First the smog, then the stink. Beijing’s white hot economic growth has led not just to smoggy skies but also stinky landfills that are literally taking people’s breath away.
Faced with overflowing landfills across the city, Beijing residents have been complaining about the rising stench of garbage that can be overpowering when the wind blows. So, the government decided to remedy the situation by installing 100 giant deodorant guns aimed at the city’s stinkiest landfill–the Asuwei dump site on the edge of Beijing.
The high-pressure cannons, like the one seen here being used at a public gathering, can spray dozens of pints of fragrance per minute over a distance of 160 feet. In addition to being bathed in sweet perfume, the Asuwei dump site will also get extra plastic layers to cover the garbage so that the smell doesn’t waft towards the city when the wind blows.
But The Guardian reports that it would take more than a few plastic sheets and perfume guns to zap Beijing’s garbage problems away:
If you’re a big Avatar fan, then James Cameron’s Oscar loss may have left your eyes swollen and your popcorn soggy. But if Avatar grabbed your attention with its story of greedy humans ravaging the alien moon Pandora for a mineral that Earth needs, then here are a handful of real-life stories, from good ol’ planet Earth, that might make the plight of Pandora’s native Na’vi seem eerily familiar.
First we have members of the Dongria Kondh tribe from Orissa, India, talking to the tribal-rights group Survival International about their quest to save their sacred mountain from a large mining company. The company wants to raze a huge part of their lush, bountiful, holy mountain to mine not “unobtanium,” but bauxite. Wait, James… are you getting this down?
Survival International took out an ad in the film industry magazine Variety to appeal directly to Cameron for help. Says Survival International director Stephen Corry: “Just as the Na’vi describe the forest of Pandora as ‘their everything,’ for the Dongria Kondh, life and land have always been deeply connected. The fundamental story of Avatar – if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids – is being played out today in the hills of Niyamgiri in Orissa, India.”
Waste plastic from “throwaway” carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries.
This is called “upcycling” – converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling…
The process isn’t cheap, however. It involves an expensive catalyst in cobalt acetate, which is not easily recovered, to convert the high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into carbon nanotubes. But if the nanotubes are then used to make lithium-ion or lithium-air batteries, that might overcome this problem, since these batteries are already recycled at the end of their use to recover cobalt.
Getting the bags to a recycling facility in the first place may be a hurdle as well. As the picture above shows, asking the public to put forth any effort sometimes seems to be asking too much.
Scientists have proposed what seems like an obvious solution to finding life on other planets—look for pollution similar to that found on Earth. Light or air pollution would be a dead giveaway to life on another planet, according to a study to appear in the journal Astrobiology.
Of course, this is assuming that extraterrestrial life is even remotely similar to ours, and even if it is, finding the pollution won’t be easy, according toNew Scientist:
Even if all the electricity we generate was used to produce light, it would still be thousands of times fainter than the glint of sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface. To reliably detect even this massive amount of artificial light on a planet orbiting a relatively nearby star—say 15 light years away—would require an array of telescopes with a combined light-collecting area of 1.5 square kilometres….
That’s about 370 football fields’ worth of telescopes.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are another source of pollution that would be a tell-tale sign of alien life, according to the study. CFCs do not form naturally and absorb infrared light, so they could be observed from afar. But by looking for CFCs we’d have to assume aliens are dumb enough to spew the pollution into their atmosphere—in other words, that they’re as dumb as we are.
Fashion has been beefing up its environmental conscience (if not its models) over the past few years—and with good reason. The production, transport, and disposal of clothing is a serious source of pollution, with the textile industry holding steady as the third largest consumer of water, and the source of up to 20 percent of industrial pollution.
This year, it’s fabric dye that’s getting the Green treatment. Coloring a pound of fabric can take up to 75 gallons of water, and a single dress or pair of pants can use up to 25 gallons.
So what if we could dye all our clothes without water? That was the idea tackled by Colorep, a California-based technology development company that created a new way to color fabric using air rather than H2O. Called AirDye, the process applies non-plastisol-based inks within garment fibers, rather than as a layer on top (which is how it’s done with water).
This Fashion Week (yup, it’s going on now—you can tell by all the hungry-looking Eastern European waifs roaming the streets) the AirDye system made its debut at the Costello Tagliapietra show, in which the clothes (see photo) were dyed almost entirely without water.
Granted, until this new dyeing method hits jeans and T-shirts, your DISCOVER staff likely won’t be testing it out ourselves.
