Crops that Survive!

The fundamental ineffeciency if farming has always been that crops die at the end of season. This requires huge investments in organic matter removal, tillage, replanting and large quantaties of fertilizer, water and pesticides. The top 25 producing crops in the world are annuals but researchers at the lands institute want to change all that by switching to perrenial crops modelled after prarie grasslands. Grasslands are the most effecient self regulating ecosystems on the planet, requiring little input of materials, with incredible resilence to harms.

Researchers have been able to create stable ecosystems that requires less than 1/100 of the energy and inputs (no pesticides required the plants take care of themselves) with yields comparable to least productive farmland nowadays. The big difference being the land institute farms are sustainable the least productive farmlands exponentially require more resources and are suseptible to collapse.

Free Fuel always at arms length

CAT is one of the first words a child learns to speak and spell and hopefully the meaning will shift from our feline friends to the new class of compressed air powered cars. Developed by Guy Negre in 2002 Guy’s fundamental shift in design moves away from distributing fossil fuels across vast distance to fuels that are arguably the most abundant, air. C.A.T. (which stands for compressed air technology) cars would be able to fill up virtiouly anywhere in the world for pennies per mile, only the cost to compress air which could be supplied by renewable energy. Within urban areas the car uses compressed air up to speeds of 50 km/h with ZERO pollution. Highway transit uses a mixture of fossil fuels and compressed air. Imagine a world where the resources are so abundant and renewable and accessible that everyone could afford a car and there is little to no pollution and most importantly wars are not fought over resources.

Emergency Lighting

The next time that the lights go out they may just glow. A company has created lights that are able to glow blue-green once the power is cut. Originally designed for the U.S. navy, the lights can be repurposed for any building.

This means that during a fire or some other mishap people will still be able to find their way out of buildings. If the light tubes break they will still glow – so they can be carried around – and what’s more is that the glowing is bright enough most people’s eyes need not adjust.

Alaskans Trying to Freeze Government Powers

The United States’ Transportation Security Administration has been violating the privacy rights of American citizens and as a result group of Alaskans have filed a lawsuit. Under Secure Flight, the program in question, personal information is collected then read by a private company to figure out if you are a threat to American airspace or not.logo

The group is comprised of people from various backgrounds that all feel that government is sacrificing freedom for little-to-no security benefit. On their website they state that the “TSA promised not to use commercial data, but they did. TSA isn’t allowed to keep secret databases on Americans, but they have. TSA promised to comply with the Privacy Act, but they haven’t.”

It is about time that American citizens challenge this since the program has identified babies as terrorists. The TSA has even been told by the American government that they are in violation of the 1974 Privacy Act.