News & commentary on sustainability, activism, urban planning, politics, and our world.
Recently I have been reading very disturbing research about how Diet Coke can possibly cause cancer and kill you. The artificial sweetener that is used in most diet beverages, aspartame, once ingested, becomes a lethal poison called methyl alcohol. Small quantities of this noxious substance can lead to blindness and death; even the most miniscule amounts of this aspartame toxin are strongly linked to cancer.
Eskom, the South African state owned electricity generator, recently announced that it has budgeted a billion dollars over the next ten years for a demonstration and pilot concentrated solar power (CSP) plant. However, moving from budget to implementation is proving more difficult! Why Concentrated Solar Power Two of the widely used alternatives for collecting the suns [...]
Bacterial evolution can be accelerated with the MAGE technique to produce large numbers of favorable mutations (micrograph image of E. coli bacteria magnified 10, 000 times) Bacteria are prolific replicators, and some species can replicate into the millions in just a few hours. Bacteria, in the functioning of their cellular and biochemical machinery, also just [...]
For anyone who has seen the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they might get that same feeling of “us” versus “them” that fills the truly indie 9500 Liberty. Body Snatchers grabbed its content and texture from the red scare, the McCarthy era where people believed that Communists (or rather aliens) launched an invasion of [...]
The Nordic countries are the northernmost cultural community within the Europe. Comprising five countries and seven territories, only one is totally outside the Arctic Circle and three quarters of the rest lie within. It’s a land which is bleak and beautiful, fragile and harsh, and utterly magnificent. This is why the recently published “Threats to [...]
