Seattle recently made bold moves to put pedestrians and cyclists first as the pandemic-induced stay-at-home order creates a new normal. Up to 20 miles of roadways in the “Stay Healthy Streets” program shall remain permanently closed to nonessential through traffic to encourage people to exercise safely while social distancing. Environmentalists are praising the move because curtailing vehicular traffic means a reduction in carbon […]

German company Sinn Power has proposed a hybrid offshore power generation platform that combines wind turbines, solar panels and wave energy harvesters to generate off-grid electricity for people living close to the coast. It’s conceived as a modular system that can be specified with any or all of these features, depending on where it’s being deployed and what your power […]

When most people think of a garden shed, they more than likely conjure up simple images of utilitarian boxes stored with barely-used tools and oodles of clutter. However, when Maryland-based practice Gardner Architects was tasked with installing a small garden shed for homeowners in the community of Bethesda, they came up with a gorgeous 100-square-foot shed that not only blends in harmoniously with the […]

Perkins and Will’s New York studio has teamed up with Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architectsand multidisciplinary design group Arup to create a proposal for retrofitting defunct school buses into mobile COVID-19 testing labs as a means of improving testing in underserved communities. Informed by the newly approved Abbott ID NOW COVID-19 test, the design concept would outfit school buses […]

Active volcanic craters are something that people generally don’t want to get very close to – even if they’re dedicated volcanologists. With that in mind, German scientists recently had success using a drone to do the job. Led by PhD candidate Edgar Zorn, a team from the German Research Centre for Geosciences started by equipping a DJI Phantom 4 Pro […]

Once the COVID-19 health crisis slows down, there will still be more work to do — and a group of University of Oxford researchers has a plan. According to a working paper they just published, the researchers think we can simultaneously restore the global economy, rebuild the workforce, and fight the climate crisis. In fact, they think this may be our […]

Thanks to factors such as agricultural fertilizer runoff, Sargassum seaweed is growing out of control in many regions – it washes up on beaches in huge amounts. Utilizing a new technique, that rotting organic matter could soon be converted into biofuels and other products. Ordinarily, the processing of seaweed involves straining it out of salt water, rinsing it in fresh […]

As factors such as habitat loss decrease the number and variety of flowering plants in the environment, beekeepers are increasingly starting to augment their insects’ diet with artificial feeds. It now turns out that microalgae may be a particularly good form of “bee chow.” Malnutrition is thought to be a contributing factor to colony collapse disorder, as it amplifies the […]

Having graced our pages with inventive coolers, stoves, utensils and ovens, GoSun is back with another clever device for eco-conscious campers. The newly launched GoSun Flow is a neat and portable water purification system that draws on solar power to clean water for washing and drinking, with the ability to squeeze into a compact carry case when it’s time to […]

There’s so much plastic in the ocean that sometimes it seems like humans will never be able to tackle it all. Apparently, there are some scientific researchers who feel the same way about humans — so instead, they are using satellites and artificial intelligence to detect ocean plastic. Earth observation scientists from the UK’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory call their project […]