While looting often becomes an issue post-disaster, it's been the exact opposite in Japan.
Since the March earthquake and tsunami that leveled much of Japan, thousands of wallets containing a total of $48 million in cash have washed ashore -- and been turned in, ABC reports. In addition, 5,700 safes containing $30 million in cash also have turned up.
Ryuji Ito, professor emeritus at Japan's Yokohama City University, tells the Daily Mail that these acts of integrity are simply reflective of the culture:
"...The fact that a hefty 2.3 billion yen in cash has been returned to its owners shows the high level of ethical awareness in the Japanese people."
And doing the right thing doesn't just end with the people who found the money. Japanese officials have also worked tirelessly to track down owners and return safes and other valuables.
Police in Miyagi prefecture searched for residents at evacuation centers and made their way through missing person reports and address forms at the post office, according to ABC. Police also met with mayors and called any cell phone numbers they could find.
Officials tell the news outlet that the difficulty lay in determining whether homes were gone and if the owners were actually still alive.
Recycling has always meant reusing materials like glass or plastic, and reducing atmospheric carbon has traditionally meant cutting emissions, but what if the two could be combined and make combating climate change profitable by recycling carbon out of the atmosphere?
EnergyNOW! correspondent Josh Zepps looked into a new technology that could pull a thousand times more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than trees and could one day power our cars and trucks with green gasoline. The full video is available below:
Most efforts to capture and sequester (CCS) carbon focus on smokestack emissions, but prohibitive costs and unproven technology make this type of carbon reduction unlikely to succeed. In addition, CCS technology can only cut back on new pollution, which fails to address the billions of tons of carbon already in the atmosphere.
These problems need to be solved quickly in order to slow the effects of climate change and move to a clean energy economy. “We know the Earth is getting hotter, the ice caps are starting to melt, the weather patterns are changing,” said Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. “This transition to a renewable or carbon neutral energy system could easily take 50 or 100 years, even if we started working on it hard today, which we’re not doing.”
To solve this quandry, two scientists from Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy took inspiration from trees and invented a plastic “tree” that absorbs carbon at a much higher rate than Mother Nature.
The idea employs biomimicry by deploying small-scale units of “trees” to soak up more CO2 than real trees, wherever you might need them. “You can remove CO2 anywhere you want, and it can deal with emissions from anywhere else on the planet,” said Allen Wright, a scientist at the Lenfest Center. “There’s no real major discovery or invention that has to happen that would prevent us from deploying that technology tomorrow.”
But beyond just removing CO2 from the atmosphere, the new technology could also turn it into a valuable commodity. Carbon reduction methods often go hand-in-hand with an increase in costs, either through new equipment, or by assessing a fee on emissions. But what if captured carbon could become an economic benefit?
The new technology could serve the existing market for CO2, in enhanced oil recovery, to grow algae for biofuels, in plastic manufacturing, or even in soda – and it could also replace oil-based gasoline. “You can add hydrogen to those (captured) carbon atoms and re-create gasoline,” said Klaus Lackner, a scientist at the Lenfest Center. “It has a zero net impact on the environment because you’re taking the carbon out that burning the gasoline will put in.”
Lackner calls this approach closing the carbon loop because atmospheric carbon can be converted to gasoline, fuel vehicles without drilling for oil, and then collected once again by the “trees.”
But as with all potential energy breakthroughs, it faces two challenges: economics and regulations. The Lenfest researchers expect to be able to sell CO2 to industry for as little as $30 a ton, but they say a tax on carbon dioxide emissions would push up the price of gasoline by about 25 cents a gallon, expand the market for their product, and bring their invention from demonstration to deployment.
Every year, about 15 million pounds of alligator fat is dumped into landfills as a byproduct of alligator meat processing. It would certainly be better to reuse this gloopy mess for a greater purpose, no? As it turns out, alligator fat is a prime candidate for animal-derived biodiesel, according to researchers in Louisiana.
Worldwide food shortages have been causing widespread famine this year, especially in the horn of Africa, which raises some questions about the efficacy (and fairness) of using food crops like corn and soybeans to make biofuels.
