Soil microbes have been found to have similar effects on the brain as prozac, without the negative side effects and potential for chemical dependency and withdrawal.
It turns out getting in the garden and getting dirty is a natural antidepressant due to unique microbes in healthy organic soil. Working and playing in soil can actually make you happier and healthier.
Americans dump 251 million tons of trash annually into landfills. Bike seat ripped? Toss it. Hole in the old garden hose? Get rid of it. Spandex not tucking in your tummy? Loose it and replace it. This linear process of extracting a resource, processing it, selling it than discarding it is creating a mound of trash dangerously equivocal to the ball of trash in Futurama episode 8 season 1.
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Andy Levin have introduced a new bill that would build a national infrastructure for electric vehicles.
The EV Freedom Act would allocate the resources for the U.S. to build a nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers within five years, Reutersreports. That would alleviate a major hurdle to widespread electric car adoption, making it far easier for the population to transition away from gas power.
The Ornish channel is designed to help people improve their health through learning about sustainable lifestyle changes, while also connecting with others on…
Despite centuries of colonization and agriculture, Cuba’s rivers are in good health.
Sugarcane and cattle farming on the island date back to the late fifteenth century. To measure water quality in Cuba’s rivers today, Paul Bierman at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Rita Hernández at the Cienfuegos Center for Environmental Studies in Cuba and their colleagues sampled water in 25 river basins in central Cuba. This is the first time in more than 60 years that scientists from Cuba and the United States have joined forces to study the island’s hydrology.
What if an umbrella could charge your phone? By tweaking well-known principles, scientists have created a highly efficient generator that can pump out lots of renewable energy with just a bit of water.
The diamondback moth is a huge pest. It eats a variety of crops, but is largely resistant to insecticides, resulting in upwards of $5 billion in losses every year.
That could soon change, though, as an international team of researchers has created a strain of genetically engineered diamondback moths that could suppress the pest population in a sustainable way — and they just released them into the wild for the first time.
For the study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, the researchers engineered the moths so that when the males of the strain mated with wild females, the female offspring would die during the caterpillar life stage.
Pre-historic times and ancient history are defined by the materials that were harnessed during that period. We have the stone age, the bronze age, and the iron age. Today is a little more complex, we live in the Space Age, the Nuclear Age, and the Information Age. And now we are entering the Graphene Age, a material that will be so influential to our future, it should help define the period we live in. Potential applications for Graphene include uses in medicine, electronics, light processing, sensor technology, environmental technology, and energy, which brings us to Samsung’s incredible battery technology! Imagine a world where mobile devices and electric vehicles charge 5 times faster than they do today. Cell phones, laptops, and tablets that fully charge in 12 minutes or electric cars that fully charge at home in only an hour. Samsung will make this possible because, on November 28th, they announced the development of a battery made of graphene with charging speeds 5 times faster than standard lithium-ion batteries. Before I talk about that, let’s quickly go over what Graphene is. When you first hear about Graphene’s incredible properties, it sounds like a supernatural material out of a comic book. But Graphene is real! And it is made out of Graphite, which is the crystallized form of carbon and is commonly found in pencils. Graphene is a single atom thick structure of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice and is a million time thinner than a human hair. Graphene is the strongest lightest material on Earth. It is 200 times stronger than steel and as much as 6 times lighter. It can stretch up to a quarter of its length but at the same time, it is the hardest material known, harder than a diamond. Graphene can also conduct electricity faster than any known substance, 140 times faster than silicone. And it conducts heat 10 times better than copper. It was first theorized by Phillip Wallace in 1947 and attempts to grow graphene started in the 1970s but never produced results that could measure graphene experimentally. Graphene is also the most impermeable material known, even Helium atoms can’t pass through graphene. In 2004, University of Manchester scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov successfully isolated one atom thick flakes of graphene for the first time by repeatedly separating fragments from chunks of graphite using tape, and they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for this discovery. Over the past 10 years, the price of Graphene has dropped at a tremendous rate. In 2008, Graphene was one of the most expensive materials on Earth, but production methods have been scaled up since then and companies are selling Graphene in large quantities.
