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Pollution Levels At Your Fingertips

Pollution is invisible and knowing how much is around you is not always easy. But a new system called Citisense, which consists of a mobile air quality sensor and smartphone app, could one day give people real-time information about the air around them. 

"Asthmatics, who number in the millions, would find this valuable to their immediate health," said William Griswold, a computer science professor at UC San Diego, who lead the group that developed the system. "What we found is that people are very interested in their personal exposure, even if they are not asthmatic."

The system, which is still in the research stages, has a mobile sensor that a person wears while walking or biking around a city. The sensor detects the levels of pollutants in the air and sends the information to a server that uses machine learning to analyze the information for the app. Users with the app can see maps that display levels of pollutants, estimates of a user's exposure to those pollutants as well as a color-coded scale for air quality that uses EPA standards, i.e. green for good and purple for bad.

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The sensors were tested for four weeks by 30 people all over San Diego, most of them faculty at the university. According to the press release, one tester found that she was exposed the most to pollutants while she rode her bike to work. 

Griswold said in the release that, “The people who are doing the most to reduce emissions, by biking or taking the bus, were the people who experienced the highest levels of exposure to pollutants.” The field tests also found that pollution levels varied throughout the day, depending on variables like traffic.

For the most part, the sensors are mobile and proximity to them is necessary for the app to receive data. However, Griswold said in an email to Discovery News that if enough sensors were put out into an area, personal sensors wouldn't be necessary to receive feedback on the pollutants nearby. "With the machine-learning component in the backend," he said, "it will be possible to get an estimate of your exposure from the machine learning estimates, even if you don't have a sensor."

Toward the end of the testing phase, a few fixed sensors were tested, but Griswold said that they didn't affect the user experience enough to continue.

One of the hurdles facing the project now is battery life. The data exchanges between the sensors and mobile devices takes up a lot of power. When testing, users had to carry around two chargers, one for the sensor and one for the smartphone. Currently, the team is experimenting with replacing constant updates by spacing out times when data is transferred to every 15 minutes to save battery life, or making it a transfer that occurs on demand.

Griswold said in an email that sensors like this will be start appearing on mobile phones in about a decade or so.

via CleanTechnica

Credit: Jacobs School of Engineering

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Molecular Sieve Traps Carbon Dioxide

A big piece of reducing carbon emissions is separating the carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the emissions of fossil fuels and storing it, or using it in making other chemicals. A "molecular sieve" is a common method for getting CO₂ out of a mix of chemicals; it's a kind of ultra-fine filter. Unfortunately such sieves usually need more filtering to get the CO₂ out -– they aren’t always specific.

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At the University of Melbourne Professor Paul Webley and his team have come up with a kind of molecular sieve that pulls out CO₂ only. It's a chemical called a chabazite, which has a lattice-like molecular structure. Chabazite is in a class of chemicals called zeolites, which are common in lots of industrial settings and even used in kitty litter and swimming pool filters.

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The chabazite consists of a kind of ring of atoms of silicon, aluminum and oxygen, with a cesium atom in the center. The cesium atom acts like a trap door, letting carbon dioxide pass but blocking other chemicals. Webley and his team tested the chabazite in a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane -– natural gas. They also found that it worked in separating other gases such as nitrogen.

Different gases were allowed through the trapdoor at different temperatures, so it's possible to use that property to get even better selection of the carbon dioxide.

Caging Radioactive Gas

One of the more immediate applications might be getting the carbon dioxide out of natural gas deposits. Often, when drilling for natural gas, there is a lot of carbon dioxide present that has to be taken out before the natural gas can be compressed and liquefied. The chabazite could also improve the scrubbers used to take CO₂ from emissions.

The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Via University of Melbourne

Photo: A naturally-occurring crystal of chabazite. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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The World's First Net-Zero Energy Stadium

The London 2012 Olympic games were probably the most eco-friendly games yet. But Brazil, whose hosting 2016, could have the world's first net-zero energy stadium.

