A Brief And Ugly Summary Of Surviving Cold Climates

Urban Treehouse Uses 150 Trees To Protect Residents From Noise And Pollution

Luciano Pia, an architect in Italy, has a beautiful vision for how people and nature can live together even in a thoroughly urban landscape. 25 Verde, an apartment complex he designed in Turin, Italy, is a woven 5-story mix of lush trees and steel girders that let urban residents feel like they live in a giant urban tree-house.

Every step in the building’s design was taken with natural integration in mind. The organic and asymmetric shape of its terraces allow potted trees to “sprout” out from the building at random intervals. The ponds in the courtyard provide residents with a refreshing place to relax in the summer, and the 150 deciduous trees, which lose their trees in the winter, allow light to filter in to the building during the darker months. The building helps keep the city’s air cleaner and isolates the residents from the urban sounds and smells surrounding them.The building, which was completed in 2012, is located at Via Chabrera 25 in Turin, Italy – you can even check it out on Google Maps‘ street view!

Via:http://www.boredpanda.com/urban-treehouse-green-architecture-25-verde-luciano-pia-turin-italy/

Moss FM

A radio which uses moss as biological solar panels in plant microbial fuel cells!

Free Solarpunk Essay for your thoughts

There’s not many essays and findings in academia that are given away to anyone without special access, so since I just got a 100 on my Environmental Ethics Reflection Essay, I’m posting it here for solarpunks it might benefit to think about these ethics considerations. (hit read more for essay)

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Actually you know what. Just don’t mow. Get rid of your lawnmower. Turn your whole yard into a wildflower field or an edible garden. Lawns are the invention of the upper class to show wealth through wasted plots of grass that is meticulously tended for no reason other than to be grass. It’s literally an empty plot of land they kept because they had so much money they didn’t need it to grow food. Not using a yard as just a yard is an act of rebellion.

One of the main industries still supporting lawns is chemical pest control companies, and they’re also responsible for the insecticides that crashed the bird populations in the 40s and 50s as well as a lot of what’s killing bees and butterflies now. The herbicides they produce specifically targets “bad” plants like dandelions, buttercups, and clovers, which are plants bees rely on for early spring feeding. Grass is just grass; it would be great for feeding small mammals if people would let it grow more than three inches, but they won’t.

So, yeah. Kill lawnmower culture. Plant some native flowers. Grow some vegetables and fruit trees. Put out bird feeders and bee sugar spots and homes for both. Be kind to bugs and birds and rabbits and opossums and whoever else might wander by. Make your neighborhood a lot more beautiful.

i learned that Binghamton University researchers have been working on a self-healing concrete that uses a specific type of fungi as a healing agent. When the fungus is mixed with concrete, it lies dormant until cracks appear, when spores germinate, grow and precipitate calcium carbonate to heal the cracks (x)

Rising Seas Are Going to Drown Way More Cities Than We’d Thought: Study

In a low-warming scenario, we expected rising tides to cover areas currently occupied by 37 million people. The real number is closer to 150 million.

But none of the challenges posed by our warming climate has loomed larger in the popular imagination than sea-level rise. With global populations and wealth heavily concentrated in low-lying coastal cities, humanity has been preoccupied by the prospect of the oceans reclaiming the high points of our civilization. And for good reason: The best available models suggest that 37 million people currently live in places that will be below high tide by 2050 — in an optimistic low-carbon-emissions scenario.

Or rather, that’s what such models suggested before this week. On Tuesday, a new study revealed that those alarming statistics — which had gotten so many of us all worked up about our favorite cities’ impending doom — were wildly inaccurate.

The actual impacts of sea-level rise are going to be much, much worse.

Listen, folks, few understand the enormity of what is happening, nor how fast it’s occurring, and, look, I don’t count myself among those few. 

The rest of us do not realize the catastrophe that is happening right now. 

Maybe that’s not fair to say: the people of California probably understand all too well. Even if their home is not on fire, certainly they see the hellish red glow in the sky and cannot avoid the acrid smell of wildfire smoke.

For sure, the indigenous folk who subsist on whale meat understand the crisis, since the bowheads they hunt have not appeared. None of them. They are way out to sea, trying to avoid the warming oceans and underwater heat waves. 

The people of Key West, who have endured a “king tide” flooding their city streets for 60+ days straight, probably think there’s a big problem. Some of them, no doubt, are hanging on to the foolish belief that this tide is going to subside – it’s not – it’s rapid sea level rise. 

It’s not our fault though, that we do not know … did not know, because, everything we have been told, the stuff that has made it out of the media in the past decade or so, has all been based on these same “optimistic low-carbon-emissions scenarios.”

This is not the world we live in. We live in the high-emission catastrophic scenario. We were shown these, when we were shown anything at all, but we were told these catastrophic emission scenarios would never, ever – couldn’t possibly – ever be so. 

Yeah, well, we were wrong about.

New 'e-dermis' brings sense of touch, pain to prosthetic hands

Amputees often experience the sensation of a “phantom limb” – a feeling that a missing body part is still there.

That sensory illusion is closer to becoming a reality thanks to a team of engineers at the Johns Hopkins University that has created an electronic skin. When layered on top of prosthetic hands, this e-dermis brings back a real sense of touch through the fingertips.

“After many years, I felt my hand, as if a hollow shell got filled with life again,” says the anonymous amputee who served as the team’s principal volunteer tester.

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I've just now found out about the amazing Autumn Peltier. She deserves so much more coverage than i've seen.