China Bans Some Logging

China has protected forests Great and Lesser Hinggan Mountain region in the north east of the country by banning logging there. For the next ten years logging in that region will be illegal in an attempt to help curb climate change.

The ban is part of a forest protection program by the National Development and Reform Commission and State Forestry Administration.

China is trying to increase the size of its forests by 40 million hectares to help reduce greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

The forest reserve in the Hinggan mountains spreads out over 430,000 square kilometres across Heilongjiang province and into neighbouring Inner Mongolia.

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Students Go Green

TD Bank has historically had issues with the environment, today they are starting to reverse that attitude. Indeed, they are now encouraging students in Canada to come up with ideas on how to be more green.

TD has announced the Go Green Challenge that will have students submit videos on ways to respect the environment. Students who submit their ideas have the chance to win cash to help turn their idea into action.

Let’s hope TD starts encouraging green investments amongst its customers too!

How the TD Go Green Challenge works:

Teams of two to four students from the same school are invited to submit a short video that explains a sustainability challenge facing their university or college and how they would address it.

A panel of judges, including singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer, will select the top three teams based on their proposed on-campus environmental initiatives.

The TD Go Green Challenge is open to all legal residents of Canada who are currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program, full or part-time, at an approved Canadian college or university.

Read their press release

Never too Old to Learn

If you thought that just because you’re old doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Apparently some people have the idea that age limits learning ability. New research has started to counter that myth, here’s a study that shows that people in their early 30s tend to have optimal facial recognition skills.

That conclusion is dramatically different from what researchers previously thought – that this ability peaked in adolescence, said Laura Germine, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard who specializes in this disorder.

In a study published in the online version of Cognition, Germine, Ken Nakayama, a psychology professor at Harvard, and Bradley Duchaine, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, detailed their results from a series of online experiments with about 60,000 participants.

They asked participants to take a series of tests involving face recognition of six young men. In another series of tests, they were also asked to learn and then recognize a series of women’s and children’s faces.

“People in their early 30s are best at this task,” said Germine in a phone interview with the Star. “Someone at age 16 and age 65 do about the same. Their face-recognition abilities are similar.”

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Soros Funding New Ways to Think About the Economy

Billionaire George Soros has provided $50 million to establish the Institute for New Economic Thinking that looks to rethink how modern economies work. Modern capitalism is need of a complete overhaul given the ongoing global struggles countries are having running and improving their economies – let alone improving the lives of their people.

It’s good to see that even the people who profited from modern capitalism see it’s failures and want to fix them.

What does the institute aim to achieve?

A radical reorientation of economic theory. Exactly what shape it will take is impossible to predict, but I hope it will recognise the fundamental uncertainties in our economic system. These uncertainties have been ignored for the past 25 years.

Wouldn’t it be better to eliminate the uncertainties, so we can avoid a repeat of the financial crisis of 2008?

We will never be able to do that. There will always be a threat of instability – it’s built into the market. You can’t avoid it, but you can be aware of it. Perfection might be unattainable, but we can become less imperfect by recognising the imperfections.

Tell me about some of the projects that have been selected for funding by the institute.

I am encouraged by the fact that INET is embracing multiple disciplines. The first round of grants have been given to people with backgrounds in law, history, medicine and science, as well as economics and finance. Several projects are taking concepts directly from science, such as the mathematics behind the spread of contagious diseases, and applying the principles to financial markets. During the financial crisis we saw instances of contagion – how a relatively small number of infected institutions made others sick.

Read the rest at the New Scientist.

Solar Power for Gas Production

Here’s a novel idea to conserve energy, use the sun to separate chemicals which can then be used as fuel thereby consuming less energy to create fuel.

Researchers have developed a novel thermochemical reactor that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into hydrocarbon-fuel precursors at a relatively high efficiency.
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The new thermochemical reactor is believed to be more efficient than previously developed ones, whose efficiencies could not be comparably measured. And it is amenable to continuous operation, suggesting that an industrial-scale version of the process could be developed for solar towers.

Read more here