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More victims of "waytoomuchglassia". Photo courtesy: Loozrboy/CC BY 2.0
Cities like Toronto, New York or Chicago get cold in the winter and hot in the summer, yet almost every new condo and office building is designed with floor to ceiling glass. Something many people don't realize that the more glass a building has, the less strength there is in the outer walls. All-glass buildings develop envelope problems much sooner than traditional designs.
Andrew Michler calls it "the very contagious disease waytoomuchglassia." At Building Science, John Straube does the math and shows how really bad they are. He explains:
Glazing systems, including almost all modern high-performance ones, have very little ability to control heat flow and solar radiation. Older windows also did little to control heat loss and solar gain. Hence, most older buildings had restrained window-to-wall area ratios. Most of the tremendous performance gains in glazing technology over the past 25 years have been squandered on increased window area, not improved performance.
He goes on to explain that there is a balance that has to be found, between maximizing daylight but minimizing unwanted heat gain or loss. Straube also points out that there are some expensive, high quality assemblies that can get up to R-12. But most of these window walls thrown up on condos have the R-value equivalent of 1/2" of fiberglass. (R-2). Who would build a house with that? Straube concludes:
Many designers have shown that beautiful and high-performance buildings can result from a proper balance of glazing quantity and quality. All too often, however, designers appear to choose all-glass curtain walls or floor-to-ceiling strip windows because they make it easy to create a sleek impression while leaving all the tricky details in the hands of the manufacturers. How much longer can we afford to pay the energy bills that result from that choice? It’s high time to revive the craft of designing beautiful facades that don’t cost the earth.
A couple years ago TreeHugger.com was excited to learn about a 60-year-old Laysan albatross named Wisdom hatched her 35th chick. Then last year, they were excited to visit Midway Atoll where she nests, and where she was rearing yet another chick. Now this year, miraculously, Wisdom has returned to the atoll -- now as the oldest living wild bird as she outlived a Northern Royal albatross named Grandma -- and has nested yet again, with her newest chick hatching on February 3rd. Wisdom is now 62.
Wisdom's age puts her at living more than twice as long as the average Laysan albatross. It means that Wisdom has overcome an incredible number of obstacles to survival, not the least of which is the thousands of deadly hooks tied to the lines of industrial fishing vessels. Albatross are often killed as bycatch, becoming snagged on the hooks as they try to grab bait fish when the miles-long lines are dropped in the water. Not only that, but there is also the problem of plastic pollution. Albatross commonly mistake pieces of plastic as food -- cigarette lighters look an awful lot like tiny squid to an albatross. Surviving ingestion of plastic, which sits in the stomach and can kill a bird by starvation, alone is a mighty feat. Also, the fact that she is still rearing young may change science's understanding of these birds.
"It blows us away that this is a 62-year-old bird and she keeps laying eggs and raising chicks," said Bruce Peterjohn, chief of the bird banding laboratory at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Centre in Laurel. "We know that birds will eventually stop reproducing when they're too old," he said. "The assumption about albatrosses is it will happen to them, too. But we don't know where that line is. That, in and of itself, is pretty amazing."
Wisdom the Laysan albatross, aged 62, and her partner, believed to be younger, at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific ocean. Photo courtesy: Pete Leary/The Washington Post
"We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves".
- Budda
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are".
- Arthur Golden
English naturalist Charles Darwin was born in 1809. By the 1830's, when he was still a young man, he had established himself in the scientific community. Darwin is most famous for his theory of evolution.
A black-eyed pea is an edible legume that is thought to have made its way to North America from Africa or Asia during the slave trade in the 1600s. The kidney-shaped bean has a black dot at its centre.
American singer-songwriter and musician Josh Groban, a top-selling pop and classical artist, shares his February 27th birthday with his brother, Chris, who is four years younger.
Although a violin and a fiddle have the same bodies, there are differences between the two instruments. For example, fiddles usually employ steel strings while gut strings are used on violins.