Food waste is a good alternative, and we’ve seen plenty of projects that use restaurant frying oil repurposed as biodiesel, for instance. But this does not come close to meeting the nation’s diesel needs — in 2008 alone, Americans consumed 45 billion gallons of diesel, according to the authors of this alligator study. Rendered animal fat could supplement food waste, but some animal fats are not very suitable for biofuel production.
Researchers at the University of Louisiana set about trying to determine if alligators could be a better source. Srividya Ayalasomayajula, Ramalingam Subramaniam and their colleagues knew alligator fat has a high lipid content, which could make it a strong biodiesel candidate. To test this hypothesis, the scientists obtained some frozen alligator samples from meat producers, and microwaved it to render the fat. They also used a chemical solvent.
Microwaving it resulted in a 61 percent recovery by weight, the researchers found. Just to be sure, they went ahead and refined some biodiesel, and found the oil’s fatty acid profile meets all the requirements for high-quality biodiesel — it has a little excess calcium and magnesium, but an improved refining process can dispense with that.
Given that huge quantities of alligator fat are typically just thrown away, it could be a fairly cheap biodiesel feedstock, the researchers write. Louisiana and Florida account for the highest alligator populations, so this could be a homegrown source of alternative fuels — good news for the South, where renewable resources are far from abundant.
Apple sued by 27,000 South Koreans over Apple has been sued by a group of about 27,000 South Koreans in a class-action lawsuit over alleged privacy violations related to location services on iPhones, iPads and the iPod Touch
The suit, filed Wednesday in Changwon, South Korea, seeks about 27 billion won, or about $26 million, in damages, which would work out to about $930 for each plaintiff, the Associated Press reports.
The complaint says Apple's iOS location services infringe on privacy rights because the iPhone stores location data obtained from nearby mobile network towers and Wi-Fi hot spots for as long as a year.
The tech giant has faced criticism from consumers and politicians in the U.S. and abroad since the storage of location tracking data came to light earlier this year. The issue has prompted privacy questions for the mobile industry as a whole, including Google, creator of the rival Android operating system.
Some iPhone and iPad owners have demonstrated that they can use the location data stored on their devices to create a map of their travels.
Apple has said its mobile devices don't need to store location data for more than seven days and were keeping the information for as long as a year only because of a software glitch in the iOS operating system that runs the machines.
The tech giant has released software updates to change how its iOS devices track a user's location for maps, geo-tagged photos and location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla.
Company representatives couldn't be reached Wednesday morning to comment about the lawsuit.
Apple has been sued by a group of about 27,000 South Koreans in a class-action lawsuit over alleged privacy violations related to location services on iPhones, iPads and the iPod Touch.
The suit, filed Wednesday in Changwon, South Korea, seeks about 27 billion won, or about $26 million, in damages, which would work out to about $930 for each plaintiff, the Associated Press reports.
The complaint says Apple's iOS location services infringe on privacy rights because the iPhone stores location data obtained from nearby mobile network towers and Wi-Fi hot spots for as long as a year.
The tech giant has faced criticism from consumers and politicians in the U.S. and abroad since the storage of location tracking data came to light earlier this year. The issue has prompted privacy questions for the mobile industry as a whole, including Google, creator of the rival Android operating system.
Some iPhone and iPad owners have demonstrated that they can use the location data stored on their devices to create a map of their travels.
Apple has said its mobile devices don't need to store location data for more than seven days and were keeping the information for as long as a year only because of a software glitch in the iOS operating system that runs the machines.
The tech giant has released software updates to change how its iOS devices track a user's location for maps, geo-tagged photos and location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla.
Company representatives couldn't be reached Wednesday morning to comment about the lawsuit.
If you don’t have time to do the recommended 30 minutes daily exercise, 15 minutes can still be beneficiary, according to a study published Tuesday in The Lancet, a British medical journal.
Conducted by Taiwanese researchers, the study tracked 416, 175 people for 12 years and found that people doing15 minutes of exercise a day had a 14 percent lower risk of death and three years more life expectancy than those who did no exercise.
The fitness guidelines of the World Health Organization recommend adults get at least a half-hour of moderate exercise most days of the week or 150 minutes weekly exercise. But in China and Japan, less than one-fifth of the population meets the goal, according to Bloomberg reports.
