The Bottom Line Is That There Is No Longer A Financial Or Technical Excuse To Leave Low-income And Vulnerable

Every year, 4.3 million lives are lost to diseases caused by indoor smoke from cooking, heating, oil lamps and candles. That’s one person every eight minutes - mostly women and children.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Sustainable Energy for All initiative is working to ensure universal access to modern energy services by 2030 - while also ramping up renewable energy and efficient energy use to help fight climate change.

Find out more here: http://www.cleanenergyislife.org/

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for harnessing energy generated by very small bending motions, which could be capable of harvesting power from a broader range of natural human activities such as walking and exercising.

Yale Environment 360: New Device Harvests Energy From Walking and Exercising, Researchers Say

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding

We actually have pictures that great of Mars, a planet about 225 million kilometers (140 million miles) away from us. Image copyright: NASA

Earthprints: Aletsch Glacier

One of Europe’s biggest glaciers, the Great Aletsch, coils 14 miles through the Swiss Alps - and yet this mighty river of ice could almost vanish in the lifetimes of people born today because of climate change. The glacier, 900 meters (2,950 feet) thick at one point, has retreated about 3 km (1.9 miles) since 1870 and that pace is quickening, as with many other glaciers around the globe.

That is feeding more water into the oceans and raising world sea levels. It was only after I got down onto the ice, with spikes on my boots for grip and often roped to my guide for safety, that I appreciated the full scale of the glacier, on the south side of the Jungfraujoch railway station.

And yet even the Great Aletsch glacier, the biggest in the Alps and visible from space, is under threat from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from factories, power plants and cars that are blamed for global warming. (REUTERS) Photography by Denis Balibouse/REUTERS Read: Vast Alpine glacier could almost vanish by 2100 due to warming See more photos of the Great Aletsch and our other slideshows on Yahoo News.

When the big Blue Marble photograph was first seen, there was this idea that it was going to change people’s view of ecology and everyone was going to become an environmentalist because of it. It was a big deal to see that image and now it’s just become so commonplace that no one even thinks about how incredible it is to look down on Earth from that perspective or just the technology it takes to create that image.

In the space of 40 years, we’ve come from this very primitive satellite that was taking photographs and scanning the pictures one line at a time, which took hours, to being able to just go online. It’s changed people’s perspective on space. People don’t think about distance anymore. It’s almost as if the geographic distance has evaporated.

It puts space in front of us as thing that we operate in but no longer think about. I think that’s why people get so frustrated in their cars when they want to get someplace quickly, because they’re so used to thinking distance doesn’t exist.  We’ve become spatial animals, we’ve become people that really track ourselves everywhere we go. When you go for a run, you’ve got your little Nike thing hooked to your cell phone. When you’re on Twitter you can use its place location wherever you’re tweeting from.

An interview with John Hessler, a cartography expert at the Library of Congress and one of the people behind the new book, Map: Exploring The World.

[Maps: Left: A Map of Vesuvius (1832) by John Auldjo. Right: Hurricane Katrina Flooding Estimated Depths and Extent (2005) (University of Otago, NOAA)]

Study: Superconducting Technologies Will Soon Be Used for Transportation, Power Storage

Game for climate adaptation

MIT-led project shows a new method to help communities manage climate risks.

The New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP) got local citizens and officials in four coastal towns to engage in role-playing games about climate change tailored to their communities, while conducting local polling about attitudes and knowledge about climate risks. In so doing, the project helped the towns reach new conclusions about local initiatives to address the threats posed by climate change— which in coastal communities may include rising sea levels and increased storm surges that can lead to flooding.

“One hour of conversation can completely alter people’s sense [and show] that this is a problem they can work on locally,” says Lawrence Susskind, the Ford Professor in Urban Studies in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), who led the project and has now co-authored a new book detailing its results. “There are a bunch of things local governments can do, and people can do for themselves — that communities can do.”

The findings stem from years of research and organizing in four places: Wells, Maine; Dover, New Hampshire; Barnstable, Massachusetts; and Cranston, Rhode Island. The new book on the effort, “Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities,” has just been released by the academic publisher Anthem Press.

Among the many findings of the project is that residents of these coastal communities were typically far more concerned about the consequences of climate change than local politicians realized.

Don’t feel drowned by your habits, we all know smoking doesn’t make sense, we all know somebody who is sick because of smoking. You have the power to stop smoking. Or replace your bad habits that hinder your life with good habits that help it progress. I have a client that used to smoke, now every time she is craving a cigarette she does 50 squats, no smoking now for 2 months, but great muscle tone in her legs! This is what I mean when I say love yourself… Not your reflection. Your actions are a reflection of how you see yourself. Big up all those who have stopped smoking, stopping smoking or even thinking about it! If you have stopped let me know how long for, if you are stopping let me know how and why. If you are thinking about it hopefully you will read the comments and try to stop. #spartanfam #strength #health #streetart