It is thought that bighorn sheep came to North America about 750,000 years ago when they crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia. Their numbers have dwindled since then from millions to mere thousands.
An aerial shot shows the causeway that divides the northern and southern parts of the Great Salt Lake. The rosy color of the northern waters is the result of the pigmented, salt-loving microbes. Photo courtesy: Courtesy of Great Salt Lake Institute via ouramazingplanet.com
So much salt is dissolved in the northern part of Utah's Great Salt Lake that its edges can become encrusted with crystals that sparkle against a treeless landscape and vast sky.
The salt concentration of the water hovers near saturation, reaching nearly 10 times the salinity, or salt content, of the oceans. These conditions are inhospitable to most life, except some salt-loving organisms.
At least a few of these make their presence known through the rosy hue they impart to the water and sometimes the salt. Pigments in these salt-lovers' cells, including carotenoids like those found in carrots, give the lake and its salt crust a distinctive pink hue.
The pink microbial tint of the northern Great Salt Lake is common for bodies of water with high salt concentrations in them. Above, the Lac Rose (or Pink Lake) in Senegal. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
This tinge commonly occurs in highly salty bodies of water around the world, said Bonnie Baxter, who directs the Great Salt Institute at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.
The pigment may offer protection from another extreme condition in this shade-less, high-elevation environment: ultra-violet radiation exposure, she said.
An inland sea, Lake Bonneville once covered much of what is now the state of Utah. When Lake Bonneville receded, it left behind what became known as the Great Salt Lake.
"I always see it as the puddle in the bottom of the bathtub that didn't drain," Baxter told OurAmazingPlanet.
Unlike most lakes, the Great Salt Lake has no outlet to the ocean; so the concentrated salt and minerals left by Lake Bonneville, as well as those carried in by its contributing rivers, have nowhere to go.
The salinity in the Great Salt Lake declines to the south, where perhaps the water's most prominent resident is the brine shrimp. Sometimes raised in aquariums as sea monkeys, they grow to 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) long.
But to the north, the super-saline water's most abundant residents are more primitive. Baxter and others have found a few fungi, some algae and bacteria, but mostly a type of extreme-environment–loving microbes called archaea.
A high-salt environment can be tough on living things because the salinity makes water leave cells. To avoid this fate, the lake microbes have salt pumps in their membranes. They also accumulate lipids, or fats, to counteract the pressure forcing water out of their cells. That ability makes them interesting as a potential source of biofuel, Baxter said.
Above, a salty pink lake in Australia. Fungi found living in Utah’s Great Salt Lake are closely related to those found in salt lakes and ponds around the world. Migrating birds may have spread the common ancestors for these salt-loving fungi, Baxter said. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
The salt-loving archaea are nothing if not resilient. Some can hibernate for years within salt crystals.
Baxter and her students discovered the organisms' hibernating abilities after reviving microbes from crystals collected 10 years earlier. Baxter had been keeping these salt crystals in a tube on her desk to show to students, "not exactly the most protected environment," she said.
"That is where we are finding the most unusual ones," Baxter said of the microbes. "The ones that can dry up in salt crystals and hang out for years."
In the northern part of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the salt concentration of the water can reach ten times that of the oceans and hovers near saturation. As a result life is sparse here. Pigments in the cells of salt-loving microbes give the water a rosy hue. Above, the inner circles of Robert Smithson’s environmental sculpture Spiral Jetty located in the lake. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
An aerial view of Spiral Jetty. The microbes’ pigments include carotenoids, like those found in carrots, and these may help protect them from the other extreme condition in this shadeless, high-elevation environment: ultra-violet radiation exposure, according to Bonnie Baxter who directs the Great Salt Institute at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
The salt-loving microbes can hibernate for years in the salt crystals that precipitate out from the lake. Baxter and her students were able to revive some collected 10 years earlier. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
Snow at Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire. The cold spell is giving way to heavy rain. Photo courtesy: Matt Cardy/Getty Images via guardian.co.uk
More than 200 flood alerts are in place across the UK as heavy rain has mixed with melting snow.
