World’s First Vertical Forest Gets Introduced in Italy

World’s First Vertical Forest Gets Introduced in Italy (via greenliving4live.com)

See on Scoop.it – Green Living The Bosco Verticale is a system that optimizes, recuperates, and produces energy. Covered in plant life, the building aids in balancing the microclimate and in filtering the dust particles contained in the urban environment…

 

Ariel Sharon Park, A Revolution In Waste Management & Urban Planning

Ariel Sharon Park, A Revolution In Waste Management & Urban Planning (via Planetsave)

What do you do if you have a lot of trash, limited landfill space, problematic floodplains, and a growing population? It’s a common problem across the world, as the trends of population growth, wasteful consumption and an increasingly plastic, throwaway…

 

Cicada 3301: The internet mystery that has the world baffled

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala, Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an Internet forum.

The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: “3301.”

A self-confessed IT security “freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson was interested immediately.

This was, he knew, an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file, most often seen in conjunction with image files.

A recipient who can work out the code — for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel — can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomized background “noise.”

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaida operatives had planned the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.


Read more in the original article at the link below..
The internet mystery that has the world baffled

Why Socialist Kshama Sawant's Campaign Matters To Seattle

Kshama Sawant didn’t have to identify as a socialist.

Seattle City Council races are nonpartisan, after all, and her views aren’t particularly revolutionary, as far as Seattle goes: She supports a $15 minimum wage (as do both mayoral candidates), unions for low-wage workers and rent control.

But branding herself as a socialist – still a dirty word in many corners of American politics – may have helped her rake in 35 percent of the primary vote with little money. (She had raised about $110,000 as of Monday night.)

Councilmember Nick Licata, who has been on the council for 16 years, said Sawant’s message resonates because a section of voters are tired of risk-averse Democrats and Republicans. Sawant, he said, has managed to make socialist ideas appeal to voters.

“We don’t have a mature socialist political movement in the country, and probably the last time we did was literally 80 years ago,” Licata said. “To Sawant’s credit, she has been able to craft a message that is understandable, simple and eschews most of the rhetoric.”

Sawant ran against Richard Conlin, 64, a darling of the Democratic party with left-leaning views. Conlin appeared to be winning on Tuesday night with 54 percent of the vote when King County released its first results. Sawant received about 46 percent of the vote.

Sawant stayed on message throughout her campaign, using dry, academic language to discuss the issues she wants addressed. The roots of homelessness are within the roots of our capitalist society itself, she said at the October debate.

Later, on the social media site Reddit, she addressed rent control:

What rent control would do is provide housing security for tenants, who are at present continually forced to move due to rent increases demanded by price-gouging real estate companies. It would also address the serious income and race segregation in Seattle housing and enable low-income people, people of color, and immigrant communities to not be red-lined out of the city.

It appears that Sawant, 41, won support on the strength of her message alone. She is a Mumbai-educated economics professor who rarely strays from her platform and who avoids discussing her private life – although she has grudgingly admitted that she is separated from her husband. She doesn’t wear pantsuits or coiffe her hair, and she rarely points to her past experiences or to endorsements.

Sawant’s political campaign director, Philip Locker, an organizer for the Socialist Alternative party, said that by running for office, Sawant pushed neglected issues into the spotlight.

“We’ve gotten an enormous response – we’ve even forced both Mayor Mike McGinn and Sen. Ed Murray to discuss the $15 minimum wage,” Locker said of the mayoral candidates. “That’s powerful.”

When Sawant speaks, her supporters cheer. The Stranger has endorsed her enthusiastically, and The Nation magazine, based in Washington, D.C., wrote about her this week in equally glowing terms.

The Nation noted that Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president in 1912, received more than 10 percent of the vote in the Western states, including Washington.

Sawant’s campaign in Seattle speaks to a similar sense of disgruntlement with the two-party system, The Nation wrote, saying that a “bold rejection of austerity has significant popular appeal.”

But even a century ago, when Debs won more than one million votes nationwide, no socialist was this close to winning a city council position in Seattle, Scott Cline, the city’s archivist said.

