Russell Ohl (Wikipedia) is generally credited with inventing the first “modern” solar cell. His 1946 patent for a “Light sensitive electrical device” inspired an unnamed British science teacher from Surrey to create a working version of the device, which was recently discovered by his family and found to still work perfectly. In full sunlight, it generates 1.5 volts. According to this article in The Daily Mail:
I like my gardening to be easy, and cheap ain’t bad either. Eco-friendly, innovative, and giving a nod to old wives everywhere makes it the best! Here’s a list of the best gardening tips I’ve come across, in no particular order. We’d love to learn about your favorite tips — please offer them up in […]
Yesterday I went to visit my wonderful mother-in-law. She is an herbalist, and literally every space of her land that can be a garden is a garden. Her name is DeAne Wilson, and she has taught me many of the things that I now know about plants. Several years ago she planted a veggie garden, […]
SOLO-TREC is outfitted with a series of tubes full of waxy phase-change materials. As the float encounters warm temperatures near the ocean’s surface, the materials expand; when it dives and the waters grow cooler, the materials contract. The expansion and contraction pressurizes oil, which drives a hydraulic motor. The motor generates electricity and recharges the batteries, which power a pump. The pump can change the float’s buoyancy, allowing it to move up and down the water column.
Tiffany Threadgould of RePlayGround reports in with photos from last night’s Green Up Scraptacular at Terracycle’s Port Authority Green Up shop in NYC. Above is tiffany wearing a a Target plastic bag dress with a workshop participant who made a party hat from a cereal box and refashioned her t-shirt with Megan Nicolay of Generation […]
Clematis is just about my favorite plant. It is a flowering vine, with literally endless variations. It’s a vigorous grower, and can be easily trained to climb trees, trellises, or along a railing. The different types indicate their flowering tendencies and their pruning needs- for instance, some clematis are deciduous, and loose their leaves in […]
Glassblower Nick Paul of Chicago drinks beer. (Hopefully, he has some friends who help him out with it, from time to time.) Then he takes the empty bottles and blows out their necks to make flat-sided tumblers. Then, in a stroke of packaging/marketing/recycling genius, he puts them back in their original six-packaging and sells them through his online storefront, Windy City Glass. The tumblers have smooth, rounded rims and are annealed to relieve internal stresses. No part of the original bottle is wasted. I love the green-on-green simplicity of his Heineken glasses, above, but the gestalt awesomeness of his Arrogant Bastard Ale tumblers, pictured below, may prove irresistible to me. If I know me, you folks have about an hour after this post goes up before I cave in and buy them for myself.
