Last week, my Ecology professor began his lecture with the trite cliché “You are what you eat”. Because the words are overused, they are not often taken seriously, but in the case of seafood selection, the phrase is important to remember. As you’re savoring your morsel of imported Mahi Mahi, do you consider how it made it to your plate? There are many more attributes of food that should be considered other than taste. Imported Mahi Mahi, for example, may be delicious, but it is also one of the fish listed in the “Avoid” section of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch pamphlet. The Aquarium provides basic seafood consumption tips for the general public in order to promote sustainable and healthy seafood consumption. The pamphlet is divided into three sections: Best Choices, Good Alternatives, and Avoid. Under each category, there is a list of fish with specifications on how each is caught/farmed as well as where the fish is from in order to direct seafood connoisseurs to make wise meal choices.
The aquarium published its first guide in 1999 and has since created an iPhone app that can be used as a portable source of sustainable seafood consumption tips. Many of the fish found on the “Avoid” list are caught using methods that are harmful to the rest of the marine environment such as trawl nets that destroy the benthic ecosystem in the process of catching fish. (more…)
One of the biggest factors limiting electric vehicle proliferation is their limited battery range for long distance travel. That being the case, technology giant IBM has now focused their development prowess on what is known as the “Battery 500 Project”, allowing electric vehicles to have a range surpassing 500 miles.
The main design feature of the newly developed battery is that it will be oxygen breathing — meaning that the air that comes in through the battery will be utilized as a reactant with lithium ions to create and dischcarge electric energy, and then the same oxygen will be transferred out as the reaction occurs almost as if nothing had happened.
IBM has recently gathered an eclectic group of researchers to tackle the project and now optimism is flourishing about the current progress being made.
“Unlike what we originally thought, we know we have a really good electrochemical reaction. The problems now are secondary,” according to Winfried Wilcke, Principal Investigator of this project at IBM, “there are still tremendous engineering challenges ahead so there’s no hope it happening this decade”.
Current problems lie within the infrastructure of the battery, through computer analysis IBM determined that the battery needs to have new, different interactions between the electrolytes and the movement of lithium ions about the cathode and anode.
Another factor to consider is that most of today’s batteries are currently plagued several limitations including cost and energy density. Though the new battery design has yet to solve all the problems facing long range electric vehicle travel, there must be something going right since the project is continually picking up momentum, which can only mean bright things in the near future as implied by Wilcke, “. . . it’s just too early and it depends on all kinds of different things… the overall trend is that I’m feeling more optimistic as time goes by, rather than less”.
Check out the informative YouTube video made by IBM
additional source: cnet
related: more articles about electric cars from The Alternative Consumer
Climate change poses serious problems for plant development
The effects of Climate Change have been widely discussed and debated, but an effect of Climate Change that is not often shared with the general population is the effect that altered climate patterns have on the growth and development of plants. Plants are primary producers, meaning they get their energy from the sun, not by consuming other organisms. This places them at the bottom of the food chain. All other organisms higher up on the food chain are affected by the well-being of the primary producers. Therefore, any alteration in the seasonal flowering of plants can shift the dynamics of an entire food web, causing damage to species populations and increasing the risk of possible extinction. (more…)
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