"Finding a slot of 15 minutes is much easier than finding a 30-minute slot in most days of the week,” said Dr. Chi-Pang Wen, lead author of the study. The 15-minute exercises may be brisk walking, bike riding, or even digging the garden, researchers said.
The researchers also found the more exercise, the better. Each additional 15 minutes of exercise reduced the risk of death by another 4 percent compared with those who did no exercise.
In case you needed more proof that watching excessive amounts of TV is bad for your health: new research shows that there is a correlation between the amount of time you spend in front of the TV and how long you live.
A study by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia has concluded that, for every hour of television watched after age 25, the average human lifespan drops by 22 minutes. A person who watch six hours of TV per day will, on average, live five years less than people who spent less time on the couch and in front of the television screen. Those are some scary numbers.
The study tracked data from 11,000 Australian participants over the age of 25. It was published earlier this month in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
This study doesn’t prove that TV is quietly killing us. It’s more likely that lack of exercise and bad eating habits are shortening the lifespans of TV couch potatoes. A person who spends six hours a day staying active is almost certainly going to live longer than a person who likes to lean back in a recliner watching countless episodes of Judge Judy or Law and Order: SVU.
It’s not just TV watching that’s bad for you, either. We recently learned that sitting in front of the computer for six hours a day increases your risk of death by 40%. And with Americans watching more video than ever, the health problem is growing. That’s why we’re fans of the stand-up desk.
[via Yahoo]
The Google/Motorola purchase is going to test everyone in the smartphone and tablet industry. But it’s also going to test whether Android’s success has come from the strength of the platform itself or if Google was just at the right place at the right time.
Looking back, the conditions for Android’s breakthrough were perfect. Google took advantage of what every other major software company had done in the space, but sidestepped all of their commitments.
smartphone world was overloaded with commitments — to carriers, hardware and sunken strategies. Android didn’t have any of that. It wasn’t just free to use: it was free from history.
Android made no assumptions, so it had, and permitted, maximum freedom. Google could sell an unlocked phone without a carrier. Barnes & Noble could use it to build a custom OS for an e-reader. You could strip it down to make a phone cheap enough to give away, or load it up with specs crazy enough to make fanboys and fangirls drool. Carriers and hardware partners could load it up with whatever pet software they wanted. Everyone involved loved it. Market share soared.
But all that freedom came at a well-known price: fragmentation. Not every piece of hardware could support every version of Android, and versions of Android built for smartphones began powering tablet and media player devices they were never designed to handle. Big players like Amazon realized there was nothing stopping them from selling Android apps. Microsoft and Apple realized there was nothing stopping them from suing hardware makers for patent infringement. Even Blackberry and Palm were on the move, developing competitive next-generation software platforms. Every one of Android’s hundred blooming flowers was just an easy, isolated target.
With Apple now on Verizon and its top phone makers dabbling in WinPhone7, Google had to put lightning back in the bottle. It had to exert more control over its software and its marketplace. It had to buy up patents to protect itself and its partners. And finally, with Motorola, Google went all-in and bought its own hardware company.
Google finally has as many commitments as each of the competitors it undercut along the way.
Now, Google’s advantages are structural, too. Even with Apple blocking products from coming to market and Microsoft extracting tolls, Android is still generally cheaper and more customizable than its competitors. It also has the biggest smartphone user base. This is the good kind of inertia. Developers don’t leave; users don’t switch.
But it does mean that it’s not enough for Android to be the only software company for Samsung, HTC or LG to work with; it’s not enough to offer the best smartphone in the Verizon store.
It’s time for Google to saddle up. It doesn’t just have to make the case that Android is better; it has to make Android better. It has to make Samsung believe that Google is ready to fight harder than Microsoft and Apple for developers, fight harder in court, and fight harder to keep making Android better than any new OS you’ll see this year, next year, or the year after that.
Get on your horse, Google. Get focused. No more excuses. Put on your Keyser Söze face.
Show everyone that it wasn’t an accident that got you here. Show everyone that it’s because you saw what nobody else could see and were willing to do what no one else could do. Show everyone that you’re ready to do it again.