City council elections have been nonpartisan since 1910, Cline said, but “I have never seen any records that indicate a city council member has self-identified as a socialist or belonged to a socialist party.”

Cline said that before 1910, a number of socialist candidates ran, but none seem to have made it out of the primary elections.

“It is certainly possible that after 1910 there might have been a serious socialist challenge,” Cline said in an email to KUOW. “However, no name from general elections stands out as a strong socialist candidate; certainly not on par with Kshama Sawant.”

Cline searched through the available voters’ pamphlets dating back to 1983 and found there has been just one other socialist candidate for Seattle City Council who did well – Yolanda Alaniz. Alaniz came in second among four candidates in 1991. She lost to Sue Donaldson, 131,872 to 27,991.

“Nevertheless, nearly 28,000 votes is quite amazing for a socialist candidate,” Cline said.
Licata said he believes that Sawant won’t be an anomaly and that more fringe candidates — on the left and the right — will run for office in coming years.

“My hope is that she doesn’t disappear after the election if she loses,” Licata said on Monday, before Tuesday night's results. “She represents the poor, the immigrants, the refugees – the folks who are not in our City Council offices lobbying us.”

On Tuesday night, Sawant told her supporters that she's not going anywhere. She hinted that she might run against Conlin again if she loses. And she said that she views the passing of the $15 minimum wage in SeaTac as evidence of the left rising up.

Isolde Raftery @ kuow.org
Original article: http://kuow.org/post/why-socialist-kshama-sawants-campaign-matters-win-or-lose

Meal Sharing: A new social-networking site that connects you with a home-cooked meal wherever you are

While home cooked meals may not have been easy to come, they are now. Meal Sharing is a new social-networking site founded by Chicagoan Jay Savsani that aims to hook travelers up with hosts for home-cooked meals.

Their mission is to allow travelers to experience further. Meal Sharing wants to “make it possible for people, who otherwise would probably never meet, to get together and have a good time over food…to make that experience safe and enriching for everyone involved.”

It’s relatively easy. Here’s how it works:
You log onto the site, select your current location, and request a meal prepared by a particular host on a particular date. After a nearby host family has accepted your request, the two parties can message back and forth to detail the particulars (possible dietary restrictions, allergies, etc), and just like that, the meal is set. “To build trust and safety for the site” users log back onto the site following the meal, and write a review of their experience.

Here is the link to their site: www.mealsharing.com

Venezuela Opens Deputy Ministry For The Supreme Social Happiness To Keep Track Of Social Programs

President Nicolás Maduro announced on Friday the creation of the Viceministerio para la Suprema Felicidad Social – a deputy ministry for the supreme social happiness. The institution will take care of complaints and applications to the services, and will monitor who is receiving what program and how it is being carried out.

The new institution will supervise the social programs the country has initiated since 2003, called Misiones. Such programs give free health care to the poorest citizens, help to the elderly and disabled, and access to education. When they launched, the Misiones gave Chávez’s presidency a much needed boost. Read the entire article here...
Venezuela Opens Deputy Ministry For The Supreme Social Happiness To Keep Track Of Social Programs

The Story Of Marinaleda, Spain's Thriving Model Communist Village

Despite the “big” failures of 20th century Communism, the 21st century boasts plenty of smaller, enduring victories against the neoliberal order. Marinaleda is one of those victories. Few of us have heard of Marinaleda, a small town of 2700 people, tucked away in Spain’s Andalusia region, around 100km east of Seville. The town’s official coat of arms states “Marinaleda – Una Utopia Hacia La Paz” (a Utopia towards Peace).

They are led by their charismatic mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, who has held the position since 1979 – re-elected time after time with an overwhelming majority.  In 2012, he became a household name in Spain after heading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalusian unemployed.  Mr Sánchez Gordillo’s CUT-BAI party belongs to the Izquierda Unida (“United Left”),the Communist-led coalition.

The fascinating story of this town in Southern Spain furnishes us with evidence of an embryonic, functioning, democratic socialism, which has managed to effectively struggle against the poverty and immiseration experienced in the surrounding areas of Andalusia. In Marinaleda, the residents have won and guaranteed greater rights for themselves – to pay, to housing and to facilities.

