You might’ve heard that the U.S. Navy has been purposely sinking old ships to make homes for fish—and that research shows this technique could be harmful to underwater ecosystems.
Well, folks at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission apparently haven’t given up on the idea. In fact, they’ve spent 75,000 man-hours and $8.6 million making an artificial reef out of a 17,250-ton, 522-foot long retired Navy ship—the same vessel featured in 1999’s Virus with Donald Sutherland and Jamie Lee Curtis.
The ship, USNS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, took less than two minutes to sink into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico near Key West, thanks to explosives placed strategically inside the bilge area beneath the water.
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No, he’s not Supercat, but apparently a fuzzy feline in the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing began sprouting triangular, fur-covered “wings” out of his back when he was about a year old.
Some speculate the strange growths are the result of a mutation caused by chemicals the cat’s mother was exposed to before giving birth. It’s certainly possible, since the heavily industrialized city of Chongqing is packed with chemical, metal, and automobile factories pumping out acid rain and air pollution. In fact, as of 2004 the city was the second most polluted worldwide. And it’s taking its toll: Environmental authorities suspect chemical contaminations were behind the deaths of thousands of fish in the Fujiang River in Chongqing a few months ago.
Others say the so-called wings are actually growths from an embryo that never completely separated from the cat before birth – in other words, the cat’s, er, Siamese twin.
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• Video of the week: A dancing polar bear and a Daft Punk soundtrack with voiceover by Coolio took first prize at a student environmental film competition in England.
• Shocker of the week: Putting lithium in your water reduces your risk of suicide! And putting Viagra in your water increases your risk of…well, we’ll let you figure it out.
• Web-hosting company GoDaddy is using its .tv domain names to educate people about the sinking island of Tuvalu.
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• Greener cooking methods have been quite the craze lately, but the search for the perfect solution will (hopefully) continue until there is one. In Senegal, “green charcoal” is now being produced from agricultural waste materials to replace the black kind that has caused the destruction of so many trees.
• “Bell-bottoms and gas masks”: Check out National Geographic’s slideshow of the first Earth Day, back in 1970. (And learn here about its history—why is it April 22, anyway?)
• Gotta pay some respect to history’s Earth Day heroes, whether they be from comic books or real life.
• Here’s the bad news first: Dow Chemical is sponsoring a fish festival near a polluted Michigan river where the (toxic) fish that are caught will be donated to the poor. But the good news: If you like SunChips, you can soon rest assured about their packaging—by 2010, it will be fully compostable.
Image: Flickr / kimberlyfaye
The spam emails clogging your Inbox are not only a nuisance, it turns out, but also an energy vacuum. Production of the 62 trillion spam emails sent around the world every year consumes more than 33 billion kilowatt-hours of energy—enough to power at least 2.4 million U.S. homes. Each piece of spam consume energy that’s the equivalent of driving three feet, and spam’s total emissions equal more than 17 million tons of carbon dioxide, the amount released from 3.1 million cars using 2 billion gallons of gas.
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Taking recycling to a whole new level, the Peepoo bag allows you to, well, pee and poo in a bag, which can then be planted to help your garden grow. For slums in the developing world where human waste is an unregulated nightmare and flying toilets are common practice, the bag provides a means of waterless sewage disposal and organic fertilizer all in one easy, biodegradable step.
The bag is lined with Urea, a common fertilizer that breaks down urine and feces into ammonia and carbonate. Pathogens in the waste, including viruses, bacteria and parasites, are killed within anywhere from a matter of hours to several weeks.
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If you live near enough natural gas, it seems, your water can become flammable. Or at least, that’s what has happened to a couple in Fort Lupton, Colorado whose home is less than half a mile from eight natural gas wells.
Jesse and Amee Ellsworth say that one of these wells (no one knows which) has been contaminating their well for six months now, and that they can light their water on fire. Testing done in the basement, bathroom, and near the well has shown explosive levels of the gas. But only recently, they say, did the companies decide to take any action—and only then at the urging of the state’s oil and gas commission.
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It looks like a carp, swims like a carp, and may even smell like a carp. But a fish being released into the waters of northern Spain is really a pollution-detecting robot.
Scientists in the U.K. have developed a robotic fish with tiny chemical sensors that detect potentially hazardous pollutants in the water. Researchers plan to release the fish into the water by the end of next year, and if the first batch of five is successful, they hope to use the fish to detect pollution—both on the surface as well as dissolved—in water systems around the world.
At 1.5 meters in length, the fish will be about the size of a seal, and will swim and wriggle just like real fish, at a maximum speed of about one meter per second. Unlike other robotic fish that are operated by remote control, the robot fish will be able to navigate autonomously, swimming through port areas and transmitting information via Wi-Fi to a control center. It will even know when it has to go back and recharge, so it won’t be left stranded by a dead battery.
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Three sailors and a scientist are getting ready to sail 11,000 miles across the Pacific…on a boat made entirely of recycled plastic bottles.
Sounds like the opening of a bad joke, but the 60-foot catamaran is currently being constructed from more than 12,000 plastic bottles on a San Francisco pier. Each of the bottles has been pressurized with dry ice powder, which sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and makes the bottles rigid enough to withstand the endless seas.
The vessel, dubbed The Plastiki, will be launched in April and is expected to take more than 100 days to reach Sydney, stopping in Hawaii, Tuvalu, and Fiji along the way. The permanent crew members will be able to sleep in the watertight cabin made from recycled PET, and the passengers will rotate in throughout the voyage.
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As if there isn’t enough economic incentive to dispense with credit cards these days, a new card issued by Discover Financial Services [ed. note: no relation to DISCOVER, though they own Discover.com] now adds an environmental perk as well.
A new biodegradable credit card, released in December, will break down when exposed to microorganisms into carbon dioxide, water, and a mild salt. The New York Times reports that the card is made of biodegradable polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, and bears the same durability as a traditional plastic credit card. Yet it will decompose in a microorganism-filled environment, which the company says can be just about anywhere, including water, soil, a compost heap, or even a landfill, because the microbes operate anaerobically.
With 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the U.S. as of 2006, the ability to decompose will surely ease the burden on landfills, which have their fair share of other plastic to deal with. The trick behind the card is a secret that BIOPVC, the company that created it, will not give up, but they say no toxic PVC remains once the microbes break down the plastic. A Columbia University professor took a stab at how the process works, and said it can be activated by coating PVC with a material that attracts fungi, or alternatively one that attracts rather than repels water, which contains microbes that will then break down the PVC. (more…)
