While back we showed you an iPhone app that lets you customize nature sounds to chill out to. You could choose a basic theme, like the ocean, and boost up the crashing waves or tone down the seagull calls to get just the right mix to create a personalized relaxing soundscape. For those of us who aren't iPhone users, we now have a similar free tool for our computers thanks to Nature Sounds.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

29 July 2010

Soot from vehicle exhaust, power generation and burning biomass is the second most important contributor to global warming. Photo: euthophication & hypoxia via flickr. More on the high, but heretofore largely neglected, role that soot plays in increasing global warming: Research from Stanford University shows that soot is... Read the full story on TreeHugger