The core of Marinaleda’s communist ethic is a 1,200 hectare co-operative farm that was won through a decade of occupations and hunger strikes from the Duke of Infantado. The Duke’s property was just one of many instances in Spain of vast estates with arable land fenced off from the area’s surrounding, usually starving, population. The farm, known as El Humoso, sells its products internationally. Fair-trade and “socially aware” brands often get a bad rap by critical theorists. But El Humoso makes a compelling counterpoint to the likes of Starbucks and Tom’s Shoes. “Know that when you consume any product from our co-operative, you are helping to create employment and social justice,” says Gordillo.

The eight agricultural co-operatives on the farm concentrate on labour intensive crop production such as artichokes, peppers, beans and also wheat and olive groves. Every worker gets paid the same wage – €47 for a six and a half hour working day. It may not sound like a lot, but it's more than double the Spanish minimum wage.  Marinaleda, now has an unemployment rate of 5%. Spain, by constrast, has an unemployment rate of 27%.

Marinaleda, surprisingly, has no police. They didn’t abolish the police force, or violently expel its officers. Marinaleda had one police officer. When that officer retired, they never hired a replacement. Now, Gordillo has been known to chase down delinquent youths on his own and speak to their families. Surprisingly, it seems to work out.

A few times every year Marinaleda organize something called red and green Sundays. On these days everyone participates in making the town and the cooperative better for the whole. ‘Red Sunday’ means that everyone does something to improve the town – paint houses, fix pipes, improve pavements and similar jobs. ‘Green Sunday’ means that everyone works extra in the fields, harvesting, packing and so on. This free work benefits everyone who lives in Marinaleda.

Everyone in Marinaleda is employed and nearly everyone has a proper house. The housing policy is that once you have lived in Marinaleda for two years, you get materials to build your own house. The houses are built on municipal land, with materials provided by local and regional government. Local people pay just €15 a month while contributing an agreed number of working hours per month to the construction of the houses. This house cannot be sold, but given away to your children or to someone you choose. Just in recent years three hundred houses have been build.

As an example of Marinaleda’s socialist ideology and believing that power has to be put into the hands of local people, the local Council has created General Assemblies where around 400 to 600 local people meet 25 to 30 times a year to voice their concerns and vote on issues. A further example of the Council’s form of local democracy is the use of “participatory budgets” whereby each year the Council’s proposed investments and expenditures are taken to local areas for discussion.

Marinaleda certainly is a breath of fresh air in a dark Spanish crisis, and might motivate others to live differently.

Companies Could Start Using Brainwaves To Figure Out How Much To Charge You

Companies could start using brainwaves to find out how much customers are willing to pay. Bloomberg Businessweek profiled Kai-Markus Muller, a German scientist who is developing technology to "measure brainwaves and hit upon feel-good prices." According to Mueller, his studies showed that Germans would pay $3.25 for a small cup of Starbucks coffee-way more than the current price of $2.44.

Read More at the link here.. http://www.businessinsider.in/Companies-Could-Start-Using-Brainwaves-To-Figure-Out-How-Much-To-Charge-You/articleshow/23989479.cms

Flour Made With Insects Wins $1M Prize For Mcgill Team

Mohammed Ashour and four other MBA students at McGill University in Montreal have a plan to farm insects in poor countries and turn them into flour that can be used in everything from bread to corn tortillas. And on Monday, former President Bill Clinton handed them $1 million to make it happen.
The team, which includes Ashour, Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and Gabe Mott, received the Hult Prize for social entrepreneurs at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting. The seed funding will go to their project, Aspire Food Group, which aims to make insect-based food products available year-round to people living in some of the world's poorest slums.

How Poverty Taxes the Brain

Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.

We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It's a scarce resource.

