One of the first presentations on Wednesday at ETech 09. Luebkeman, from Arup, talking about “Urban Futures”. It was an interesting presentation, and he was a great talker but… I still don’t know what the point of the presentation was. It all felt like an introduction to some...

The ways our food is produced, packaged and shipped stand at the center of an ongoing debate about the health of our planet and ourselves, but the key to creating a sustainable system may rely on our collective ability to accept a realistic solution as a opposed to a perfect one. And this involves a...

“Paper is dying, but it’s just a device.” So says Nick Bilton, editor in the New York Times research and development lab. Bilton talked with Wired about what he sees as the future of news delivery, and paper, in his view,  is not going to go away, but it will play a smaller role i...

More notes from the ETech 09 conference, this a talk by Alex Steffen of World Changing: One of the biggest choices we can make is how many children we have. Given the choice many women have fewer kids than they would otherwise. We could see peak population in our lifetime. Most of the people who wil...

The theme of China’s annual National People’s Congress taking place this week – the proceedings of which remain highly secretive beforehand – has been largely an economic one. Although the environment is hardly the priority issue du jour, China has not entirely changed its course with re...

Putting idle servers to sleep when they're not in use is part of University of Michigan researchers' plan to save up to 75 percent of the energy that power-hungry computer data centers consume. Data centers, central to the nation's cyberinfrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipme...

Christian Wolmar writes in the Guardian, about a delicate and often unspoken aspect of personal hygiene that Southasians have practiced since the year dot: Three years ago I went to India and discovered botty nirvana. While I was suffering from one of those inevitable bouts of Delhi belly, I was sta...

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As part of our ongoing NOLA Changemakers interview series we talked to Jon Guidroz, Director of Project Development at Free Flow Power, about his clean energy project and the unique spirit of NOLA. Can you tell us a little about what Free Flow Power does? Free Flow Power Corporation was founded to p...

I like Bruce Nussbaum’s list of what he’d like to see in The Stimulus Bill. The premise of his piece is that INNOVATION got a bit left out in the discussion and writing of the bill i.e., the process to get us to a healthy economy. Nussbaum does believe Obama has a vision for an America that is â...