"We'll be the first to bring to the market a storage battery for home use, which can store sufficient electricity for about one week of use," said Fumio Otsubo, president of Panasonic, in a recent interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun.

Stressing that Panasonic and Sanyo have already test-manufactured a storage battery for home use, Otsubo said, "We're positioned closest [among firms] to realizing CO2 emission-free daily life."

By making Sanyo its subsidiary, Panasonic plans to accelerate the development of the storage battery, while planning to sell it together with a system that will enable households to check electricity usage on a home-based TV display

Read the whole article at http://www.physorg.com/news180778009.html

Study suggests that wind is ecologically and economically practical and could reduce CO2 emissions Cambridge, Mass. – September 10, 2009 – A team of environmental scientists from Harvard and Tsinghua University demonstrated the enormous potential for wind-generated electricity in China. Using extensive metrological data and incorporating the Chinese government's energy bidding and financial restrictions for delivering wind power, the researchers estimate that wind alone has the potential to meet the country's electricity demands projected for 2030.

The switch from coal and other fossil fuels to greener wind-based energy could also mitigate CO₂ emissions, thereby reducing pollution. The report appeared as a cover story in the September 11th issue of Science.

Twenty minutes per day of guided workplace meditation and yoga combined with six weekly group sessions can lower feelings of stress by more than 10 percent and improve sleep quality in sedentary office employees, a pilot study suggests.

The study offered participants a modified version of what is known as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a program established in 1979 to help hospital patients in Massachusetts assist in their own healing that is now in wide use around the world.

In the first study to look at what happens over the years to the billions of pounds of plastic waste floating in the world's oceans, scientists are reporting that plastics — reputed to be virtually indestructible — decompose with surprising speed and release potentially toxic substances into the water.

We have exposed a secret oil industry plan to organise fake rallies against US climate legislation, and to exaggerate concern over the cost of action on climate change. The plan, stated in a leaked internal memo from the API (American Petroleum Institute) shows that they are reverting back to old tricks - spreading misinformation about climate change and pressing politicians towards inaction. While Shell Oil have said they won’t participate in this plan - they still give money to the API which continues to lobby the US Government using deceptive tactics. Climate protection policy is needed urgently. Politicians should listen to climate scientists and the people - not big corporations with vested interests. The API is threatening our future, and our children’s future with their lies. We need you to tell the oil industry to come clean and support real climate action. The following letter will be sent to the CEOs of: BHP Billiton, BP, Chevron, Conoco, Exxon, General Electric, Halliburton, Shell and Petrobras.

Send the letter at Greenpeace

Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Birmingham, Royal Holloway London and IFM-Geomar in Germany have found that more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas are rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin in the Arctic, in a depth range of 150 to 400 metres.

Methane released from gas hydrate in submarine sediments has been identified in the past as an agent of climate change. The likelihood of methane being released in this way has been widely predicted.

The data were collected from the royal research ship RRS James Clark Ross, as part of the Natural Environment Research Council's International Polar Year Initiative. The bubble plumes were detected using sonar and then sampled with a water-bottle sampling system over a range of depths.

Brazil — Bertin, the world’s largest leather exporter is joining the fight against deforestation and climate change and is finally doing the right thing and backing the call for a moratorium on buying cattle from farms responsible for Amazon deforestation.

Since the release of our expose, ‘Slaughtering the Amazon’ just two months ago, we’ve seen an overwhelming response from companies fighting to distance themselves from Amazon destruction.

Major shoe companies Adidas, Nike, Timberland, Clarks, Geox and Timberland have all committed not to buy leather from Amazon destruction, prompting the recent decision by Bertin to commit to stop sourcing cattle from newly deforested areas and implement a traceability system to ensure the sourcing.

The Plan Over the next six months, Bertin will register and map all farms which directly supply cattle to the company.

Much of the search for life outside of Earth's biological oasis has focused on examining the conditions on the other planets in our solar system and probing the cosmos for other Earth-like planets in distant planetary systems.But one team of astronomers is approaching the question of in the universe by looking for life's potential beginningAparna Venkatesan, of the University of San Francisco, and Lynn Rothschild, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., are using models of star formation and destruction to determine when in the roughly 13.7 billion-year history of the universe the biogenic elements – those essential to life as we know it – might have been pervasive enough to allow life to form

Read the full article over here at Space.com 

Dear leaders,

I call upon you, not as representatives of your countries, but as leaders of the world, to personally attend the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen this December.

Decisions which will be made at this meeting will impact the lives of everyone alive today, and determine the shape of humanity’s future.

This is the world’s best chance to avoid runaway climate change.

You owe it to the world to attend, to set aside your national interests, to safeguard our future, and to do what you were elected to do: lead.

My request is simple: promise now to personally attend.

Click on the image below to sign the petition at Greenpeace

Manaus, Brazil — Ten years ago, we set up an office in Manaus, a city inaccessible except by boat or plane, in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, and began exposing illegal logging. Just three years later our campaign heralded the end of the illegal mahogany trade in Brazil. Since then we have been uncovering further forest crimes and persuading the Brazilian government and corporations like McDonald's to take action against forest destruction - and in so doing, protect our planet from runaway climate change. As we celebrate our 10th year working in the Amazon it is more important than ever before to end deforestation. It is estimated that 80 percent of logs from the Amazon are cut down illegally.

April 20 (Bloomberg) -- The Dutch town of Barendrecht has a message for Royal Dutch Shell Plc: Not under my backyard.

The oil company and the Netherlands government intend to build the first of a new generation of carbon-dioxide storage facilities in two depleted natural-gas fields in Barendrecht. The plan is to capture emissions from a gasification hydrogen plant at Shell’s nearby Pernis refinery and then store the CO2 more than a mile below area homes, preventing the greenhouse gas from reaching the air and harming the environment.

“I don’t think this is the solution to the CO2 problem,” said 53-year-old resident Gerard van Gils. “Why do a project in a residential area and not offshore? The atomic bomb wasn’t tested under Manhattan. To me this means: Not under my backyard.”

Born in May 2007, Environmental Graffiti is an eclectic mix of the most bizarre, funny and interesting environmental news on the planet. We search the vast realms of the internet on behalf of all environmentalists who don’t take themselves too seriously and compile it into a daily blog. Surf and enjoy!

The Nitrogen Paradox

Nitrogen is one of the five major chemical elements that are necessary for life. While nitrogen is the most abundant of these, more than 99 percent of it occurs as molecular nitrogen, or N₂, which cannot be used by most organisms.  This is because breaking the triple bond holding the two nitrogen atoms together requires a large amount of energy, which can be mustered only through high-temperature processes or by a small number of nitrogen-fixing microbes.

Most living organisms can only make use of reactive nitrogen, which includes inorganic forms of nitrogen like ammonia, ammonium, nitrogen oxide, nitric acid, nitrous oxide, and nitrate, and organic compounds like urea, amines, proteins, and nucleic acids. It includes any nitrogen compound that is radiatively, chemically or biological active.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is an innovative power generation system that uses the slight temperature difference between surface layer ocean water and deep ocean water.