Video Preview of Isabella Rossellini's Bizarre New Film

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:04:29 -0500

surreal!) films and television shows about all kinds of creatures during the past few years (see the links at the bottom of this post for more details). Her latest one-hour documentary is called "Animals Distract Me" and it's scheduled to air on Planet Green on April 23rd at 10 PM EST. Make sure to tune in! And if you are unsure, the video excerpts below should convince you! In the first video, Isabella explains how her love for all kinds of animals - including bugs - started at a very young age, in good part thanks to very supportive and open-minded parents: ... Read the full story on Planet Green

Robot Cars Are on the Horizon!

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:46:42 -0500

Dean of Invention episodes premiering on Planet Green this Friday, November 19th at 10pm Eastern and 10:30pm Eastern; the first of them contains a segment that really intrigued me and made me think about some future transportation possibilities that might seem very science-fiction to us, but they could show up faster than expected. After all, it's very hard to predict the future. If you had asked someone 20 years ago if it would be possible to sort through billions and billions of documents in less than a second and find a very specific phrase or piece of data, and all that for free, would they have believed you? Yet most of us used Google and other search engines daily. Not so long ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Poachers a Huge Threat to Last Few Wild Tigers

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:58:33 -0500

Video Art: Chris Jordan's "Year of the Tiger" A new study estimates that more than 1,000 tigers were killed that way in the past decades (this represents about a third of the current population!). The authors of the study said the data showed that the trade in illegally kil]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

A Bike-Riding Bus Driver's Tips for Urban Cyclists

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:10:52 -0500

Publicola has an interesting interview with a bus driver who is also a bike commuter. He gives cyclists some tips to help them coexist more smoothly and safely with buses. His three main recommendations are as follows: "First, Be visible: Wear visible clothing and use lights--day and night. It makes a huge difference from a driver's perspective. I have lots of stories of cyclists seemingly coming out of nowhere at the last second. I can usually see a red tail light three or more blocks away while some lighting conditions can hide cyclists until I'm almost on top of you. ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

San Francisco to Aim for 20% of Trips by Bicycle by 2020

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:42:19 -0500

Bike Plan, and soundly rejecting the obj]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

300 New York DOT Employees to Share 25 Zipcars

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:29:08 -0500

Zipcar, a car-sharing company, instead of driving NYC fleet vehicles. �Earlier this year, we announced a large-scale effort to make City government smaller, smarter, and more sustainable � both environmentally and fiscally,� said Mayor Bloomberg. �An important component of that effort is looking at City-owned cars. A car share program could help reduce the number of]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Electric Car Design Brings New Possibilities

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:27:12 -0500

electric cars that'll soon be rolling through production lines and out on to the roads may not look much different from gasoline-powered cars from the outside, but there are a variety of design considerations that can really bring new possibilities to the way that cars are designed. Let's look at a couple of those. The image on the top right of this post shows the back end of a Tesla Roadster electric car without the body panels. The metallic cylinder in the middle is the electric motor. It's not much bigger than a watermelon, yet it can accelerate the car from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 3.7 seconds, leaving behind many exotic s]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Hoboken, NJ, Pays Citizens to go Car-Free

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 15:50:42 -0500

A ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Cyclists Might Not be as Visible as They Think

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:45:08 -0500

study (page 56), cyclists might not actually be as visible as they think they are, which can increase danger. Photo: Flickr, CC Here's the abstrac]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

George Soros Donates $100 Million to Human Rights Watch

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:57:42 -0500

billions of dollars to make the world a better place (and they aren't just throwing money at problems, they are using various processes to make sure their donations are effective and have maximum impact). Of course, all of this is not new. Andrew Carnegie is probably the spiritual leader of this philanthropic movement which is now culminating with the Giving Pledge. Another great donation happened recently, and I'm not talking about Read the full story on Planet Green

The Psychology of Road Rage and What to Do About It

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:51:02 -0500

car-centric society like ours, including air pollution, health problems related to not getting enough exercise, high personal and governmental monetary costs, deaths and injuries, etc. On top of all this, there's a common problem that we're too often downplaying: all the stress and anger caused by spending so much time driving. Psychologists have a pretty good idea about what causes road rage and lesser frustrations, and Baltimore Spokes gives a pretty good overview: "The car is not only an object of convenience, beauty, and status. It is also a cultural ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Can't Afford Solar Panels? Lease Them!