There have been more reports of flooding in south Wales overnight as the downpours replace almost two weeks of snow. Norfolk police have reported flooding caused by melting snow and ice, which has closed a number of roads in the area.
Wales, central England, and the south-west will be the worst-hit areas, with at least 2.5 cm (1 in) of rain expected by mid-morning, while the rest of the UK can expect around 1.3 cm.
Rising temperatures of up to 12C have sparked a rapid thaw of the snow and ice which has built up in the recent cold snap, exacerbating potential flooding problems. The Environment Agency has issued 30 flood warnings urging people to take immediate action against predicted flooding, in the Midlands, the west of England, central England and Wales. A further 218 flood warnings are in place across England, Scotland and Wales affecting all but the east of England and north of Scotland.
Chris Burton, a forecaster for MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said the heavy rain would return on Monday along with the risk of flooding, as the surface water and river levels build up before an unsettled week.
Around 18 buildings flooded in various locations across Wales on Friday night, including two houses in Solva, Pembrokeshire, and two in Dolgellau, north Wales.
The latest heavy snow storms left hundreds of people stranded for hours on motorways in the north of England. The M6 was blocked in both directions between junctions 25 and 27 in Lancashire when a sudden burst of more than a foot of snow brought drivers to a standstill from around 8.30 pm, the Highways Agency said. Many became stuck along the stretch of motorway between Wigan and Standish after struggling to make it up inclines in the treacherous conditions, while a number of accidents including jack-knifed lorries also blocked lanes.
Mountain rescue workers were drafted in to help with rescue operations and check on the condition of drivers stranded by the snow. A diabetic man was taken to Royal Blackburn hospital after falling ill, while an ambulance taking a female patient to Royal Preston hospital had to be dug out of the snow by Bowland Pennine mountain rescue team.
Phil O'Brien, team leader of Bowland Pennine mountain rescue, said: "It was potentially a very serious situation. The Highways Agency managed to get people moving at about 4.30 to 5 am]. There were hundreds of cars stuck but most people seemed in good spirits."
Some of the stranded drivers passed the time by having snowball fights and building snowmen, while others abandoned their cars completely.
David Cameron took to Twitter on Saturday to express his sympathy for those caught up in the snow.
He tweeted: "Huge sympathy for those affected by heavy #uksnow. Govt working closely with transport operators to minimise impact on everyone."
A family had to be evacuated when the gable end of their house collapsed, apparently under the weight of fresh snow in Barnsley, South Yorkshire.
The death toll during the recent cold snap, which is in double figures, is thought to have risen further as it was feared a man in his 30s or 40s might have frozen to death after going missing in woodland.
His body was found on Thursday night after four friends went to Newmarket police station in Suffolk reporting that he had not been seen for four days. The men had been searching for him and found him dead in a wooded area. The death is being treated as unexplained, but one theory is that he succumbed to the freezing temperatures.
A father died when his car skidded into a river just before his wife's vehicle also plunged into the icy water. David Cox, 42, was taking his 11-year-old daughter Tess to school when their Toyota Aygo left the path and crashed into the river Wye in Derbyshire.
The children and their mother managed to get out of the cars and safely to shore but Cox was unable to escape.
Other casualties of the cold spell include the postman John Bircham, 57, who collapsed soon after he was towed out of a snowdrift in Dulverton, Somerset, and Bernadette Lee, 25, who was found collapsed in the snow in Deal, Kent, following a night out.
A deforested area of rainforest along the border of the Xingu river in northern Brazil. Photo courtesy: Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images via guardian.co.uk
The Brazilian government is to launch a four-year tree census of the Amazon to improve understanding of the impacts of deforestation, climate change and conservation efforts.
The study will also help to assess the potential value of the biodiversity under the canopy and the growth of human settlements in the Amazon region, which is home to a number of fast-expanding cities, as well as uncontacted indigenous tribes.
The cataloguing operation will be the most detailed study for 40 years – a period in which the world's greatest forest has come under unprecedented pressure from farmers, loggers and drought.
