Thursday, December 17. 2009Ulm s’associe à Daimler pour lancer la voiture en libre serviceEn Allemagne, la ville d’Ulm, une ville moyenne de 120 mille habitants, a développé à grande échelle le concept de la voiture en libre service, en collaboration avec l’entreprise Daimler. L’expérience s’appelle « car2go », elle a été lancée en mars dernier et son succès dépasse toutes les prévisions. Forte de ce succès allemand, l’expérience doit à présent être validée à grande échelle dans la ville d’Austin, au Texas, qui compte 750 000 habitants. Daimler se dit par ailleurs très intéressé par le projet de la mairie de Paris de lancer un autolib’ sur le modèle du vélib’. Yann Gerdil-Margueron ----- Via Les Urbanités Personal comment: P.S. Et en Suisse il y a depuis longtemps le système Mobility, car sharing. Développé à l'échelle du pays. Wednesday, December 16. 2009Return of the Steam Engine?Startup Cyclone Power thinks it has a way to replace internal combustion engines.
By Kevin Bullis
The gasoline-powered, internal combustion engine dominated transportation during the 20th century, but during the early years of the automobile it wasn't obvious that it would beat out two alternatives: batteries and steam. The movement to cut carbon emissions and petroleum consumption has of course renewed interest in electric vehicles. But there's also an effort to revive the steam engine. Today I got a letter (speaking of antiquated technologies) from the president of the Steam Automobile Club of America, Tom Kimmel, directing my attention to Cyclone Power Technologies, a startup based in Pampano Beach, FL. A few days ago, the company demonstrated its new steam engine, which generates 100 horsepower. The company has also posted some videos of the engine here. It can run on just about any source of heat: the sun, wood pellets, biofuels, diesel, waste heat from other engines. Basically anything that can be used to produce a head of steam. The first application would be generating power from waste heat, the company says (pdf), but the engine could also be used to power vehicles. Kimmel writes that steam engines can run directly on biomass, without the need to convert it into biofuels, with the energy losses that this entails. But there's a reason why liquid fuels beat out the alternatives before--they store more energy. It's hard to imagine this being a real alternative--outside of some nice applications. Anyone think otherwise? ----- Monday, December 14. 2009Cooling the Asphalt JungleThe asphalt jungle is due for a makeover as tar beach becomes a sanctuary for native plants, wildflowers and winged pollinators. Like mushrooms after a spring rain, "green roofs" are proliferating on rooftops across the United States and throughout Europe, gaining adherents among sustainable design advocates intent on creating more livable and greener cities. "Green roofs" are proliferating on rooftops across the United States and throughout Europe, gaining adherents among sustainable design advocates intent on creating more livable and greener cities.While rooftop gardens have been a part of city life since the 19th century (if not earlier), their environmental benefits are just beginning to be fully realized. As global temperatures creep upwards, scientists are glancing at the skyline, looking for ways to cool down concrete-bound cities and the planet. One proposal has been to install white roofs, which would reflect solar heat and require less energy to cool urban areas. Another idea is to absorb — or sequester — heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide by using rooftops as yards. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Michigan State University have calculated the carbon sequestration benefits extensive green roofs can provide. Findings from horticulturalists Kristen Getter and Brad Rowe in October's Environmental Science & Technology revealed green roofs' potential as carbon sinks. During photosynthesis, plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store CO2 in the leaves, soil and root system, converting sunshine into carbon-based compounds such as carbohydrates and sugar. According to Environmental Protection Agency statistics, U.S. forests sequestered 637 million metric tons of the carbon dioxide emitted by made-sources such as coal, fuel and natural gas. Urban forests sequestered on average an additional 74 million metric tons. (All told, the U.S. offsets about an eighth of the carbon it produces, and the vast majority of the offset comes from forests.) Currently the job of large-scale carbon sequestration is performed in the vast storehouse of the Earth's ocean and forest ecosystems that play an integral part in regulation of the temperature of the atmosphere. While there have been studies on how much heat green roofs might fend off, how well a green roof would store carbon had been uncertain up until Getter and Rowe's study. Two experiments were run to measure the potential of storing carbon in green roofs. The first involved eight green roofs in Michigan and four in Maryland ranging from 1 to 6 years of age. The second involved planting an extensive green roof of 20 1-square-meter plots at MSU's campus in East Lansing. All the green roofs were planted with Sedum, a genus of leafy succulent known for its hardiness and often used as ground cover. "We planted what we knew would grow," said Getter. The researchers estimated the city of Detroit has 219 acres of roof space available for conversion. If black tar roofs were retrofitted, 55,000 tons of CO2 could be removed from the air — enough CO2 to offset the carbon emissions of 10,000 mid-sized SUVs or trucks for an entire year, they calculated. "Implementing a green roof strategy would definitely be one way of managing the sequestration of carbon," said Getter. And