Al Khudary

Last Friday the Medcalf Gallery in London debuted “Flooded London”, a photographic depiction of the future of London as it is overtaken by the rising sea. On Monday, exactly 20 years after warning us about global warming, NASA scientist James Hansen told congress that time’s up and he warned of such apocalyptic consequences.

Part of the London Architecture Festival, the “Flooded London” exhibition by the Squint/Opera media house is a prophetic rendering of London in the year 2090 and the effects of global climate change, an issue that has permeated the public’s consciousness over the last 20 years. That awareness is in large part thanks to Hansen, who is trumpeted by many as the “Global Warming Prophet” for his 1988 testimony before congress where he warned that global warming is real, it is here and it is manmade.

“Flooded London” depicts what life would be like in London years after the catastrophic rising sea ravaged the landscape. The stunning images actually show an almost utopian world where these people peacefully go about their daily lives in their new watery home. One picture shows two people fishing out of the side of a high rise building at Canary Wharf (above). Another shows a man about to dive off the ledge of the whispering gallery in St. Paul’s Cathedral, into the dimly lit pool. Yet another shows two men in a work shop fashioning together old bike and engine parts to make an electrical generator. The series seems to be as much about mankind’s resilience as it is about impending consequences yet when you listen to Hansen’s warnings it is hard to imagine bouncing back from the global cataclysm that Hansen predicts if we don’t act now. He cautions, “We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path.”

Electric_treex A new sensor system is under development that runs on electricity generated by ordinary trees! Apparently trees are capable of self-sustaining a reliable source of electricity. While a tree may not seem like much of a powerhouse, the "trickle charge" can add up, "just like a dripping faucet can fill a bucket over time," said Shuguang Zhang, one of the researchers on the project and the associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBE).
MIT researchers now believe they can power a network of sensors connected directly to trees to perform a variety of tasks.

Trees could serve as “silent sentinels” along the nation's borders to detect potential threats such as smuggled radioactive materials—with the sensors powered by the trees themselves. They could also prevent forest fires, among other applications, by sending early reports to the authorities.

Right now, the U.S. Forest Service says that manually recharging or replacing batteries in remote automated weather stations, which usually have to be located in hard-to-reach places, makes things impractical and costly. The new sensor system would bypass this problem by tapping into trees as it’s very own self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with an off-the-shelf battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree itself.

New Bacteria-Driven Process Could Make Recycling Plastic Bottles More Attractive
By COLIN BARRAS

Newly discovered bacterial alchemists could help save billions of plastic bottles from landfill. The Pseudomonas strains can convert the low-grade PET plastic used in drinks bottles into a more valuable and biodegradable plastic called PHA.

PHA is already used in medical applications, from artery-supporting tubes called stents to wound dressings.

The plastic can be processed to have a range of physical properties. However, one of the barriers to PHA reaching wider use is the absence of a way to make it in large quantities.