Celebrating its 20th year, the Goldman Environmental Prize has announced the 2009 winners, selected for their grassroots activism in “protecting endangered ecosystems and species, combating destructive development projects, promoting sustainability, influencing environmental policies and striving for environmental justice. Prize winners are often women and men from isolated villages or inner cities who chose to take great personal risks to safeguard the environment.”
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You’ve probably seen the earlier version of this video. The updated 2008 version (5 minutes long) is below. The information presented is mind boggling. Do you have an answer for the question posed at the end?
As a recovering PC user, I can’t live without a right click, which of course Macs don’t have. Or do they?
Actually you can right click on a Mac: just press the control key (ctrl) and click, and you’ll be able to access those handy right-click menus in Zotero and other programs and applications.
Google’s Chrome may give Microsoft’s Internet Explorer some stiff competition. But until there are extensions or plugins that can compete with Firefox’s, it likely won’t make much headway with Firefox fans.
CNET’s coverage of the launch includes several stories from different angles.
As unlikely as it sounds, termites might provide a partial solution to our energy needs. Lisa Margonelli reports in The Atlantic:
But where humans have failed, the termite succeeds—spectacularly. A worker termite tears off a piece of wood with its mandibles and lets its guts work on it like a molecular wrecking yard, stripping away sugars, CO2, hydrogen, and methane with 90 percent efficiency. The little biorefineries inside each termite allow the insects to eat up $11 billion in U.S. property every year. But some scientists and policy makers believe they may also make the termite a sort of biotech Rumpelstiltskin, able to spin straw—or grass, or wood by-products—into something much more valuable. Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.
