Tag Archives: open source
When the Texas company, re:char, wanted to ship their biochar kilns to Kenya, they found the usual options were wasteful and costly. They concluded that it would be much more efficient to manufacture near to the customers. To do this, in a place with little industry or infrastructure, re:char designed a fully functioning, off-the-grid, solar powered factory inside a shipping container. One re:char "shop-in-a-box" is able to produce more than 300 biochar kilns a month. The company envisages a global network of shop-in-a-box factories able to quickly create and improve upon the product. A new version of a product would … Continue Reading
The British government is to make publicly funded scientific research available for anyone to read for free by 2014. Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world. Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have risen in recent months as researchers have baulked at the high journal subscription charges their libraries have to pay. Under the new scheme, libraries will not have to pay for subscriptions but authors will pay "article processing charges" … Continue Reading
This video from www.everythingisaremix.info/ explains it all: .
Protei is a fleet of pollution collecting sailing drones which use existing technologies in an innovative, low-cost open-source oil collecting devices that semi-autonomously sails upwind, intercepting oil sheens which are going downwind. The design of protei is intended to be hurricane-ready, self-righting, inflatable, unbreakable, cheap and easy to manufacture for immediate response. The machine currently being developed is for collecting spilled oil at sea but other versions may be designed in the future for other purposes, such as Protei for the North Pacific plastic garbage patch, heavy metals in coastal areas or toxic substances in urban waterways.
Realizing that the appropriate, low-cost tools for affordable, sustainable farming and settlement didn’t exist, Marcin Jakubowski decided to build them. The idea was to create an easily repairable, modular and scalable set of tools providing everything you need to build, or rebuild, civilization. The result was a group called Open Source Ecolody, and an open source hardware initiative called The Global Village Construction Kit".
Leading members of the corporate community, including IBM, Sony, Nolia and Pitney-Bowes, have come together in a first-of-its-kind effort to help the environment, unleashing dozens of innovative, environmentally responsible patents to the public domain. The pledged portfolio, dubbed the "Eco-Patent Commons", is available on a dedicated, public website, www.wbcsd.org/web/epc, hosted by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Examples of the environmental benefits expected for pledged patents include: Energy conservation or improved energy or fuel efficiency Pollution prevention (source reduction, waste reduction) Use of environmentally preferable materials or substances Water or materials use reduction Increased recycling opportunity. Availability of these … Continue Reading
The UK Government has adopted the radical policy of using open-source, in preference to commercial, software. Under the new policy, agencies will be required not only to consider open source solutions and make the choice soley on the basis of value-for-money, but will give peference to open source solutions where there is no cost difference and will actively seek to avoid becoming locked in to proprietary software. The Minister for Digital Engagement, Tom Watson, said that “The world of technology has moved on hugely since we last set out our thinking on open source, which is why it was so … Continue Reading
GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second largest pharmaceutical company, which has spent a fortune researching cancer, has announced that it is making most of its information available to the research community for free. Glaxo’s logic is that academics and small companies to do pioneering work — identifying new targets for medications, discovering early warning signs and figuring out the underlying biological malfunctions that cause cancer. It is only when those groundbreaking studies have been done that large corporations can step into the picture and create new products. The information, which is available through the National Cancer Institute’s CaBIG website (cabig.nci.nih.gov), is related … Continue Reading
The success of Wikipedia has brought the notion of commons to public attention. Commons are not new but were a dominant part of most economic systems prior to the Industrial Revolution. In England, for example, the people of a village would have an area of common land which they could all use for grazing cattle, collecting fruit, gathering firewood and so on. This system was brought to an end between 1760 and 1820 by the “enclosure” of village common land. The result, whether as a deliberate ploy of the capitalists (as Marx claimed) or coincidentally, was to deprive thousands of … Continue Reading
Videos
Renewables News- Dysol Aiming to Print Storage with Solar CellsAustralia's Dyesol Limited has acquired an equity stake in Printed Power Pte Ltd, a spinoff company of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Printed Power is focussing on integrating dye solar cell technology with printed storage and power management systems to … Continue Reading → […]
- CSIRO Printer Makes 10m of Solar Cells a MinuteCSIRO researchers have built a gigantic printer that spits out solar cells at a rate of about ten metres a minute. The printer system uses existing technology to embed polymer solar cells (also known as organic solar cells) in thin … Continue Reading → […]
- New Aussie Technology to Clean Polluted WaterScientists from Deakin University, together with French colleagues, say that they have manufactured a lightweight and reusable material that can absorb up to 33 times its weight in a wide range of spilt oils, chemical solvents and dyes, while repelling … Continue Reading → […]
- Dysol Aiming to Print Storage with Solar Cells