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:28:24 -0500

Solarlease"). Basically, the company pays to install the solar system in your house (solar panels, inverter, grid-tie, etc) and you repay them over a long-term lease that is designed so that you save over what your regular electric bill would otherwise have been like. It's one of those rare win-win-win sit]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

More Than Half of Penguin Species are Under Threat

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:14:53 -0500

International Penguin Conference. The conclusions of the conference are rather alarming: the scientists warn that 10 of the 18 penguin species are experiencing population decline and that a variety of things are threatening their long-term survival, with some of these species facing extinction by the end of the 21st century. Four main factors are threatening penguins. The first is over-fishing: Because of the rapid increase in fishing operations in the past decades, penguins are now competing with us for food, and our industrial fishing fleets are simply more effective at catching fish. "The large scale harvesting of anchovy and sa]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Investing in Transit Creates More Jobs than Road Investments

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:37:39 -0500

every dollar spent on funding transit creates more jobs than spending on roads. Specifically, each billion dollars spent on transit creates 36,108 jobs while the same figure can only buy 30,319 road jobs. That means that by reassigning some federal spending from roads to transit, Congress could boost employment without adding a cent to the deficit. [...] The report also shows how the feds could create even more j]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Variable Parking Pricing Cuts Congestion

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:35:54 -0500

and for pedestrians, cyclists, local businesses, and the environment. The problem is that the cheaper street parking is, the longer people will leave their cars there, taking advantage of the cheap real-estate. Once parkings are full and there's no turnover, it's almost impossible to find a free space, which means that those who are looking are helplessly circling around looking for an opening, slowing down traffic, getting in the way of buses, making it harder for cyclists to go with the flow if there's no separate bike lane, and reducing turnover, which can be bad for local stores. It also leads to more air]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Zipcar Goes to Harvard, Offers Car-Sharing to Under-21 Drivers

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:31:00 -0500

car-sharing service. Type "car sharing" plus your city name in Google to find out if a car sharing company operates in your area. Getting Under-21 Drivers Hooked on Zipcar The latest good news in the car-sharing world is that Zipcar, a huge car-sharing company with 400,000 members and 7,000 vehicles in the U.S, has decided to expand its coverage in the Boston-area to allow people under-21 - mostly students around the Harvard campus - to have access to its vehicles. It will add about 20 cars to the ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Are New York's Pedestrians Living Dangerously?

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:39:18 -0500

new study by New York's Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) took a look at over 7,000 crashes that occurred in New York City between 2002-2006 and that resulted in the death or serious injury of at least one pedestrian. Its conclusions can help us identify the biggest threats to pedestrians in New York, and by extension, in other big cities. This data will hopefully help NYC and others to make the streets safer. What Should You Look Out For? The first thing that stands out is that men seem to be more prone to hitting pedestrians than women. "in 80 percent of city accidents that resulted in a pedestrian�s death or serious injury, a male driver was behind the wheel. (Fifty-seven perce]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

What's the Transit Score of Your City?

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:59:24 -0500

wrote about how cities that open up their transit data were bringing public transportation into the 21st century and making the system better at a very low cost (they just release the data -- other people build the apps at not cost to the city). A good example of this is the new Transit Score, an online app by the people who brought us the Walk Score. They use open data to calculate a particular's spot's Transit Score. They currently cover more than 40 cities where the public transit agencies provide their data in an open format (over 100 transit agencie]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Open Data is Bringing Public Transportation Into the 21st Century

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:36:13 -0500

free way to make the system better is to open up the databases of transportation agencies and allow others to find new ways to do useful things with the data. This might seem like a small thing, but check out the great video below by our friends at Streetfilms to see how big a differenc]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