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

Read the entire article here.. How Poverty Taxes the Brain

Element Crucial For Life On Earth Probably Came From Mars, New Study Finds

Element Crucial For Life On Earth Probably Came From Mars, New Study Finds (via Planetsave)

Owing to the fact that it is far easier for a chunk of Mars to travel to Earth than the other way around,  it is likely that certain elements necessary to catalyze the formation of biological molecules (like RNA and DNA) came  from our neighboring…

 

Bayou Corne: The biggest ongoing disaster in the United States you haven't heard of.

(Source: Mother Jones, Daily Kos)

One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine, forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne's 350 residents—an exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.

Texas Brine's operation sits atop a three-mile-wide, mile-plus-deep salt deposit known as the Napoleonville Dome, which is sheathed by a layer of oil and natural gas, a common feature of the salt domes prevalent in Gulf Coast states. The company specializes in a process known as injection mining, and it had sunk a series of wells deep into the salt dome, flushing them out with high-pressure streams of freshwater and pumping the resulting saltwater to the surface. From there, the brine is piped and trucked to refineries along the Mississippi River and broken down into sodium hydroxide and chlorine for use in manufacturing everything from paper to medical supplies.

Bayou Corne is the biggest ongoing disaster in the United States you haven't heard of. What happened in Bayou Corne, as near as anyone can tell, is that one of the salt caverns Texas Brine hollowed out—a mine dubbed Oxy3—collapsed. The sinkhole initially spanned about an acre. Today it covers more than 24 acres and is an estimated 750 feet deep. It subsists on a diet of swamp life and cypress trees, which it occasionally swallows whole. It celebrated its first birthday recently, and like most one-year-olds, it is both growing and prone to uncontrollable burps, in which a noxious brew of crude oil and rotten debris bubbles to the surface. But the biggest danger is invisible; the collapse unlocked tens of millions of cubic feet of explosive gases, which have seeped into the aquifer and wafted up to the community. The town blames the regulators. The regulators blame Texas Brine. Texas Brine blames some other company, or maybe the regulators, or maybe just God.

Why does America have such a big prison population?

Why does America have such a big prison population? (via The Economist)

“TOO many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law-enforcement reason.” The person who said that was neither a defence lawyer, nor a prisoners’-rights advocate, nor a European looking down his nose across the…

 

Phyto Kinetic: Green Roofs for City Buses and Improved Urban Ecosystem

Source: Urban Gardens
With his project, Phyto Kinetic, Marc Grañén aims to energize drab public buses with vibrant, gardened roofs that he hopes will contribute a bit to improving the urban ecosystem. Grañén utilizes a lightweight, 7-centimeter thick hydroponic foam which is much lighter than soil, thereby significantly reducing the overall weight of the Phyto Kinetic roof. The foam retains humidity and is extremely flexible, making it easy to install regardless of the shape of the bus roof. Read More..
Phyto Kinetic: Green Roofs for City Busesbr /and Improved Urban Ecosystem

SERCO: The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of

Serco Group are the world's leading outsourcing company with a vast and diverse portfolio of government contracts. These contracts are worth billions of pounds each year and means that the control of public services are passed to this privately owned company.  Among its operations are public and private transport and traffic control, aviation, military and nuclear weapons contracts, detention centres and prisons and schools. Serco has seen a large amount of criticism involving its private prisons and detention centres.

This video from the Hungry Beast, broadcast on Australia's ABC network, give's a brief introduction to Serco and the services they run across the world.

Another video from RT examines their role in public services across the world.

Could the Government Get a Search Warrant for Your Thoughts?

Source: The Atlantic

We don't have a mind reading machine. But what if we one day did? The technique of functional MRI (fMRI), which measures changes in localized brain activity over time, can now be used to infer information regarding who we are thinking about, what we have seen, and the memories we are recalling. As the technology for inferring thought from brain activity continues to improve, the legal questions regarding its potential application in criminal and civil trials are gaining greater attention.
Last year, a Maryland man on trial for murdering his roommate tried to introduce results from an fMRI-based lie detection test to bolster his claim that the death was a suicide. Read More... http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/could-the-government-get-a-search-warrant-for-your-thoughts/278111/

Peru To Provide Free Solar Power To 2 Million Of Its Poorest Residents

Peru has initiated a new solar panel program that will provide electricity to more than 2 million of its poorest residents.

