Archived material from historical editions of The Generator
Energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of Continue Reading →
ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2007) — Suppressing a cellular cleanup-mechanism known as autophagy can accelerate the accumulation of protein aggregates that leads to neural degeneration. In an upcoming issue of Autophagy, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies report for the first time that the opposite is true as well: Boosting autophagy in the nervous system of fruit flies prevented the age-dependent accumulation of cellular damage in neurons and promoted longevity.
"We discovered that levels of several key pathway members are reduced in Drosophila neural tissue as a normal part of aging," says senior author Kim Finley, Ph.D., a scientist in the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory, "which suggests there is an age-dependent suppression of autophagy that may be a contributing factor for human neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease."
By ASHLEY DAWSON
On September 13th, 2007, Italian shoppers, led by a confederation of consumer organizations, staged one of the country’s first pasta strikes. In the elegant but rather grimy deindustrialized city of Turin where I’m currently living, erstwhile home to the FIAT auto factories, there were few signs of consumer anger boiling over. No pickets of irate housewives dressed up in inflatable spaghetti costumes outside local groceries, no sign-wavers at the local farmers’ market. Was this simply another risible example of the famous Italian proclivity to strike over virtually everything?
Italian consumers were encouraged to boycott pasta for the day in order to protest against price rises of up to 27% over the last year. Pasta was, however, simply a symbolic target. The consumer organizations that masterminded the strike asked shoppers to stay away from markets in general in order to protest against price run-ups in everything from gasoline to rent to the cost of a cup of espresso in the local café. Carlo Rienzi, head of one of these organizations, called on the Italian government to pass a decree opening markets on Sundays for special direct sales of food by farmers to consumers, which, he argued, would help lower prices in general.
Planet Ark story Environmental company Planet Ark and print cartridge recylcer, Close the Loop, have teamed up to recycle the 5,000 tonnes of print cartridges that are currently dumped as landfill every year in Australia. The initiative is known as Cartridges for Planet Ark and provides recycling boxes around the country to encourage people to Continue Reading →
By: Daniel M. Kammen
At a recent Capitol Hill hearing I was surprised to learn that it was far from common knowledge just how competitive wind power has become. As a result, a bit of a data and price update memo may be of use, even to those who follow the industry. In addition, I will summarize the data on a few of the least cost wind farms in the nation.
Wind energy in the United States has continued to grow, and represented 19 percent of the new nameplate capacity added to the electrical grid in 2006 . With a total cumulative U.S. capacity of 11,575 MW (1 percent of total U.S. nameplate capacity) at the end of 2006, wind energy is now often directly cost competitive with fossil-fuel generation, and at times is a least-cost supply option.