Author: Adam Clare

Smog Free Bike Cleans the Air While You Ride


Daan Roosegaarde designed another piece for his Smog Free Project and it’s a bicycle that cleans the air as you ride through the city. The handlebars contain a filtration system that removes pollutants which will provide clean air for the cyclist to breath in. As a cyclist myself this sounds amazing because breathing in exhaust from commuters is painful. The filtration technology is a version of what Roosegaarde used in his Smog Free Tower.

“The bike is a perfect model,” Roosegaarde told Dezeen. “It has a double function as it cleans the air and reduces congestion while being healthy and energy-friendly.”

The Dutch designer, who heads up his own firm Studio Roosegaarde, sees the bike being implemented through bike sharing programs in China such as Mobike.

“The bicycle is part of the Dutch DNA of course, and Beijing and other cities in China used to be bike cities,” he said. “We want to bring back its prestige and follow our ethos of making citizens apart of the solution instead of the problem.”

“It will always be connected with big programs of government and green technology and electric cars. They do top-down, we do bottom-up, and we meet in the middle.”

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Zero Emission and Autonomous Shipping to Start in Norway

Norway will soon see a fully autonomous ship navigating its waters. A resource company in the country presently uses trucks to transport fertilizer from one port to another, the new ship will replace 40,000 of these diesel truck journeys. The ship is battery powered meaning that it will be zero emission if electricity comes from a renewable resource. The autonomous aspect of the ship means it can run at anytime while improving transportation safety by not needing trucks to go through normal streets. Autonomous technology is already used in the shipping industry to move containers around in port, so it’s only logical that more of the shipping industry operates independently.

“As a leading global fertilizer company with a mission to feed the world and protect the planet, investing in this zero emission vessel to transport our crop nutrition solutions fits our strategy well. We are proud to work with KONGSBERG to realize the world’s first autonomous, all-electric vessel to enter commercial operation,” says Svein Tore Holsether, President and CEO of YARA.

“Every day, more than 100 diesel truck journeys are needed to transport products from YARA’s Porsgrunn plant to ports in Brevik and Larvik where we ship products to customers around the world. With this new autonomous battery-driven container vessel we move transport from road to sea and thereby reduce noise and dust emissions, improve the safety of local roads, and reduce NOx and CO2 emissions,” says Holsether.

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An App That Rewards You for Riding a Bike

Bicycle

Biko rewards cyclists with free stuff just for riding their bike! Rewards include small things like coffee to very expensive consumer items. The idea of rewarding cyclist for not killing the environment using cars isn’t new, Stockholm basically pays cyclists. When it comes to using Biko please consider that they collect marketing data from your mobile (contacts, location, and anything else that can track you). It’s just good to see that more and more people consider rewarding cyclists to be a good thing.

Biko, a free mobile app that launched in Bogota, Colombia, in 2015, has launched in Toronto today (May 10). The app tracks a user’s movements through GPS to earn digital rewards, which can be traded in for actual rewards such as discounts and freebies from local businesses. For every kilometre travelled, users earn one Biko point.

“Incentivizing cycling through rewards can help reduce Toronto’s carbon emissions, and we have the data to prove it,” says Emilio Pombo, the cofounder of Biko. “Our users have collectively reduced carbon emissions by 2,608 tonnes globally.”

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Exercising a lot Increases Lifespan

run

Everybody already knows that exercising is good for your health, this isn’t new. What is new is associating the amount of exercise to telomere length. Telomeres are plentiful in young humans and over one’s lifespan the telomeres start to disappear, which has led researchers to think that more is better for staying biologically young. This most recent study looked at adults between 20 and 84 and concluded that, of the 6,000 people studied, that telomeres were more prevalent in people who exercised 30 to 40 minutes five days a week. This high level of exercise can increase your lifespan by about nine years.

Exercise science professor Larry Tucker found adults with high physical activity levels have telomeres with a biological aging advantage of nine years over those who are sedentary, and a seven-year advantage compared to those who are moderately active. To be highly active, women had to engage in 30 minutes of jogging per day (40 minutes for men), five days a week.

“If you want to see a real difference in slowing your biological aging, it appears that a little exercise won’t cut it,” Tucker said. “You have to work out regularly at high levels.”

Tucker analyzed data from 5,823 adults who participated in the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, one of the few indexes that includes telomere length values for study subjects. The index also includes data for 62 activities participants might have engaged in over a 30-day window, which Tucker analyzed to calculate levels of physical activity.

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3 Things You Can do Now to Improve Your Life

work and smile

Happiness is an elusive thing – one can never have enough and striving for it makes it unattainable. We all want happiness in our, so how can we achieve a happier life? The most obvious answer is to “live in the now” and be thankful for what you have, but there are other things you can do too. These other three things will not only help you be happier they will generally improve your life! SO, if you want to improve your life do these three things:

  1. Talk in person.
  2. Put away your mobile.
  3. Have meaningful goals.

Chasing meaning, not happiness, is what really matters
The quest for happiness doesn’t make us happy. In fact, Emily Esfahani Smith realized that constantly evaluating our own happiness is actually contributing to feelings of hopelessness and depression. Happiness is a fickle emotion, fleeting, based on a moment or an experience. What’s really making us feel sad is not a lack of happiness, it’s lack of meaning, she said.

Smith, author of the new book “The Power of Meaning,” said that after five years of interviewing hundreds of people, she discovered that meaning can be derived in four forms: belonging, purpose, transcendence and storytelling.

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