Currently, only 66% of Peru’s 24 million people has access to electricity, according to the country’s Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino. By 2016, the plan is to provide electricity to 95% of residents through The National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program.

“This program is aimed at the poorest people, those who lack access to electric lighting and still use oil lamps, spending their own resources to pay for fuels that harm their health,” he said.  Read More..
http://www.the9billion.com/2013/07/18/peru-to-provide-free-solar-power-to-2-million-of-its-poorest-residents/

Dalston House: where every visitor becomes Spider-Man

(Source: The Guardian)
 A Victorian terrace has popped up in east London that lets you swing from its ledges, run up its walls and generally defy gravity. Architecture critic Oliver Wainwright hangs loose at Dalston House, the novelty installation by Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich.
 Leandro Erlich's Dalston House is at 1-7 Ashwin Street, London E8 3DL until 4 August

We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say

What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.”  Read More...
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/we-are-now-one-year-and-counting-from-global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say--2#ixzz2UZHy1OUO

Jib.li connects people who need to send something, somewhere, with those travelling that way.

 

Jib.li connects people who need to send something, somewhere, with those travelling that way. Jibli is pronounced dʒi:b li: which means Bring Me in Arabic.

Founded in Dec 2011 and based in Paris, Jib.li is a social platform that connects people who are travelling, with those who want to ship something. The site was designed and developed by two young Algerian information technology engineers. Jib.li is based on social networks to build trusted relations between people. It could be to send your keys to your roommate who lost them when you're on holidays, or maybe a sudden desire to taste your grama's delicious cookies. You can also just carry stuff for people to make some money.

The newborn site provides a platform for those seeking to get round the classic excess baggage weight problem. A search engine allows users to see who is available to transport certain objects, what routes they are travelling on and the price offered for the service. Similarly, those who may have some spare room in their suitcase can post an advertisement stating their departure and arrival cities and can search for objects to transport.

The concept is simple and easy to use and is just a way of formalising a practice which is already in vogue among those who are often led to travel, especially young passengers.

Link to jib.li

FreshWall Indoor Vertical Garden Purifies the Air While Growing Plants and Fresh Veggies

FreshWall is a vertical garden that redefines indoor agriculture while maximizing the air purification ability of plants. The innovative green wall combines high-end technology with Scandinavian design aesthetics to encourage a green and healthy lifestyle.

It is an affordable, automated green wall for the urban dwellers, which does not take too much of the floor space. FreshWall brings vertical gardening indoors and requires minimal maintenance. All you need to do is to put the plants into the pot, plug it to your FreshWall and add water to the reservoir. Plug in the cord and the FreshWall takes care of the rest.

Moreover, each plant in FreshWall purifies air as well as 100 normal plants. FreshWall combines the best of hydroponics and aeroponics to help you grow plants throughout the year. The integrated watering system delivers the right amount of water and nutrients to all the plants. As the air circulates through the plants root systems, plants grow healthier and faster. Currently the product is mainly for business use, but the team just launched an Indiegogo campaign with the goal of making it available to everyone.

Sweden’s Quest To Be The First Oil-Free Nation

Sweden’s Quest To Be The First Oil-Free Nation (via Clean Technica)

This post first appeared on Fuel Freedom By Zana Nesheiwat Famous for Volvo, Ikea and Absolut Vodka, Sweden is now on a new pursuit to become the first completely oil-free economy in the world by 2020. The oil crisis in the early 1970s forced Sweden to embark on a quest for alternative energy sources…

The Tunnel People That Live Under The Streets Of America

Did you know that there are thousands upon thousands of homeless people that are living underground beneath the streets of major U.S. cities?  It is happening in Las Vegas, it is happening in New York City and it is even happening in Kansas City.  As the economy crumbles, poverty in the United States is absolutely exploding and so is homelessness. Read More..
The Tunnel People That Live Under The Streets Of America

