A sewage plant near Berlin has found that playing Mozart to its biomass-eating microbes makes them work harder. They expect that it will save the facility as much as €1,000 a month.

The waste-treatment facility in the town of Treuenbrietzen southwest of Berlin has been testing a special stereo system over the past two months after an Austrian waste treatment plant said that Mozart made their sewage-eating micro-organisms perform better, helping to cut costs.

The process was developed by Mundus, a small German firm in Wiesenburg in northeastern Germany.

According to Anton Stucki, a founder and managing partner of the firm, the sonic waves of Mozart’s compositions spur micro-organisms to a higher performance in breaking down biosolids. As a result, wastewater facilities can save energy costs and decrease the amount of residual sludge, which is expensive to dispose of.

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D.Net, a non-profit research organisation, is bringing some of the benefits of modern technology to impoverished rural villages in Bangladesh through a band of "InfoLadies".

The InfoLadies are young women equipped with a bicycle, phone, some medical equipment and a netbook loaded with information on topics from agriculture to health, sanitation and disaster management. The content uses simple text, pictures and engaging animations to reach all users, many of whom are illiterate. Their medical kits include items such as blood pressure monitors and pregnancy test kits.

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An MIT-led team has designed a plane that is estimated to use 70 percent less fuel than current planes while also reducing noise and emission of nitrogen oxides.

MIT was contracted ny NASA to evaluate the potential of quieter subsonic commercial planes that would burn 70 percent less fuel, emit 75 percent less nitrogen oxides and take off from shorter runways than todays commercial planes.

The MIT design achieves this in an aircraft similar in size to a 180-passenger Boeing 737 by reconfiguring the tube-and-wing structure. Instead of using a single fuselage cylinder, they used two partial cylinders placed side by side to create a wider structure whose cross-section resembles two soap bubbles joined together. This allows the fuselage to provide some of the lift currently provided by the wings and the design to have thinner wings and a smaller tail to reduce drag.

The team moved the engines from the usual wing-mounted locations to the rear of the fuselage. This means that the engines take in the slower moving air that is in the wake of the fuselage. As a result, they use less fuel for the same amount of thrust, although there is more engine stress. To mitigate theis, the plane is designed to fly 10% slower than a Boeing 737.

The team has also designed an aircraft similar in size to a  350-passenger Boeing 777 using the same "hybrid wing body" principles to dramatically reduce fuel consumption.

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A company called MiserWare Inc, which is a spinoff from Virginia Tech, has launched a free program for Windows and Unix which is claimed to reduce power usage by 30%.

The program, called Granola, saves energy by applying dynamic voltage and frequency scaling to the CPU of the system. When a user is reading a website or working in a word processor, Granola scales down the power needed but when the CPU is running at full blast for graphics or other computing-intensive processes, the software draws more power.

According to the company, "a good analogy is a dimmer switch on your dining room light. When you are writing a letter at the table, you need the full light to be able to see your work, but when you are relaxing with a glass of wine after dinner, you don’t need the brightest available light. You turn down the dimmer to save energy (well, maybe not JUST to save energy) while you are relaxing."

Granola can be downladed at grano.la/software/index.php.

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DIME, a company based in the United Arab Emirates, has begun selling a hydrophobic sand for creating an artificial water table which, the company claims, could revolutionize farming in the Middle East and other sandy desert areas.

Hydrophobic sand has an extremely thin layer of nanoparticles on each grain which causes it to repel water. In DIME’s case, the nanoparticles are of a substance called "SP-HFS 1609" for which it has obtained an exclusive licence from a German company.

A type of hydrophobic sand was sold as a toy in the 1980s;

In regions with sandy soil, water is leeched away deep underground and salt rises to the top. DIME proposes laying hydrophobic sand below the topsoil.. When crops are grown in the soil above, less water is needed because it isn’t sucked deep underground. At the same time, salt is prevented from flowing up into the topsoil. DIME claims that water use could be cut by as much as 35%.

