Month: March 2010

Pavement to Parks

- Fono

Major cities like SF and NYC are beginning to realize they could do with a few less roads and parking lots — and they’re doing something about it.

In San Francisco, a handful of parking spaces and public right-of-ways are being remade into mini parks and plazas. Some are lined with trees sprouting from old dumpsters, others are buffered from traffic with large, discarded pipes; inside the improvised borders, tables, small patches of grass and concrete slabs are arranged for seating.

Meanwhile, the temporary pedestrian mall in Times Square is going to become permanent!

Read the whole article at Worldchanging

Google Adds Bike Directions to Google Maps

- Dan Harrison

The League of American Bicyclists has announced that Google has added bicycling directions to their US maps! Unveiled at the National Bike Summit, the bike feature will have cycling directions (in addition to driving, walking, and in some cities, public transit) as an option to plan a route between point A and point B.

This new feature includes: step-by-step bicycling directions; bike trails outlined directly on the map; and a new “Bicycling” layer that indicates bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly roads. The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions – similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible.

Google has said that the inclusion of cycling directions has been the most requested addition to Google maps. Here’s hoping that additional pressure from cities around the world will soon lead to cycling directions becoming available in your city!

Read more at the League of American Bicyclists blog.

EDIT (March 12)

It appears at least one Canadian city won’t have to wait long for something similar! Ride the City has gone live with Toronto bike directions! Ride the City Toronto is based on the open source maps system, OpenStreetMap.org and offers much the same functionality as the Google map version in the States. Check it out here and start planning your route by bike!

Virus Shown To Treat Prostate Cancer

- Dan Harrison

A team of researchers in Alberta have successfully tested a new way to treat prostate cancer with a virus. Viruses, which target specific cells, are injected into the body and seek out the mutations in cancer cells. The virus then replicates and causes the cancer cell to burst, sending thousands of viral particles into the surrounding tumour.

The six men in the study had the virus injected directly into their tumours three weeks before they had surgery to remove the prostate gland as part of standard treatment. The tumour cells are targeted by viruses in the experimental treatment, says Dr. Don Morris of the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary.

Signs of cancer-cell death were found in the removed prostate tumour, while the normal parts of the prostate showed minimal toxicity and no viral replication, Morris said.

Although this doesn’t represent a cure for cancer (tumours were very rarely completely eliminated), it may lead to cancer becoming a much more treatable illness.

Read more at Cbc.ca.

Using Trees To Provide Clean Water.

- Dan Harrison

It turns out that trees can do more than just provide power! The Moringa tree, which grows in Africa, India, South East Asia, and Central and South America, is drought resistant and capable of producing cooking and lighting oil, soil fertilizer, and nutritious food.  In addition, it has be recently publicized that the seeds can reduce the bacteria count in previously untreated water by 90.00 – 99.99%! Although the process can be quite involved, it still has the potential to allow people to have unrestrained access to clean water.

Read a bit more at Gizmag.com, or read the entire article as published in Current Protocols in Microbiology.

Powering Tomorrow With Ancient Plant Technology

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Photosynthesis is how plants convert energy from the ball of fire in the sky into useful plant-growing energy. The USA’s Department of Energy is actually looking into how photosynthesis can be used to power our homes and even turn homes into miniature power stations using the power of nature.

According to Nocera, his new system can work at ambient temperatures and pressures, without corrosion in a simple glass of water, even polluted water. “If you need pure water for energy storage, they’ll drink it,” Nocera said. “Use puddle water instead.” In fact, Nocera has been running his prototype on untreated water from the Charles River in Boston. And it’s cheap, not $12,000 per kilowatt like commercial electrolyzers that do the same thing. “That’s not going to help the energy situation for the U.S. or poor people of the world.”

Using the electricity generated by a photovoltaic array five meters by six meters, Nocera claims he can split enough water in less than four hours “to store enough energy for the average American home” for a day, a little more than 30 kilowatt-hours. “We need to stop making big energy systems one a time to service lots of people. We need to do it the old American way of making one small one and then manufacturing that system to give it to the masses.”

Read more at Scientific American

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