Why We Went Down Yesterday

Yesterday you probably noticed that most of your favourite websites were down yesterday or had a notice up warning you about two bills in front of the American government. Those bills are SOPA and PIPA and essentially if these bills pass the internet would be all but dead to American citizens and beyond!

Here’s a video by the Kahn Academy explaining the bills:

So why is this on a website dedicated to good news? Here’s why:

Never forget that when people work together stupid policies and backwards thinking from old corporate powers (who are being replace by new and better technical solutions) can be stopped! Just look at how people also stopped the Keystone XL pipeline!

Occupy 2012 and Beyond

Megan Boler has an inspirational article on The Mark about the coming year in the Occupy Movement.

She did research into the Occupy Movement and interviewed many participants to see what some people are still wondering – what’s occupy all about? Well, Boler points out that at the core there is a commonality between all the occupiers: they want a fairer, more equitable, inclusive, and most of all a more respectful world.

Here’s one of Boler’s key points:

4. We are seeing an intergenerational and international social movement grounded in creative dialogue across diverse groups.

The diversity of age, social class, education, religion, and economic status found in protesters around the world (including within the Occupy movement) offers great hope. The global protests bring together the wisdom of veteran organizers and the energy and technological skills of the younger generation. At every Occupy site and march that I have attended, I have witnessed dialogue taking place between hundreds of unlikely conversants – homeless people talking to men in suits, black women conducting consciousness-raising workshops in the commons for diverse and rapt audiences, older people talking to the young – as people discuss solutions for a sustainable economy and environment. Occupy’s success in introducing new concepts – such as the “99%” and “economic justice” – into our political lexicon results directly from the public spaces of unprecedented dialogue. Reading online comments and Twitter feeds, one discovers thousands of strangers engaged in serious deliberation. The dream of a public commons where genuine democratic conversation takes place has, for many, come true.

Read the full article at The Mark.

Madrid Turned a Highway into a Park

Madrid made a very wise urban planning decision and buried a highway to make room for people and nature. Thanks to a lack of foresight, the Rio Manzanares was surrounded by concrete and industrial spaces that made for depressing scene. The smart people in Madrid decided to change that and make the area along the river a place for people to enjoy and bring back nature to the space.

They added more pedestrian space, bike lanes, and room for public transit. To make things even better they supported surrounding buildings in sustainable renovations to improve their carbon footprint!

Here’s a great video explaining what they did and how the project drastically improves the city:

The planning management of the project was first sub-divided into two phases due to its technical complexity and the high amount of investment required to complete the project. The two phases focused on different objectives which were:
1. Madrid Calle 30 (Phase 1) – to bury the M-30 highway, and
2. Madrid Río (Phase 2) – to treat the area surrounding the river by building parks, playgrounds, infrastructure, and other facilities.

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In a project as big as this one, the objectives were met step-by-step through smaller projects that were carried out to focus on specific areas that would be affected. For example, one project would deal with the areas of Casa de Campo and Manzanares districts, while another would execute the project in areas of Palacio-Puerta del Angel districts. The planning of many focused projects such as these under one big project, displays the work breakdown structure (WBS) of the whole project as well as the divergence and convergence of the work paths that would occur in the process.

Read more here

How do We Define Life?

Most of the news that gets covered here is related to new discoveries and good events happening around the world, but sometimes we need to take a step back from those discoveries and think deeper about what it all means. Recently NASA launched its most ambitious mission to Mars and they hope to find evidence of life.

But what is life?

Philosophers for hundreds of years have tried to answer this question and depending on who you ask we are closer or no closer than we were when humanity first asked such a question. Some people rely on old writings or established mythos for defining life, but those generally don’t old up when looking for something truly alien to us. Which leads us to something relatively new to the world of science and that is figuring out a sound and comprehensive definition for life for the purposes of scientific research.

Defining life poses a challenge that’s downright philosophical. There’s no ambiguity in looking for water, because we have a clear definition of it. That definition is the same whether you’re on Earth, on Mars, or in intergalactic space. It is the same whether you’re dealing with water as ice, liquid, or vapor. But there is no definition of life that’s universally agreed upon. When Portland State University biologist Radu Popa was working on a book about defining life, he decided to count up all the definitions that scientists have published in books and scientific journals. Some scientists define life as something capable of metabolism. Others make the capacity to evolve the key distinction. Popa gave up counting after about 300 definitions.
Things haven’t gotten much better in the years since Popa published Between Necessity and Probability: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life in 2004. Scientists have unveiled even more definitions, yet none of them have been widely embraced. But now Edward Trifonov, a biologist at the University of Haifa in Israel, has come forward with a new attempt at defining life, based on a new strategy. Rather than add on yet another definition to the pile, he’s investigating the language that previous scientists have used when they talk about life.

Edward Trifonov: Life is self-reproduction with variations.

Read the rest of the article here.

Carbon-Absorbing Material can Clean the Air

A new material that is inexpensive to produce is also good at absorbing CO2 emissions in the air. Hopefully we’ll see this material being applied to the medians on highways and other places close to planet-damaging carbon emission sources.

Reporting their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the team (which includes a Nobel laureate in chemistry) descirbes a new solid material based on polyethylenimine that can be used to capture carbon dioxide at the source–be that an industrial smokestack or a car’s exhaust pipe–under real-world conditions where the air contains moisture.
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That last part is important. Previous methods of scrubbing CO2 from the air have enjoyed varying degrees of success (usually under controlled conditions), but none has been particularly effective in the presence of humidity. The new material, which is inexpensive and readily available, has shown some of the highest carbon dioxide removal rates of any material ever tested in the presence of humidity.

Read more at Popular Science.