21 October 2011

Photo credit: langalex via Flickr/CC BY Much of the world is impatiently waiting for clean energy to get more affordable and more efficient. Renewable power advocates eagerly await the day when technologies like solar and wind reach 'grid parity' in mainstream markets. This is already happening: The cost of manufacturing solar photovoltaics, for instance, is plummeting, and efficiency is consistently improving. Even so, the folks at MIT are hoping to speed up the process with an intriguing new approach to uncovering ch... Read the full story on TreeHugger

21 October 2011

Rinaldo Wurglitsch/CC BY 2.0 The contentious debate over hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in New York State just took a turn towards the weird. As Care2 reports, natural gas companies and the Niagara Falls Water Board have agreed to a plan for fracking wastewater disposal ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

21 October 2011

From sail-powered cargo ships to kite-powered freighters, there have been some promising signs of wind-power returning to international shipping. The Tres Hombres is a wind-powered ship providing a freight service between continental Europe, the UK and the Americas. Rob Hopkins of the Transition Movement has just recorded a podcast on Read the full story on TreeHugger

20 October 2011

Ask anyone who lives in the Gulf or the Niger Delta: oil spills are very nasty, and they don't clean themselves up. Chemical dispersants can make spills worse. And deploying hundreds of people in boats to run the clean-up presents a host of health hazards. After the BP disaster last year, those challenges led Cesar Harada, a design-and-technology polymath, to another solution: swarms of autonomous sailboat drones armed with sensors, trawling the water for oil. If their designs were open-source, anyone from Nigeria to Louisiana could adopt them... Read the full story on TreeHugger