Category — Resources

That tub of fruit yoghurt on the supermarket shelf has been advertised as healthy, fresh – and probably organic into the bargain.

But it also probably represents as much as 9000 kilometres of road and air transport to get it to the shelf. The yoghurt base, the fruit, the jar or tub, the lid, the label and even the bulk carton it came in have all come from widely scattered places. Germans consume 3 billion serves of processed yoghurt every year. [Read more →]

If the biosphere is wrecked, it will not be done by those who couldn’t give a damn about it, as they now belong to a diminishing minority.

It will be destroyed by nice, well-meaning, cosmopolitan people who accept the case for cutting emissions, but who won’t change by one iota the way they live, says George Monbiot in The Guardian

I know people who profess to care deeply about global warming, but who would sooner drink Toilet Duck than get rid of their Agas, patio heaters and plasma TVs, all of which are staggeringly wasteful. [Read more →]

Handmade wooden bicycles are part of daily life in rural Rwanda.They’re not playthings either, and are used as virtual trucks to move goods and often to carry water. [Read more →]

Orienting a house to take advantage of the weather is always a challenge to architects, especially in an age when architects are driven by clients to include active and passive solar electricity, heating and cooling in the design.

After hearing a neighbour lamenting a wrong decision about the placement of his house, Australian engineer Luke Everingham was inspired by his wife’s remark: ‘How about a house that moves?’ [Read more →]

While the predictable research heavies gain the honours as the annual Nobel Prizes are dished out, Cobbers needs to honour a few more worthy recipients — those who rose to the top of the heap from the more than 7000 entrants in this year’s Ig Nobel Awards at Harvard.

They certainly put things in perspective: While this year’s Nobel prize for physics went to two scientists who helped to prove that the universe began with a big bang, Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris won the Ig Nobel physics prize for tackling the conundrum of why dry spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when it is bent.

People’s Choice will no doubt go to Francis Fesmire, of the University of Tennessee, who was awarded the medicine Ig for his report Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage. [Read more →]

If former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein has his way, as early as next year people will be able to order books online in just about any language.

And faster than you can say “Grande Caramel Macchiato,” they will be able to be pick up the finished product at a nearby bookstore, coffee shop or copy shop.

[Read more →]

The Venturi Eclectic, touted as an “autonomous energy vehicle,” gets its charge from wind and a roof of solar panels.

The four-person ‘car’ boasts a 22-horsepower electric engine, powered by liquid-cooled NiMH batteries, and can reach a top-end speed of nearly 52kmh.

Range is only 50km but that should be ideal for most town runs, and if its sunny you could park and charge.

The car does sport an option to recharge via AC power.

Scheduled for production in June 2007 it is expected to sell for $US30,500, but don’t hold your breath for one, the first 200 have already been sold.

If you can read German there’s lots more information here.

Cobbers has just been introduced to a new source that will benefit our eclectic audience — the unlikely CNNMoney.com site’s Business 2.0 section.

There’s a story, for example, about the need for cellphone companies to go green, to get green [as in dollars], Richard Branson, entrepreneurial icon, shares his freshest ideas - like a Virgin superfuel that will let us jet around the world guilt-free, Down under, they’re all over alternative energy - starting with a 1600-foot tall “solar tower” that can power a small city, and how Daimler’s Smart car lives up to its name — it’s 8 feet long, gets 60 mpg and is surprisingly roomy and sufficiently nimble.

The stories are well-researched and much longer than the normal blog post — which bodes well.

For weeks, the world has been aware of a damning speech about global warming to be given by Al Gore at New York University’s law faculty today.

It has prompted the spin doctors to leak stories that George W Bush is about to announce sweeping green initiatives as a pre-emptive strike. They might have to go back to the drawing board:

Over to Al Gore:

A few days ago, scientists announced alarming new evidence of the rapid melting of the perennial ice of the north polar cap, continuing a trend of the past several years that now confronts us with the prospect that human activities, if unchecked in the next decade, could destroy one of the earth’s principle mechanisms for cooling itself.

[Read more →]

News media are all about now. Journalists parachute into trouble spots when a crisis erupts and almost before the dust has settled they’re off to the next outbreak.

Rarely do they have the airtime or the knowledge to tell you any more than what happened today. What started the horrible civil war in Sri Lanka more than two decades ago? Why is Kosovo? Who is the United Nations? Who blames who for firing the first shot or lobbing the first bomb? [Read more →]