What's net-zero? According to the U.S. Department of Energy, it's one that consumes no energy and emits no carbon on an annual basis. Upgrades to the existing Estádio Nacional de Brasília will help it achieve that goal, but the modifications are in places few visitors will see: the roof.

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A ring of rooftop photovoltaic panels will collect energy to power the stadium. A photocatalytic membrane will collect air pollution and break down the chemicals to remove toxins from the air. These and other upgrades like rainwater collection for landscaping and plumbing will earn the stadium a LEED Platinum status.

The construction will cost over $400 million, but the returns from investing in this kind of renewable energy should even out in about 10 to 12 years. The stadium should be finished by the end of the year, two years ahead of its first major event, the 2014 World Cup.

via CoExist

Credit: Blue Ant

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New Ferry Goes To Zero Emissions

A passenger ferry that emits zero carbon will be plying the routes between Denmark, Germany and Sweden in the next five years. FutureShip, a subsidiary of GL Group, has designed a ship that runs on a combination of solar power, fuel cells, batteries and wind power. It can hold 1,500 passengers and about 1.3 miles of parking space for cars.

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The ship is built with a streamlined hull designed for traveling up to 18 knots (21 miles per hour) and would average about 17 knots (20 miles per hour). Storage batteries hold some 2,400 kilowatt-hours and a set of fuel cells totaling 8,300 kilowatts power the engines. Turbines capture additional electricity from the wind.

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Surplus electricity from the grid produces the hydrogen for the fuel cells, which is stored in tanks on board. There are no diesel engines and thus no emissions. Further efficiencies come from the shape of the hull and propellers.

Such vessels are designed for short trips, where the energy requirements are not as large as for long-haul shipping. The total cost, FutureShip says, is only about 25 percent more than a conventional ferry.

While ferries don't often use the heavy "bunker oil" that older cargo ships do, they do burn a lot of fuel –- about a ton per crossing. They also emit sulphur and oxides of nitrogen in addition to tons of carbon dioxide. So anything that cuts this back is a welcome step in curbing global warming.

via Maritime Propulsion

Credit: GL Group

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Home Automation On The Cheap Wins Demo

Does the world need yet another video-chat service, yet another app to share footage from your phone, and yet another site to find out where to go tonight? Most likely not, but that didn't stop many of the 78 startups making six-minute presentations at the DEMO Fall conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week.

Fortunately, DEMO -- the fall's other big launchpad for startups after TechCrunch Disrupt SF -- offered more substantive fare. These four in particular caught my eye.

Ube: This Austin firm won the conference's prize of a million dollars in free advertising on tech publisher IDG's sites for its smartphone-controlled home-automation system. Instead of you running wires through the house and attaching controller modules to existing appliances, Ube will sell $55 replacement power outlets, plugs and $60 light switches and plans a Kickstarter campaign to raise more funds.

Each includes a small Android computer and all can talk to each other and an elegant-looking mobile app via WiFi for easy remote control and monitoring. They say their system will also talk to Internet-linked appliances like "connected" TVs and Blu-ray players, which sets this apart from Belkin's less-ambitious, but already available WeMo.

bandu: Boston-based Neumitra introduced this stress-monitoring system, which links a chunky-looking watch that measure's your galvanic skin response for anxiety with an iPhone app that tracks these measurements and indexes them on the map (presumably, TSA security checkpoints rank high). When you start to freak out, the app tries to put you at ease by sending reminders to the watch's screen to do things like practice breathing exercises, call your mom or look at photos or listen to songs that make you happy.

The company's taking pre-orders on the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo at $189 a pop, but its target market is health care for veterans and other high-stress populations.

MoveEye: Twin Cities-based Tarsier had the conference's strangest eyewear: a set of glasses that use two off-the-shelf Logitech webcams to track the movements of your hands and fingers (and make the wearer look like a complete dork). Tarsier's software allows those gestures to control the action on a computer or TV screen.