Scientists Develop Robobees to Pollinate Flowers as Bee Populations Decline

Honey bee populations around the world are in decline due to causes ranging from ‘super mites‘ to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and even cell phones – and if the insects disappear completely the planet’s ecosystems would be in peril. The issue has become so dire that now a team of Harvard and Northeastern University scientists are working on a swarm of miniature Robobee robots that could pollinate flowers and do the job of real bees if required.
Speaking to Scientific American, the team leaders said: “In 2009 the three of us began to seriously consider what it would take to create a robotic bee colony. We wondered if mechanical bees could replicate not just an individual’s behavior but the unique behavior that emerges out of interactions among thousands of bees. We have now created the first RoboBees—flying bee-size robots—and are working on methods to make thousands of them cooperate like a real hive.”

World’s First Algae-Powered Building by Splitterwerk Architects Opens This Month in Germany

(Source: Inhabitat)

We’ve all heard about buildings powered by solar or wind energy, but an algae-powered building? Splitterwerk Architects have designed just such a structure, dubbed BIQ, which will be the very first of its kind. Covered with a bio-adaptive façade of microalgae, the distinctive building has been designed for the International Building Exhibition in Hamburg and is slated to open this month!
Read more: World’s First Algae-Powered Building by Splitterwerk Architects Opens This Month in Germany

Megafactories Tesla Model S (English)- Video

National Geographic recently produced a 45-minute video on the Tesla Motors “megafactory” in Fremont, California. Of course, it’s also a video on Tesla as a whole, the Model S, Elon Musk, and a potential electric vehicle revolution. It’s worth a watch. Elon Musk the South African American entrepreneur and inventor is best known for founding SpaceX, and co-founding Tesla Motors and PayPal (initially known as X.com). The Tesla Model S is a full-sized electric four-door sedan produced by Tesla Motors.

Feldheim, Germany Generates 100% of its Energy From Renewable Sources!

Over the past decade, no country has embraced renewable energy with as much enthusiasm as Germany. Despite phasing out nuclear power, the country is exporting more energy than ever, thanks largely to its investment in renewable energy. One town in particular stands as a shining beacon of the potential that renewable energy holds: Feldheim, a small village located about 60 kilometers from Berlin that has its own energy grid and generates all of its power from wind, solar and biogas.

Read more: Feldheim, Germany Generates 100% of its Energy From Renewable Sources! | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

A Building That Plays Music When It Rains - Video

An intricate system of drains and funnels is attached on the outside of a colourful house in Germany and when it rains the entire building becomes an instrument.
The house is located in Neustadt Kunsthofpassage, an area of Dresden part of an arts project called the Courtyard of Elements.

Futuristic highways in Netherlands "Glow in the Dark" - Video

A futuristic highway that can save energy and improve road safety is set
to be installed in the Netherlands by mid-2013. Two companies, Studio
Roosegaarde and Heijmans Infrastructure, came up with the highway, which
includes: glow-in-the-dark road markings painted with photo-luminescent
paint which are charged during the day and light up during the night;
temperature-responsive paint which indicates slippery roads when
temperatures fall below zero; and interactive lights along the highway
that light up as cars approach. Wind lights that light up using the
draft produced by cars and priority induction lanes that can recharge
electric cars as they run along them also feature.

The luminous road markings and weather indicating roads will debut in
the Dutch province of Brabant in the middle of next year. The wind
powered and interactive lights along with the induction lanes are also
planned to go into service in the next years.

Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification - Documentary

Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification is a groundbreaking NRDC documentary, whcih explores the startling phenomenon of ocean acidification, which may soon challenge marine life on a scale not seen for tens of millions of years. The film, featuring Sigourney Weaver, originally aired on Discovery Planet Green.
Pollution from carbon dioxide is causing an increase in ocean acidity. In fact, our oceans have absorbed a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. As a result, our oceans’ acidity levels have increase by 30%. Conditions like these have not existed since the extinction of the dinosaurs.
What does this mean to us and the marine species that inhabit our oceans? Will ocean species be able to adapt? How can we stop the rise of ocean acidity? Acid Test explores these issues, then reveals how to take action today to stop the creation of an uninhabitable ocean.