Featured Video: Organic Environmental Tech

At first play, this YouTube offering felt like a brochure/101 video. What we liked about it is how it advocates using micro-organisms to help clean up our messes. It’s safer, less toxic and easier to manage for us all. These helpful buggers are called “Effective Micro-organisms” (EM). And if we find a way to use them,maybe we’ll finally sync up with world.

That good stuff starts at 2:43.

Introduction to the Power of Organic Environmental Technology: harnessing Mother Nature's tiniest creatures to clean up any toxic environment; bringing hope for safe drinking water to those in need; enabling industry to effectively recycle solid waste and wastewater; acting as a natural insect pest control, natural weed control, and much more.

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Think fast! Sports (part deux)

What happened on UCreateChange.com (1-7 Mar 2010)

Last week, we talked about how sports could be improved by science and technology on UCreateChange.com. Now we’re collating everything into this weekly digest.

Kudos to Australian Ben Kersten who won the OCBC Cycling Challenge held over the weekend (6-7 Mar). In grueling endurance sports, it really boils down to your training regime. Andy Potts, the top triathlete in USA uses his heart rate to gauge how much he should train. The results were spectacular: in just five years, he went from overweight weekend swimmer to a top-class professional athlete.

Winning is everything. That’s why athletes look every little edge that could beat down the competition. Some of them turn to modified sports equipment, while others down sports drinks to keep on going like the Energizer Bunny.

Finally, this is a smart use of a sporting equipment: S0ocket is a soccer ball that generates energy for off-grid rural areas. So kids kick it around to charge an embedded battery and use it later at night to power their lights.

Power up! Alternative sources of power

16-28 Feb 2010

Power = energy / time.

Energy converts over time to give us power. Question is: how much time do we have left before we run out of energy?

Perhaps that’s why radical ideas are floating around on the internet such as hamster-powered electronics where nanogenerators harvest biomechanical energy released from small, irregular and erratic movements… expect hamster sweatshops in dingy corners soon. For power on the go, bounce a Piezoelectric backpack to charge your Motorola Razr cell phone.

Cars are the worst consumers of fossil fuels. In response a couple students invented a water-fueled internal combustion engine for scooters to run on water. We hope that it’ll eventually graduate to water-powered cars. And mind you, don’t smoke away the next big biofuel… as scientists discovered that tweaking genes of a Tobacco plant can increase oil production by 20 times. How’s that for maxing out our fuel production?

On the grander scale of things, our trash can power a country if we can get plasma plants in Pulau Semaku. And someone’s making a fusion reactor to provide limitless energy at minimal cost to the environment. Now that’s the wet dream of all green physicists.

Got an idea that would power up our lives? Leave it in the comments.

Biomimetic engineering: Nature inspires innovations

9-15 Feb 2010

From catching water to moving effortlessly and creating food from unusual sources (e.g. sunlight), nature’s organisms had centuries to get it right.

And we’re better off mimicking them in our designs of everyday and not-so-everyday things.

Take plants for example. Every school kid knows that they produce energy by photosynthesis, and make the air breathable for us (carbon dioxide in, oxygen out).

So engineers took their lead from plants, resulting in a solar cell that’s twice as efficient than other cells and concrete blocks that breathe carbon dioxide from the air!

We’d expect every living thing to host bacteria colonies. But there’s none on the Galapagos sharks. That’s due to their unusual skin patterns that prevent bacteria from landing on it. This discovery led to anti-bacterial surfaces used in hospitals.

The Humpback Whale’s jumps through the air are likened as a ballet. That inspired aerodynamic windmills based on their unusual fins. Back on land, the Nambian fog-basking beetle has taught architects how to design buildings that collect and collate water from its surroundings. The ant colony is greater than the sum of its ants. In fact it self-regulates its resources without the need for a central controller. Regen’s smart energy grid took a cue from the ants and allowed every electrical appliance to monitor and adjust their own energy usage based on what’s happening as a whole.

But the kicker is how we’ve design a way to self-assemble solar cells by mimicking salad dressing. Imagine it… salad dressing inspires?!

Janine Benyus on Biomimicry (src: TED)

Living spaces: It ain’t up the clouds

Most of us live in buildings: be it bungalows, HDB flats, or huts. Some of them are exquisite but dysfunctional, others value function over style. Architects and developers ask “Why can’t we have both?”

Sure we could.

Just look to these projects for inspiration. And mix-and-match them to your liking.

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7 green tech to look out for in 2010

We went gaga over green tech in 2009, and Copenhagen 2009 was supposed to be the highlight of the year. Sadly it went bust like Frannie Mae, and now we’re all left to our own devices.

Fine.

It's time to go down to the grassroots and find out what’s happening there. After all, the best engineering ideas had worked its way up from the ground. Not ever down. So we’ve put together 7 types of green technologies that we’d like to see more of in 2010.

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