I gave it a test drive by playing a racing game with my hands held out as if they were gripping a steering wheel. It worked, although the system got confused when I tilted my head as the car went around a turn. Tarsier says this is two years from shipping (when the glasses will be lighter and smaller than the prototype I donned). By then, though, connected TVs with webcams for living-room video chats may get smart enough to use them for the kind of no-remote control I saw Oblong Industries show off last month.

Passboard: Passwords can look awfully frail as a way to secure our important accounts, but what can we use instead of them? The San Francisco startup Passban takes an all-of-the-above approach, allowing you to choose and combine different forms of authentication on an Android or iOS device: recognizing your voice, recognizing your face, checking to see if you're in a designated location, or entering an old-fashioned password, among others. This flexible setup also gets around the problem of you being in a place that's too noisy or too dark for voice or facial recognition.

Or people may be content to continue wrestling with passwords, with only a minority opting to augment them with measures like Google's two-step verification.

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Glowing Driveway Sparkles Like a Galaxy

I grew up in a semi-rural town, where people had long gravel driveways spanning the massive acreage up to their homes. These driveways were almost never well lit, and sometimes if you weren't paying attention, you would trample the grass and possibly end up in a ditch. A batch of photo luminescent stones mixed in with the gravel would come in handy on those nights.

That's what Core Glow pebbles are. The pebbles are made of an aggregate of synthetic materials (basically a mashup of a bunch of different elements), resin and a hint of photo luminescent pigments. When exposed to sunlight, the pigments in the stone perk up and get excited. As day turns into night, the rocks emit an afterglow. They naturally illuminate a driveway to create a sparkling pathway that requires absolutely no electricity.

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Because there are no wires and no bulbs needed for this source of light, these rocks, that seem better suited for an aquarium than a driveway, are completely carbon emission-free. The glow lasts for 10 to 20 hours and slowly fades as the charge wanes. The photo luminescent pigments on the rocks have been engineered to be waterproof, so even if a nighttime shower pops up, driveways will still be easy to find.

Completely necessary? No. Cool and extremely helpful in an area otherwise hard to light? Yes. Also, great conversation starter for out-of-town visitors.

Credit: COREglow

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Fuel Cells Turns Waste Into Electricity

Waste not, want not...even when it comes to electricity.

Waste treatment plants may soon have a new way to treat wastewater that will also generate electricity. Oregon State University has developed a method using microbial fuel cells that can generate 10 to 50 times more electricity from waste treatment plants than methods that use similar cells. 

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Currently, waste treatment plants use a process called "activated sludge" to speed up the decomposition process of solids in waste water. This uses microbes to break down organic material. During this process, anaerobic organisms (that don't require oxygen) convert organic materials to methane.

It's effective but has environmental drawbacks because methane is a greenhouse gas.

OSU's microbial fuel cell uses microorganisms to break down the particles directly on an anode, which generates electrons and protons. These transfer from the anode to a cathode (terminals where electricity flows in and out) inside of the fuel cell which creates an electric current. 

Engineers on the project say the method was improved by reducing the space between the anode and cathode and using advanced microbes. This made it possible to produce more than two kilowatts per cubic meter of waste.

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So, why is this important? According to a press release from OSU, 3 percent of electrical energy in the United States and other countries is used to treat waste water. Most of that electricity comes from coal, oil or gas.

A fuel cell process could make it so that waste treatment plants can create their own electricity to power their facilities.

If this process is put into place, treatment plants could even sell the excess electricity. Now we can't just focus on the wonders of sewage, this process can also be used for breweries, animal waste, dairy byproducts and water treatment plants.

A full pilot study will be underway soon in the hopes of moving the concept towards commercial use.

via Engadget

Credit: Oregon State University 

 

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One Green Thing Both Parties Agree On

If there's one thing Democrats and Republicans can agree on it's pedal-powered buses, seriously!

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Humana, Inc. will provide 20 pedal-powered buses from Freewheelin for both parties National Conventions in Charlotte, N.C. and Tampa F.L., respectively, in the coming weeks.