yet ... in order to offset man-made carbon emissions it would require a Texas-sized green roof to make a significant contribution to carbon sequestration. "Green roofs certainly don't store the kind of carbon that a forest or productive grassland stores, but a traditional roof is essentially a wasteland — no carbon storage whatsoever," Getter wrote via e-mail. Jim Mumford, a horticulturalist turned entrepreneur, is dubious about the amount of carbon sequestration a green roof provides. Perceiving it as an added but minor benefit, "it's debatable about how much of a carbon sink it really is," he said. Still, he's in total agreement there has to be more green and less tar on city rooftops. In 2007, he retrofitted his office with a 478-square-meter green roof, the first of its kind in San Diego, if not the state. As the founder of GreenScaped Building, he's completed construction on nine green roofs in San Diego County and has several more projects under proposal throughout California and the United States. Instead of talking meters and grams, Mumford is faced with the challenge of turning data into a business plan. He believes retrofitting commercial space with green roofs in Southern California is cost-prohibitive, especially in the current business climate. For the time being, "building has ground to a halt," he said. Once the market revives, the next challenge he faces will be building large-scale green roofs at a price real estate developers and building owners will pay. Green roofs cost typically twice as much to install as conventional roofs. Nonetheless, he's intrigued. "The more I looked at it the more excited I got," he said. Mumford envisions a day when installing a green roof will be part of a comprehensive plan to create buildings that are both energy efficient and conserve water. He's assembled living walls and demonstrated water-caching systems on the grounds of his business complex, transforming his workplace into an "open laboratory" for water and energy conservation strategies, and seeking cost-effective ways to capture rainwater rather than rely on drinking water to irrigate green roofs. Burnishing a building with a living skin has several environmental advantages. Most notably, it cuts down on storm water runoff, reducing the energy costs associated with heating and cooling buildings, and extends the material lifespan of roofs exposed to the elements. Inside his office, Mumford has noticed a marked difference. White noise has been reduced. He's saved 23 percent on his electric bills. And rather than redoing his roof every 10 to 20 years, he believes his green roof can last up to 60 years if maintained properly. A study by the Berkeley Lawrence Lab found that if 15 percent of the buildings in Los Angeles installed reflective or green roofs, daytime temperatures would be reduced by 3 degrees Celsius — saving Los Angeles half to 1 gigawatt of power during peak-use hours. As green roofs proliferate to cool and cheer cityscapes, might they also suck up and store some of the carbon urban life pumps out? ----- Via Miller - Mc Cune Friday, December 11. 2009Seeing the forest through the cloudToday, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, we demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests. We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide. According to the Stern Review, protecting the world's standing forests is a highly cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests, in an effort to make forests worth "more alive than dead." Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable. However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so we're working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this. Here's what we've done with this prototype to help nations monitor their forests: (Landsat images courtesy USGS)
This type of imagery data — past, present and future — is available all over the globe. Even so, while today you can view deforestation in Google Earth, until now there hasn't been a way to measure it. Then add science With this technology, it's now possible for scientists to analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract meaningful information about the world's forests, such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of a forest. In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing. Handle computation in the cloud What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform? We decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we've built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers. Here are the results of running CLASlite on the satellite imagery sequence shown above: CLASlite online: This shows deforestation and degradation in Rondonia, Brazil
from 1986-2008, with the red indicating recent activity
Here's the result of running SAD in a region of recent deforestation pressure in Mato Grosso, Brazil: SAD online: The red "hotspots" indicate deforestation
that has happened within the last 30 days
Combining science with massive data and technology resources in this way offers the following advantages:
We're excited to be able to share this early prototype and look forward to seeing what's possible. Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google.org and Dr. Amy Luers, Environment Manager, Google.org ----- Personal comment: Sustainability, de- or re-forestation quatification, satellite imagery, cloud computing and Google! Thursday, December 10. 2009Designing Bugs that eat Plastic
Earlier, we’ve discussed some of the dramatic effects of this nextnature material and suggested how a future-evolving microbe able to digest plastic, could thrive on the vast amount of ----- Via NextNature
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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