We're in Beta! Help us test our site by sending any bugs or feedback to us by clicking the Give Feedback button. Thanks!

Teenage boys in different parts of the world have solved two of the most difficult problems facing the environment and both projects are low-tech and affordable.

Richard O’Shea from Blarney won this year’s BT young scientist top award for his invention of a smokeless biomass-fired cooking stove.  Richard had visited Africa and seen first-hand how many people cook indoors on wood-burning stoves: 2 billion people across the world rely on burning biomass materials like wood, dung and plants to cook their food.  Every year thousands of people in the developing world who cook indoors in poorly ventilated homes die from smoke inhalation.

Richard then spent months designing a highly efficient, smokeless stove that can be built using found materials such as tin cans.   His goal is to work with charities such as Trocaire and Concern to share his invention with those who need it and can build their own.

Meanwhile, across the water in Canada, 16-year-old Daniel Burd won the Canadian Science Fair with his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic. Daniel  recognized that plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means that decomposing microorganisms do exist.

Daniel immersed ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth and then isolated the most productive organisms.  The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures, Burd achieved a 43 percent degradation of plastic in six weeks, an  amazing result.

With 500 billion plastic bags manufactured annually and an expanding Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, Burd’s breakthrough is timely and now needs to be embraced by governments and industry alike.

It’s nice to see humans getting to do something fun on the beach – whenever I take my humans out all they do is walk along by the waves!  But last Saturday a big group turned out and brought their humans with them for a dance/happening/choreographed runabout…whatever it was, they seemed to be having fun and it was supposed to be doing something about this crazy weather we’re having.  My ancestors were from Cuba, so I like a little tropical showers and sun, but I never expected to see that in Ireland.  Anyway, take a look at the video and see if you can spot the little white dog showing them how it’s done!

In case you have any doubts about how climate will affect Ireland and the UK, have a read of this - it describes the summers we might be having soon, which are fine if you’re a lizard, but not when you have a full coat of beautiful fur!  Are you carpooling yet?

As anyone who read the blog on electric cars below will know, I’m skeptical of just changing the symptom without addressing the cause.  The big problem with electric cars (as with computers, phones, and even wind and wave power) is that batteries, to date, are uneconomical in terms of the energy that is lost in storage.  A team at Boston’s MIT university have come up with a solution that is part terrifying and part exciting.  These braniacs have genetically engineered a virus that builds rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the form of a plastic film. 

Whatsmore, these nanocreatures were created using green processes: the researchers bred the viruses to self-assemble nanoscale battery films by creating billions of random variations, then using the survival-of-the-fittest principle to select those that best performed desired tasks. (One man’s breeding is another man’s genetic engineering…!) And the batteries can be constructed in an environmentally-friendly manner, avoiding toxic solvents and energy-intensive procedures:  “Because the viruses are living organisms, we had to use only water-based solvents, no high pressures and no high temperatures,” says Angela Belcher, the study coauthor.

The viruses were selected from common bacteriophages, which infect bacteria but are harmless to humans. To the Buddhists in the house who say “But what about the bacteria?  Aren’t they living creatures too?”  I can only answer – if we keep using the old batteries there won’t be any bacteria left to care…!

In demonstrations, batteries made using the micro-contact printing method were able to be recharged hundreds of times with no detectable drop in performance – now that truly is incredible. We still have the problem of how the charge will be created, but this is extremely interesting news for greeniacs everywhere who can overlook the Frankenstein element of living creatures creating things – but wait!  Isn’t that what farming is all about?  In this case, the farm is just nano size – not as picturesque, but then global warming isn’t too pretty either…

Eventually, they plan to commercialize the printable battery films. Last week, MIT President Susan Hockfield demonstrated the prototype to U.S. President Barack Obama.  This wasn’t just a courtesy: funding for the research was provided by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute and the U.S. National Science Foundation.  Here’s hoping Obama will use it for the right purposes….

A report in today’s London Independent suggests that over the past few decades the sun has quietened its sunspot activity, thereby cooling the earth, at exactly the same time as greenhouse gasses were heating the planet to dangerous temperatures.  Is this pure coincidence, or could it be that the Gaia theory doesn’t just hold for the earth but for the entire solar system? How comforting and awesome to imagine that this system, and who knows, perhaps the whole universe, is a sophisticated organism, self-regulating and self-healing – much as our microcosmic little bodies are…?