The environment ministry said the inventory "will allow us to have a broad panorama of the quality and the conditions in the forest cover".
Improvements in satellite monitoring technology have already provided a wealth of data about the degradation of the Amazon.
Last week, Nasa released figures showing that an area twice the size of California continues to suffer from a mega-drought, which began eight years ago. Nasa said this may be the first sign that the Amazon is suffering major consequences from climate change.
The Brazilian government also uses a sophisticated satellite system to co-ordinate its actions against illegal forest clearance. The environment ministry says this has slowed deforestation and pushed Brazil halfway towards its Copenhagen commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 36% by 2020.
However, there are limits to what can be analysed from above, particularly when it comes to the quality of the forest and the biodiversity below the canopy.
"We are going to come to know the rainforest from within," said forestry minister, Antonio Carlos Hummel.
With the results expected to be released year by year, the environment minister, Izabella Teixeira, said the government would have more information on which to base its future strategies of conservation and extraction of economic value.
At an age when most youngsters are just beginning to get acquainted with the world they've inherited, 10-year-old Vanis Buckholz was already thinking of ways he could help make it a better one for others -- and grown-ups have taken notice.
After learning about the importance of recycling on Earth Day at his elementary school a few years back, Vanis began to to notice how much reusable stuff people were throwing away every day, and decided to try to make a difference. So, at the ripe young age of 7, he became one of the nation's youngest eco-entrepreneurs, launching his very own recycling business to serve his hometown of Corona del Mar, California -- thus, "My ReCycler" was born.
"The idea for my business name came from 'cycling' and riding my scooter around town picking up trash on our beach, streets and parks then hauling it home to recycle," says Vanis. "My mom and dad taught me to never pollute so picking up trash was something we always did but now it's a part of the business."
After three years in business, My ReCycler has expanded with the help of his family, friends, and folks from throughout the region -- and a trailer attached to his bike to collect his customer's recyclables. In fact, nowadays his trips to the recycling center are by the truckload.
But if all that wasn't remarkable enough for such an ambitious youngster, Vanis then decided to donate a portion of the recycling profits Project Hope Alliance, an organization that provides outreach to homeless and underprivileged kids.
"It’s so easy to do nothing. But it’s really good to do something! I always tell my new customers that “every little bit matters”. Even ONE bottle helps. I love my job. I’m a very lucky kid but there’s a lot of kids who don’t have much luck."
"Project Hope Alliance is both amazed and humbled by the contributions and support given by Vanis to our organization," says Executive Director Jennifer Friend. "With his support we are educating and empowering homeless children in Orange County to end the cycle of poverty. Thank you Vanis for being a shining example of hope in action"
Vanis recently spoke before city council meeting, where he was lauded by Newport Beach Mayor Keith Curry: "Newport Beach is the home of some great entrepreneurs. The one tonight is particularly young, but I think is a very outstanding entrepreneur."
The oldest living organism in the world is 80,000 years old and clones itself. Known as Pando, and nicknamed The Trembling Giant, this organism is a single grove of Quaking Aspen trees in Utah. Aspens trees are so glorious particularly on windy nights. Before the aspen grove across the street was sacrificed for even more condos, I would sit on my balcony on windy nights enjoying the sight and sound of the aspens. My neighbours don't make the same viewing as my aspens did.
The grove is aptly-named Pando, which is Latin for "I spread" -- and spread it does. The grove is actually a single clonal colony of a male Quaking Aspen. Simply put, it is essentially one massive root system that began life an estimated 80,000 years ago. The root system currently has somewhere around 47,000 stems that create the grove of trees that keep the root system going.
Pando is not only considered the oldest living organism but also possibly the heaviest. The colony has spread over about 106 acres and experts think in all it weighs about 6,600 short tons. However, some experts think that chunks of the root system have died off leaving parts of the colony separated, making it effectively more than one organism. And other less-studied clonal colonies of aspen may be contenders for the title of heaviest.