Update (28 January 2010):
We have received several comments from M Russ of GEREMCO claiming to represent the patent holders and that DIME has illegally used their "know how". GreenBiz Cafe is interested in the potential of the technology, not in legal disputes about patent rights, and will not be publishing comments on this matter.

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Research scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK have provided the first evidence that that reducing levels of fishing is a viable way of protecting coral reefs from some of the damage caused by climate change.

Increases in ocean surface water temperatures subject coral reefs to stresses that lead quickly to mass bleaching. The problem is intensified by ocean acidification, which is also caused by increased carbon dioxide. This decreases the ability of corals to produce calcium carbonate, which is the material that reefs are made of.

Coral bleaching in the Maldives

Approximately 2% of the world’s coral reefs are located within marine reserves, where human activity, like dredging and fishing. is prohibited.

The researchers conducted surveys of ten sites inside and outside marine reserves in the Bahamas which had been severely damaged by bleaching and then by hurricane Frances in the summer of 2004.

After two and a half years, coral cover in protected areas had increased by an average of 19%, while reefs in non-reserve sites showed no recovery.

According to Professor Peter Mumby of the University of Exeter, "In order to protect reefs in the long-term, we need radical action to reduce CO2 emissions. However, our research shows that local action to reduce the effects of fishing can contribute meaningfully to the fate of reefs. This sort of evidence may help persuade governments to reduce the fishing of key herbivores like parrotfishes and help reefs cope with the inevitable threats posed by climate change."

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It is generally argued that livestock are the cause of about 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. The figure comes from a 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report titled "Livestock’s Long Shadow". A new study by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, published in Worldwatch magazine, argues that this greatly understimates the impact of livestock and that the real figure should be about 50%.

Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang argue that the FAO underestimated the impact of livestock in serveral ways:
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Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi.have written an article for Scientific American analysing how the world could achieve 100% clean energy by 2030.

Their analysis concluded that the key factor is eliminating all forms of combustion as a way of generating power. The reason for this is the inefficiency of the use of fossil fuel and biomass combustion.. For example, when petrol is used to power a vehicle, at least 80 percent of the energy produced is wasted as heat.  On the other hand, in electric vehicles roughly 80 percent of the energy supplied to the vehicle is converted into motion, with only 20 percent lost as heat. Similar comparisons apply to other combustion devices compared to electricity or hydrogen produced by electricity.

The researchers concluded that if the world’s current mix of energy sources is maintained, global energy demand in 2030 would be 16.9 million megawatts. If no fossil fuel or biomass is used to generate energy, the demand will be only 11.5 million megawatts.

To achieve this, the world would have to build wind turbines; solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar arrays and geothermal, tidal, wave and hydroelectric power sources to generate electricity. On the other hand, the need for 13,000 coal-fired power stations would be elimated.
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A team of environmental scientists from Harvard and Tsinghua University have demonstrated the enormous potential for wind-generated electricity in China. Using extensive meteorological data, the researchers have estimated that wind alone has the potential to meet the country’s projected electricity demands for 2030.

While wind-generated energy currently accounts for only 0.4 percent of China’s total electricity supply, the country is rapidly becoming the world’s fastest growing market for wind power.

The researchers, led by Michael B. McElroy, Professor of Environmental Studies at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, used meteorological data from the Goddard Earth Observing Data Assimilation System at NASA. They assumed the wind energy would be produced from a set of land-based, 1.5-megawatt turbines operating over non-forested, ice-free, rural areas with a slope no more than 20 percent.

The analysis found that a network of wind turbines operating at just 20 percent of their rated capacity could provide as much as 24.7 petawatt-hours of electricity annually - more than seven times China’s current consumption. This would meet the country’s entire projected demand for electricity for 2030.

To do this would require an investment of about $900 billion over twenty years. This is not considered an unreasonable sum considering that it would replace China’s investment in fossil fuel plants. China is currenly adding about one gigawatt of fossil-fuel generating capacity every week.

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