When the Texas company, re:char, wanted to ship their biochar kilns to Kenya, they found the usual options were wasteful and costly. They concluded that it would be much more efficient to manufacture near to the customers. To do this, in a place with little industry or infrastructure, re:char designed  a fully functioning, off-the-grid, solar […]  Read more »

The British government is to make publicly funded scientific research available for anyone to read for free by 2014. Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world. Tensions between […]  Read more »

Microsoft is creating a "carbon price and charge back model" that will levy fees on each of its various internal business groups for the emissions they generate. The company expects that this will result in its becoming carbon neutral by its next fiscal year. Each Microsoft business unit will be responsible for the carbon that […]  Read more »

 This video from www.everythingisaremix.info/ explains it all: .  Read more »

We have just seen widespread protests aginst the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act. Proponents of these Acts claim that they want to encourage creativity by protecting the rights of authors, artists and musicians. But copyright law is not about protecting authors, artists and musicians. It is, and always has been, […]  Read more »

Could the current scandals surrounding Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation organisation be a sign that printed newspapers are in their death throes? Dubious behaviour in a corporation and its management is often a sign of a failing business desperate for revenue. Printed newspapers are a relic of the industrial age and News Corporation seems […]  Read more »

Realizing that the appropriate, low-cost tools for affordable, sustainable farming and settlement didn’t exist, Marcin Jakubowski decided to build them. The idea was to create an easily repairable, modular and scalable set of tools providing everything you need to build, or rebuild, civilization. The result was a group called Open Source Ecolody, and an open […]  Read more »

It is estimated that around 2.6 billion people have no proper sanitation. A group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a low cost, modular sanitation solution which they call "Sanergy". The project, which would be operated and maintained by locals and the waste transported to nearby processing plants, through a network […]  Read more »

Leading members of the corporate community, including IBM, Sony, Nolia and Pitney-Bowes, have come together in a first-of-its-kind effort to help the environment, unleashing dozens of innovative, environmentally responsible patents to the public domain. The pledged portfolio, dubbed the "Eco-Patent Commons", is available on a dedicated, public website, www.wbcsd.org/web/epc, hosted by the World Business Council […]  Read more »

The UK Government has adopted the radical policy of using open-source, in preference to commercial, software. Under the new policy, agencies will be required not only to consider open source solutions and make the choice soley on the basis of value-for-money, but will give peference to open source solutions where there is no cost difference […]  Read more »