Pando exists in part because frequent fires have kept conifers out of the area, and because a shift to a semi-arid climate has kept other aspen seedlings from taking root. This has left plenty of space for the ancient root system of Pando to spread and thrive. The fact that Pando is one giant organism wasn't discovered until the 1970s, by Burton V. Barnes of the University of Michigan. Currently, experts are worried that a range of factors are threatening the life of this ancient organism.
While Pando's estimated age of 80,000 years may be staggering, even more amazing is the possibility that experts have underestimated its age. Because the age of the organism cannot be determined through tree rings (the average age of the stems being around 130 years), many factors such as the history and climate of the local environment over millennia. Taking different factors into account, some experts think that Pando could be closer to 1 million years old! There is a lot of debate and speculation around Pando, but one thing is certain: this organism is mind-blowing.
Li Feifan discusses his 40-minute documentary Future Armageddon, screened on Chinese TV via guardian.co.uk
In the news lately has been the extraordinarily bad conditions of Beijing's air, or as some are calling it, "airpocalypse". The city recently went way, way, way off the charts for air pollution and officials are now looking at how to reign in the causes of such incredible pollution.
The Guardian reports, "One week after that chart-busting Saturday, Beijing proposed new measures to combat pollution, including increased fines for excessive vehicle emissions and factory shutdowns on particularly bad days. But experts say the sheer scale and diversity of the pollution's underlying causes means that Beijing residents may not be able to breathe freely for decades."
One resident, Li Feifan, hopes to bring the issues directly to the public view with a new 40-minute documentary showing the flat-out frightening conditions of air within the city. He is hoping a visual presentation of the damage being done will spur residents to change their ways.
A baby is given nebuliser therapy at Beijing Children's Hospital as the capital is hit by record-breaking air pollution. Photograph: Li Wen/Xinhua Press/Corbis via guardian.co.uk
Record-breaking pollution in Beijing and other environmental problems in China are the result of unchecked government power, one of the country's former top environment officials has said.
On 12 January, Beijing's pollution hit a nauseating 755 on a US Environmental Protection Agency-designed 0-500 scale. Below 25 is considered the safe daily level by the World Health Organisation. Stores sold out of anti-pollution face masks, flights were delayed and hospital respiratory wards were overrun with coughing patients. Internet users called it the "airpocalypse".
"I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth, and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted," Qu Geping, a top environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993, told the South China Morning Post.
Qu said that Chinese authorities could have pre-empted the crisis by adhering to a 1983 policy "stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection". Yet they haven't, and the country's air, water and soil continue to deteriorate. "Why was the strategy never properly implemented?" he said. "I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law."
One week after that chart-busting Saturday, Beijing proposed new measures to combat pollution, including increased fines for excessive vehicle emissions and factory shutdowns on particularly bad days. But experts say the sheer scale and diversity of the pollution's underlying causes means that Beijing residents may not be able to breathe freely for decades.
Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China's environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country's air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. "One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to," she said.
Beijing's air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.
The Guardian writes, "Li Feifan discusses his 40-minute documentary Future Armageddon, screened on Chinese TV this week. It features multiple images of the same city skyline submerged in different levels of smog. Li spent two months filming in the city, including earlier this month when pollution levels were 30 to 45 times above the recommended safety levels."
Air pollution isn't only bad in Beijing. A NASA chart revealing poor air quality across the middle east and Asia.
I'm fortunate to have several passions in my life. I am absolutely an eco-nut. I am always trying to find new ways to reduce, reuse, recycle. We, as a species, have done more harm to this planet in the short time we have been here, than any other catastrophe or happening ever has. It's up to us to fix it.
I care about the environment whether it is as small as a single cell or as large as the universe.
I adore creativity and think we can all do more with much less. This earth has enough resources for us all to live comfortably if we all learn to share. Wasn't that a lesson we were supposed to learn in kindergarten?
I also love the bizarre, unusual, the weird and the strange. Be prepared for the odd "different" blog.
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