Herbicides are not only harmful to the environment, but they’re also costly and time-consuming to apply. A new device could drastically reduce the need for them, however, while also providing crops with a soil-health-boosting mulch. Known as the Seed Terminator, the gadget was invented by Dr. Nick Berry, who is a farmer on Australia’s Kangaroo Island. It incorporates two multi-stage […]

There has been massive pushback against the use of plastics over the past few years, including single-use plastic bans in cities all over the world. Industrial entrepreneurs have responded to these mounting concerns with a new product that seems like the perfect solution– bioplastic. It looks and feels like plastic, but its made from plants, so it’s good for the […]

Architectural designer and visualiser Honglin Li has proposed deploying floating high-rise waste-to-energy plants fuelled by plastic waste to clean up the oceans while generating electricity. The sci-fi proposal, called Filtration Skyscraper, imagines placing unmanned towers on abandoned oil rigs in parts of the oceans where plastic waste accumulates. Sophisticated machinery in the conceptual towers would generate electricity and biofuels from […]

Oil spills can spell big trouble for the environment, and an efficient and swift response is critical in trying to contain the problem. In the not-too-distant future folks dealing with such incidents may have a robotic helper to call on, with Boston’s Sea Machines Robotics successfully demonstrating what is says is the world’s first autonomous spill response vessel, which has […]

Have you ever thrown away food that looked perfectly fine, just because the package said it was expired? As it turns out, a lot of people get confused by date labels on food packaging — and a big reason why is because expiration dates are not uniformly regulated in the U.S. To combat that, legislators introduced the Food Date Labeling Act. […]

Following severe flooding in 1960s Hamburg, Germany, that killed over 300 people, the city upgraded its flood defenses. However, recent simulations revealed that even higher flood barriers were required to protect against extreme high tides and storm surges. An architecture competition was launched to redevelop the site and high-profile firm Zaha Hadid Architects got the nod. Though it doesn’t boast […]

Rhode Island School of Design student Hyunseok An has created a prototype indoor micro-algae farm in a bid to sustainably and beautifully integrate algae into our everyday lives. Dubbed The Coral after its coral pattern, the micro-farm takes on the shape of a four-by-four gridded bioreactor that can be mounted on the wall like artwork. The algae that grows inside […]

Plastic pollution is a frequent topic around the planet, especially when referencing marine life and water pollution. Microplastics can’t be seen by the naked eye but are showing up in water tests nearly everywhere. Do you have plastic in your nearby waterway? If you want to find out, you can collect a sample for testing using Babylegs, a trawl for […]

It has been a rocky start to life for The Ocean Cleanup’s U-shaped barriers, which it hopes will sweep through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch collecting plastic waste that can be hauled back to shore and recycled. The team is now reporting to have overcome a significant stumbling block, using a novel parachute-anchor mechanism to correct speed-related troubles plaguing its […]

There’s good reason why sharks are the most disagreeable of nature’s beasties. They’ve been the apex predator in the oceans of the world for around 450 million years, the shark had taken on its current shape long before land vertebrates existed. Given such an extraordinarily long evolution that makes them three times older than the dinosaurs, it’s little wonder sharks […]