No Money for Public Transportation in New Energy Bill

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:01:21 -0500

here) is flawed for many reasons, and pundits on all sides will gladly explain you why. But there's one omission that doesn't get nearly enough press, and it is the fact that the bill doesn't contain any money for public transportation and the improved urban planning that goes with it. If there's one thing that could improve energy use in the U.S., it's fast and modern public transportation (f.ex. more than 90% of trips are made using transit in Hong Kong). So much energy ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Let's Make Our Cities Safe for the Sick and the Frail

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:28:40 -0500

working on this), people will keep getting frail as they age. This will be an especially big problem in many of the richer countries (Europe, Japan, U.S.) where a large fraction of the population is reaching the age at which many types of illnesses are starting to appear. One problem with this is that over the past 100 years, we've designed most of our cities and suburbs around the automobile. This means that when someone gets sick or starts to have vision or coordination problems, they have to make a choice between giving up their car and losing their independence, or keeping driving, which can be unsafe f]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Meet the Algorithm that Cut Delays in Half for German Trains

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:10:56 -0500

especially for commuting in and out of cities during rush hour. But optimizing large and complex networks of trains and buses isn't as easy as it might seem. There are lots of moving pieces, and one small delay for one vehicle can snowball into a system-wide delay. The longer the average delay is, the less attractive transit becomes to commuters who need to know they can count on getting to work on time. EU Research to the Rescue Thankfully, in the past years a lot of progress has been made on this type of real-world problem, and more effective algorithms have bee]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Bike-Sharing is Coming to London!

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:50:16 -0500

Washington DC's bike-share, for example): There will be about 400 bicycle docking stations, 10,200 docking spaces and 6,000 bicycles available at launch in central London Boris Johnson, London's mayor and a cyclist commuter, has been a big supporter of the program. He said: �I have long held the view that a cyclised city is a civilised city, but if we are to get more Londoners on to two wheels rather than four we need to provide the facilities to help them do so. I hope a central-London cycle-hire scheme will insp]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

The Upper Mississippi Forest Project Protects 187k Acres!

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:07:37 -0500

going on in the Gulf of Mexico right now), but there are also victories, and it's worth taking the time to celebrate them. The latest success comes from Minnesota, where a major forest conservation deal was reached. About 187,000 acres of northern Minnesota forest, wetlands and shoreline will be forever protected and remain open to public hunting. A $44 million deal was inked with UPM-Blandin Paper Co. to keep the land from development of sub-division (regardless of who owns it in the future). According to the Read the full story on Planet Green

"Cities for Cycling" Wants Cities to Share Biking Best-Practices

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:59:52 -0500

Cities for Cycling". The goal is to to catalog, promote and implement the world�s best bicycle transportation practices in American municipalities. They take inspiration from the most bike-friendly cities in the US and around the world and try to package that information in a way that is easy to use for the urban planners and engineers of other cities that might not have much experience building quality bike infrastructure. "Cities for Cycling and NACTO seeks to create a comprehensive Urban Bikeway Design Guide which will have two major final products: a web-based version that includes a platform for discussion and information exchange, and a printed summ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Why Does Lance Armstrong Prefer to Ride Behind Electric Cars?

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:43:06 -0500

"Tailpipe after tailpipe after tailpipe..." Uber-cyclist Lance Armstrong had already voiced his support for electric car, and in particular the Nissan LEAF, and now we can clearly see one of the reasons why he's likes EVs so much: He's been riding his bike behind cars and motorcycles for years, breathing in dirty exhaust fumes. Check out the video below. What is the Nissan LEAF? If you've missed the media coverage of the LEAF so far, here's what you need to know: The LEAF is a compact 5-door hatchback electric car to be produced by Nissan. It has an all-electric range of 100 miles and can be charged in 8 hours using a 220v outlet. The price i]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Chicago Realizes Bike-Sharing is Awesome, Gets Pilot Program

