When you spot someone on the side of the road with a camera your normal instinct is to slow down to avoid a speeding ticket. But this fancy new camera developed by researchers at Spain’s Universidad Carlos III de Madrid doesn’t care how fast you’re driving. It’s instead designed to spot how much pollution is spewing forth from your vehicle, letting authorities pinpoint vehicles that are the worst offenders.
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Nature in all its unspoiled glory has played muse to many artists through the years, but the ever-increasing ways we’ve sullied the earth have, themselves, offered new inspiration for eco-conscious creative types. John Sabraw, an artist and professor at Ohio University, was checking out some abandoned coal mines in his home state during a sustainability immersion course and was struck by strange gradients in the runoff. “They’re a little clear right at the beginning, then the whole rest of the stream is just yellow once the suspended metals begin to oxidize," he explained to me.
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Infamous gadget manufacturer Foxconn is in the news once again after Chinese authorities alleged that the company has been dumping heavy metals into local rivers. Environmental regulator Ding Yudong believes that Foxconn and UniMicron Technology’s facilities in Kunshan may be allowing toxic, cancer-causing substances to pass into the water table. Both companies have already issued firm denials claiming that the black-green fluid, which locals describe as “sudsy,” is compliant with local laws. All we need to do now is find the guy with the heart ring.
Via: TNW
Source: WSJ
The best way to deal with smog is to make less of it, but it’s too late to just do that. And when it comes to cleaning up your already polluted air, mesh structures like this one in Mexico City are a stylish way to filter a whole city’s worth of air. More »
Most modern cities have bad air, it just comes with the fact that when people live very close together, and they have a lot of cars and industrial complexes, they pollute the environment. Heavy traffic doesn’t help at all, and that’s why this unusual new kind of structure has been conceived to help clean things up.
The PH Conditioner Skyscraper is a concept for a large-scale floating pollution-combating platform that aims to manage the effects of acid deposition due to pollutants, and turn them into reclaimed water as well as chemical fertilizer.
While this might look and sound like science-fiction, designers Hao Tian, Huang Haiyang and Shi Jianwei developed this in the hopes of deploying them in Chongqing, China. The structures look like robotic jellyfish, and the project aims to set them at between 650 to 1,000 feet in height, where most of the acidic pollutants gather. The top of these structures would be filled with hydrogen to provide buoyancy. Porous membranes absorb the pollutants, which are collected and put into a purifier.
It will be interesting to see the impact on large cities if and when this is deployed in China. Personally, I welcome our robotic jellyfish overlords, especially when they come bearing clean air.
[via designboom]
The BP oil spill that occurred back in 2010 has left a huge mark on not only the environment, but also history books. But even though billions of gallons of oil was essentially dumped into the ocean, the amount of pollution that is found in it is still staggering, especially plastic. 19-year-old Boyan Slat may have come up with a solution that could remove over 7 million tons of plastic from the world’s oceans.
Slat unveiled his plans to help create an Ocean Cleanup Array that would consist of an anchored network of floating booms with processing platforms attached to them that can be sent to discovered garbage patches in the ocean around the world.The array would act as a giant funnel as it spans the radius of the garbage patch, forcing plastic into the direction of the attached platforms that would separate plankton from the waste and store them to be recycled.
The process of cleaning the world’s oceans with Slat’s array would take an estimated five years, which is relatively quick when you consider how many years we’ve probably been polluting our oceans with plastic.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Solar Panel Cleaner Robot, Detroit Electric Intends To Roll Out A Battery Powered Sports Car, 
Beijing’s smog problem isn’t exactly new information, but it’s been getting way worse lately. In response, local artist Matt Hope decided to integrate an air purifier into his bike so riding around the city would be less hazardous. More »
You probably have seen the extreme smog in Beijing, so bad that you can observe it from space. But this shot blew my mind just because it looks like a frame from Blade Runner. So awesome—if you don’t live there. [Twitter] More »
Beijing is choking – as these two pictures vividly demonstrate. On the right is the city’s skyline on Monday; on the left the same view on 4 February 2012. The suffocating smog is not just bad for health, it may also have a more potent effect on climate change than previously thought. More »
How was your week? We got to spend a couple of days trekking around the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh, PA to check out some of the latest projects from the school’s world renowned Robotics Institute — a trip that culminated with the bi-annual induction ceremony from the CMU-sponsored Robot Hall of Fame. Given all the craziness of the past seven days, you might have missed some of the awesomeness, but fear not, we’ve got it all for you here in one handy place — plus a couple of videos from the trip that we haven’t shown you yet. Join us after the break to catch up.
Butlers, lunar rovers, snakes and airboats: the best of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Oct 2012 12:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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