This week’s five stories look at: Deploying 3D Printers in the Military Rapid Prototyping; A New Device To Replace Man’s Best Friend When Hunting Bombs; Poo to Power Microsoft’s Latest Data Center; Mars No Worse Than Living in Low-Earth Orbit and Guess What, There

This week’s headlines look at the latest controversy around synthetic life, and a whole bunch of energy stories including: a new oil sands technology that promises to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a new energy technology that uses water, electricity and biomass t

This morning is “blue bin” day on my street. Every second week (alternate weeks are for non-recyclable garbage put out in a “gray bin”) here in Toronto we trundle out giant blue boxes on wheels to the curbside. The boxes contain newspaper, junk paper from the m

My weekend newspaper on its “World” page had some interesting statistics about Sweden and waste-to-energy usage in that country. I learned that biomass generates more energy than oil in Sweden. And that by 2020 the country projects that 50% of all its total energy needs wi

The Newspaper Problem The manufacture of paper takes a huge environmental toll on our planet. Paper manufacturing is ranked third among industries on the planet in its consumption of fossil fuels. Every year in the United States, 24 billion editions of newspapers get published. A year

In a previous blog we talked about the challenges and promise of mining waste for energy. North America’s largest landfill and waste removal company, Waste Management Inc., today mines half of its 266 landfill sites in the United States and Canada for methane gas collected from

Biofuel Isn’t Something New Humanity discovered how to control fire hundreds of thousands of years ago with wood and dung our primary fuel sources. Tens of thousands of years ago our ancestors discovered that wood could be converted to charcoal. Peat fires to this day are still

According to Ward’s Auto there are more than 1 billion automobiles and light trucks on the road today with forecasts reaching 2.5 billion by mid-century. At current levels of consumption per vehicle 2.5 billion automobiles will translate to 150 million barrels of oil per day, co

What’s does humanity output more than anything else? Garbage…about 5 billion tons of it a year. When you consider that the planet’s population is close to 7 billion, that means each of us is responsible for producing more than 3/4 of a ton of trash each year. What do

Humanity has relied on biofuels since first mastering fire. Until the Industrial Revolution peat, wood, charcoal, whale oil, and plant oils represented the biofuels of choice. Fossil fuels began with coal. Fossil fuel crude oil and oil byproducts were a 19th century technical achievem