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:49:33 -0500

This post is part of our Better Biking feature, a discussion of many of the ways that we can engage in two-wheeled transport a little more effectively. Stay tuned for more! The mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, has announced that the windy city is getting a bike-share program this July. The city will follow Denver's lead and adopt the B-Cycle system, starting small with a 100 bike pilot program. If that goes well - and hopefully it will - it will certainly be much expanded, like Washington DC's bike-share program which is getting 10x bigger. Read the full story on Planet Green

Elon Musk of Tesla Motors Wants to Turn the Planet Green

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:19:29 -0500

Tesla Motors Expands IPO to 13.3m shares, Could Raise $226m). I figured this was good timing to look at the man who runs Tesla Motors, is chairman of the solar energy provider Solarcity, and also co-founded Paypal and SpaceX. He is exactly the kind of forward-thinking and passionate person that we at Planet Green want to support. His name is Elon Musk. Musk is so passionate and hands on with his businesses (he was lead designer for SpaceX's spa]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Lessons From Past Deforestation Disasters

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:01:34 -0500

Latin American Antiquity explains how the ancient Nazca civilization (between 500 and 600 A.D) of south coastal Peru collapsed after they destroyed local forests to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion. These findings are in line with what the Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond argues in his book Collapse. Dr. Diamond lists eight factors which have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies: 1) Deforestation and habitat destruction, 2) Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), 3) Water management problems, 4) Overhunting, 5) Overfishing, 6) Effects of introduced species on native species, 7) Overpopulation, 8) Increased per-capita impact of people. ]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Why Did Derek Sivers Give His $22M Company to Charity?

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:00:32 -0500

Here on Planet Green we like to feature passionate individuals who do forward-thinking things, people that help make the world a better place. This sometimes means people who work on environmental problems, but it doesn't stop there. There's more to making a better work than the environment, though that's the foundation on which everything else rests. One of these people is Derek Sivers, the founder of CDBaby.com, a musician-friendly online store that helped independent artists connect more directly with their fans and keep a bigger piece of each sale ("CD Baby retains $4 of every sale, the remainder gets paid out to the artist on a weekly basis"). Read the full story on Planet Green

Why Can't We Generate All Our Energy From Wind Power?

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:02:27 -0500

How Does Wind Power Work? The gases that make up the Earth's atmosphere are moving around, mostly]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: The What, When and Where [UPDATED]

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:10:27 -0500

An epic environmental tragedy has been unfolding recently, with things going from bad to worse to terrible (and it's not over yet). What I'll do here is take a quick look at the timeline of events so far, and then look at what you can do to help.

Slideshow: Amazing Photography of the Gulf Oil Spill

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The Deepwater Horizon, a semi-submersible offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and caught fire at around 10 p.m. local time (CST). 126 people were on board, 17 were injured and 11 are still missing (presumed dead).

... Read the full story on Planet Green

One Man Walks Across America Just for the Heck of It

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:24:36 -0500

I'm Just Walkin' will probably get you an answer in the form of a question: Why not?

Pulling a Forrest Gump

He's not the first to do it (check out Tom's site from 1997), but his experience is inspiring and worth sharing. Matt writes:
"I�m anxious. I�m not sure what I�m doing with my life. I need an adventure. And I do want to smell the ground and look at grass and birds and trees. I want to savor the country. And there�s no other way to do it save on fo]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Inspiring Video Portraits of 3 Great Cyclists

Tue, 25 May 2010 14:59:20 -0500

Lance Armstrong to be an ambassador for cycling. Regular people of all walks of life are keeping bike culture vibrant and getting new converts just by preaching by example.

Win-Win-Win

In the transportation world, nothing's greener than a bicycle (except maybe walking, but for longer distances it's not always practical). When it comes to health, the exercise you get from cycling is great, and many medical problems could be avoided if we all exercised a bit more. And when it comes to community, the human-scale of the bike makes all the difference in the world. It's a lot easier to meet people when you aren't sealed up in a car.

The thre]]>... Read the full story on Planet Green

Wiping Out Humanity?! An Introduction to Existential Risks

Thu, 20 May 2010 12:02:13 -0500

What are existential risks? The best introductory paper on this topic was written by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher who heads the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He defines the problem this way: "[A risk] where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." ... Read the full story on Planet Green

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