be the change you want to see in the world

Batteries are increasingly being flagged as a huge enviromental problem. Especially as cell phones become disposable items, the leaching of heavy metals and toxins into the environment from batteries is a growing problem.

In what seems to be a miraculous development, researchers at MIT have devised a way to store electricity like water in a sponge. The technique involves the modification of an electronic component called an ultracapacitor, improving it to hold as much electricity in the same form factor as a conventional battery. Not only that, but they can be recharged in an instant, and they last ten years. Read more

You may not have noticed but, yesterday in the United States of America, Democracy was taken down from the shelf, dusted off, and wielded against established political power in a suprising way. In Connecticut there was a fight for the Democratic Party’s nomination for Senator in the upcoming congressional elections. In the US, party members get to choose their candidate in advance of the actual election. Imagine that.

On the one side you had the consummate Dem heavyweight, Joe Lieberman. That’s Al Gore’s VP candidate. He’s been around for a long, long time, and in US politics, it is nearly impossible to unseat an incumbent Senator. On the other side, a rookie with no party establishment backing. Read more

I live in Victoria, BC. Americans call this the Pacific Northwest, even though it isn’t particularly north at all from a Canadian perspective. In any case, the area encompasses some very rich fishing and marine life habitat. The beauty of the area is unsurpassed, and people who live here enjoy a very mild climate and relatively clean environment. This is because of a low population compared to other coastal areas in North America, and only about 100 years of serious industrial civilization.

Despite this relative advantage, we can’t control what happens due to global systemic change. This drives home the point that Global Warming affects us all, regardless of the current state of our local environment.

Changes in the global climate are causing profound changes in our local oceans. These changes have a profound impact on sea life. We have seen the growing influx of warmer water predators, and the warming of the ocean overall, which reduces phytoplankton production in general and reduces the food supply. But increasingly wider fluctuations of warm and cold - the hallmark of global warming - are creating a more serious problem. Read more

John Bolton is the acting US Embassador to the United Nations. He has not been confirmed in that position because the majority of US lawmakers don’t think he’s fit for the job. He has demonstrated again and again that he is an arrogant, uncaring person who acts as a tool for the neoconservative agenda in the US.

Bolton’s recent statements on Canadians killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebannon are just beyond the pale, over the line; incredible. He’s now playing God and parsing the value and moral equivalence of various kinds of deaths (and therefore lives). Read more

In order to ensure your favourite open source CMS is included for consideration for the Open Source CMS Award run by Packt Publishing, go to the following URL and vote:

http://www.packtpub.com/nominations

The Five CMS’ with the most votes will be judged by a panel of three judges:

• Scott Goodwin, The Open Source Collective
• Lenz Grimmer, MySQL
• Nathan Gervais, Eclipse

US$5000 to the winning project, second prize $3000 and third prize $2000. Criteria are as follows:

The Judges will be choosing from the five Content Management Systems that received the most nominations, during the nomination stage. They will be selecting their top three based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.

This kind of thing helps fire up the buzz machine, which in turn draws people to your cause. Please reblog this.