And the trophy goes to…Picher, Oklahoma! Years of lead and zinc mining have left the town so polluted that “the soil is poisoned, the water runs orange and the air has been ruled unsafe,” according to MSNBC. The effects on residents include a variety of cancers and birth defects. Watch the full report here:
We recently covered a study in which every single fish tested from U.S. streams was tainted with mercury. But that may be the least of our worries: The demand for fish will increase by 40 percent in the next two decades. As the world population hits 9 billion by 2050, the continued depletion of biodiversity and poor environmental conditions of the ocean could end up wiping fish completely off our menus. Not surprisingly though, aquaculture is picking up, and now more than 50 percent of the fish that ends up in our bellies was raised in coastal fish farms.
Fish raised in farms near the coastline are exposed to more pollution than wild fish, and therefore grow to be less nutritious. Ideally, we’d like our fish to roam around freely in the sea before we eat them.
Enter MIT’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, which is building robotic cages so fish can be farmed in the ocean away from the coastal waters. The Aquapod cage has 8-foot long propellers, which are controlled and powered from a generator in an attached boat. The cage, which strikingly resembles the Apple Store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, is built with triangular panels that are coated in steel nets. National Geographic reports:
“The idea of a cage towing a buoy, with the buoy in radio contact with the shore, is quite feasible,” [director Cliff Goudey said]. “It’s a little futuristic for today’s industry, but we could have a sensor on the cage which gives its heading and a GPS system to report its effective speed over the ground.”
Another group at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory has a more open idea for a “cage”: They allow their fish to swim freely, but train them to return to their cage at the sound of a dinner bell. Granted, fish are hardly terriers: The bell worked for black sea bass for about a week, but when a school of bluefish came to dine on the bass, they refused to return to their cage despite the researchers’ offer of free food.
Last summer, we speculated whether the air pollution in China—home to the tirelessly-publicized 2008 summer Olympics—could prove hazardous to the health of the Games’ athletes and spectators. Still, the nation managed to clean up its air that summer by closing factories and allowing cars to hit the roads only every other day.
Unfortunately, the trend was too good to last: The veil of smog suspended over Beijing is back just a year later, and the nation’s air quality is now rated “hazardous” by the embassy. Although the so-called “Green Olympics” might have raised public awareness about the pollution in China, its political effects have been paltry. AFP reports:
“It changed the public mentality and made people remember the clear days we had 20 years ago and wonder why can’t we have that again. That’s a big achievement,” said [China climate and energy campaigner Yang Ailun].
However, the fact that China had to basically shut down much of the city of 18 million to meet its Olympic clean-air promises, showed that little real progress has been made.
“The Beijing experience did not provide any examples of cost-effective policies that can actually deliver results. All the major measures taken by the city were expensive and not easily replicated elsewhere,” she said.
Beijing maintains some restrictions on how many cars can be on the road on any given day, for example—but with the addition of 1,500 cars daily, such a measure is a little like teaspooning water out of a sinking aircraft carrier.
The 2008 blockbuster Wall-E won heaps of awards and made over 150 critics’ lists of the best movies of the year. But the also movie made a statement about how we treat the planet today—and how we can make sure that it’s habitable tomorrow. That was the basis of the event put on Thursday night by the World Science Festival, entitled “Wall-E’s World: Design for an Invisible Footprint,” which was moderated by DISCOVER’s own Carl Zimmer and held at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
In the first scene of the movie, the intrepid Wall-E rolls through streets filled with garbage, crushing waste into boxes and constructing skyscrapers with the refuse.
Ben Schwegler, Walt Disney Imagineering R&D’s chief scientist, offered a more hopeful view of the future during his presentation and the subsequent discussion with two other panelists. “Could we really be overwhelmed by waste” he asked the audience of around 150 people. “Not in the long run, because things will evolve to eat the waste we produce.”
He showed the audience a few photos of what appeared to be the metallic cores of laptops. It was then he revealed that cockroaches had stripped away the plastic casings in about a year and a half, upon which researchers halted the experiment because they were too grossed out.
Perhaps another part of the solution to keep garbage at bay is to change our attitude toward refuse. In a view called renewable urbanism, we would consider waste a valuable resource. That was one suggestion by Mitchell Joachim, who works at Terrefuge, an organization for ecological design in New York. “If I were an alien looking down,” Joachim said, “I would see the city as something meant to produce waste.” (more…)
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
First the smog, then the stink. Beijing’s white hot economic growth has led not just to smoggy skies but also stinky landfills that are literally taking people’s breath away.
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Scientists have proposed what seems like an obvious solution to finding life on other planets—look for pollution similar to that found on Earth. Light or air pollution would be a dead giveaway to life on another planet, according to a study to appear in the journal 
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Fashion has been beefing up its environmental conscience (if not its models) over the past few years—and with good reason. The production, transport, and disposal of clothing is a 
We recently covered a study in which 
Last summer, we 
The 2008 blockbuster 