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What is a pedal-powered bus? Think Fred Flintstone's car, but bigger and green. The buses can hold eight people, along with a driver, that will pedal along the special trails at the conferences as well as popular areas in both cities.

The idea behind this was to provide a fun, environmentally friendly, and healthy way for visitors to get around. Humana's Chairman and CEO Mike McCalister said in a press release, "Whether it's a pedal bus, bicycle, hand-cycle or unicycle, pedaling is good for the body, the mind and the environment."

The shaded vehicles are estimated to save one pound of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the air and burn between 140 to 380 calories per rider. Freewheelin first started as a bike-sharing initiative on the health insurance company's Louisville K.Y., campus in 2007, which was then replicated at the 2008 political conventions.

The Republican National Convention starts next week on Aug. 27-30 in Tampa, Florida. The Democrats meet up in Charlotte, North Carolina Sept. 2-6. If you're planning to attend and want to catch a ride, find a representative on site to register.

via Inhabitat

Credit: Freewheelin 

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Environmental Efforts Power the Olympics

We’re seeing a lot of gold at this year’s Olympics, but behind the scenes, it’s all green. From environmentally responsible energy to recyclable venues, the London 2012 Olympics could be one of the most eco-friendly games yet. Two areas stand out when talking about sustainability and the Olympics, transportation and architecture, and here’s a few ways London is keeping them green:

Transportation

BMW is providing two-hundred zero-emission electric cars comprised of 160 ActiveE First Drive and 40 Mini Cooper Mini Es (right). GE has placed 120 of their DuraStation EV chargers throughout the Olympic Village to keep the cars juiced and ready to go.

An even cuter “mini-er” Mini Cooper (right) is being used to transport athletic gear. According to Edmunds Inside Line, the radio-controlled electric vehicles are small enough to carry equipment like a single discus or two javelins, which can be accessed through a sunroof. Charging up in about 80 minutes, the cars can carry up to 18 pounds and have a range of around 109 yards.

Architecture

All of the structures built for the London 2012 Olympics were done so with environmental sustainability and energy consumption in mind. Both the Velodrome (above), home of indoor cycling, and the Copperbox, venue for handball and badminton, collect rainwater from their sloped roofs for indoor plumbing usage, which cuts water consumption by 40 percent annually. Using a natural ventilation system, outdoor air is used to keep the more than 6,000 visitors to the Velodrome cool -- no A/C needed.

Two buildings in Olympic Park won’t last long after the closing ceremonies -- and that’s ok. The Water Polo Arena (right) and the Basketball arena will be torn down immediately after the Olympics are over. Both structures were built with PVC fabric that’s highly recyclable and will be reused for other construction projects. The wings of the exterior of the Aquatic Center will also be removed and the main structure will be used for other London community events. 

So, whether you’re watching at home or from the stands, remember that not only are these games making athletic history, they are also making environmental history. 

Credits: Edmund Sumner/View/Corbis (top); BMW North America (middle); London 2012 (bottom)

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AT&T Scores Phones Based On Sustainability

Earlier this summer, AT&T conducted a survey to find out how important environmental sustainability is to customers when they buy a new mobile phone. The company found that 60 percent of potential buyers consider the environmental impact of a phone before making a purchase. As a result of the findings, the carrier is introducing an eco-rating system into their stores. The label will include all pertinent environmental information and a rating based on it.

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The devices are rated with five categories in mind and each category has a point value. For example, having less hazardous materials earns 4 points, product energy efficiency 2 points and environmentally responsible manufacturing, 3 points. The more points the device has, the better the rating, they must earn at least 14 points to get a five star rating. The only phone to earn that so far is the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate. AT&T isn’t the first company to think about the impact their phones have on the environment, a few years ago Sprint introduced green initiatives that included the addition of eco-devices to their line-up and a buy back program to recycle phones. Verizon has similar initiatives.

The only phone not included in AT&T’s eco-rating system is the iPhone, which after their recent EPEAT debacle isn’t much of a surprise. Since the carrier has said future devices will be rated, maybe Apple can earn a good rating next year.

Credit: AT&T

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