Dear reader,
We, The Green Optimistic team, want to thank you for being loyal to us during 2011.
As a sign of our appreciation, I am writing this post and wishing you all the best in the year to come,
May all of your wishes come true and we hope you’ll love (or hate) some or our future green news just like you loved (or hated) some of last year’s news.
May we all live a greener life and may the companies and governments find solutions to give up oil and embrace clean-generated electricity, for our children’s sake, if not for ours.
And, last but not least, may you joyfully visit The Green Optimistic for the rest of your life and ours! Let’s hope 2012 will bring all the best and prosperity to everybody!
Thank you for being our reader. Truly.
Here’s a short list of what I consider this year’s hottest news, by month:
January
Eric’s Homemade Mirror Solar Concentrator Melts Metals and Concrete in Seconds (Video)
Here’s Eric Jacqmain, who built his “Death Ray” out of a normal satellite dish with 5,800 small mirrors on it. He worked about 24 hours on the project whose results you can see in the video below.
Read more…
February
Solar Powered Oil Rig in Fremont: Serving The Nation’s Dirty Fuel With Renewable Resources
I laughed my a** off this one: a Fremond-based company, GlassPoint Solar, is actually helping the oil industry prosper by selling them solar panels for oil extraction purposes! Now this is the hottest news I’ve ever read since the dawn of the Green Optimistic.
Read more…
March
T-box: A New Device That Harnesses Wind Energy Produced by Running Trains
Designers Ale Leonetti Luparinia and Qian Jiang have come up with a new concept of a device that uses the wind energy produced by a running train. As the designers claim, the device, dubbed T-box, is a power generator that is able to harnesses wind power when a train moves across the tracks.
Read more…
April
Four Running Men Pollute More Than a Hybrid Car, Italian Study Claims
Watch the chart on the left… what do you think it represents?
Did you watch it carefully enough? This represents the auto industry’s top notch statistic, claiming that 4 (four) running men (the average size) pollute more than 1 (one) hybrid car (carrying its 1.2+ tons and the four men) running at a speed of 30 km/h. Do you also think that’s stupid? I did, too.
Read more…
May
Car Built by Romanian Inventor Gets 784 MPG Fuel Efficiency
Remember Justin Capra, the Romanian inventor of the jetpack? Well’s he’s done it again. Now, his ingenuity inspired him to build a small car that has a fuel efficiency of 784 miles per gallon! How about that?
He said in an interview to a Romanian television, Antena1, that he blended gasoline with water and that with less than a gallon (three liters) one could go from Bucharest to Budapest (480 miles).
June
Scrap Materials Used to Build 500W Vertical Axis Wind Turbine System
Along history, some said making wind turbines, transporting them to the site, installing and performing regular maintenance emits lots of carbon dioxide and uses lots of raw materials. A team of students from Cape May Technical High School in New Jersey has proved the contrary.
Read more…
July
Transparent Lithium Ion Battery Invented by Stanford Researchers
They may not even know it, but I guess transparent batteries are the dream of every teenager or fancily-dressed girl out there. And the good news is that Yi Cui together with a team from the University of Stanford, have invented such a battery.
Read more…
August
Alligator Fat Turned Into Precious and Cheap Biodiesel in Louisiana
A team of researchers from the Lafayette campus of the University of Louisiana have not only gotten used to the idea of putting plant oil (biodiesel) into their tanks, but are also thinking how they could convert alligator fat into an energy-rich fuel. 45 billion gallons a year: that the total diesel consumption in the […]
Read more…
September
Water Evaporation From Plants Helps Cool Down The Climate, Study Demonstrates
A team from the Carnegie Global Ecology department have recently concluded that water evaporation on Earth actually cools down the atmosphere and fights global warming, but not in the way you’d be tempted to think. You probably know from elementary classes that evaporation happens with energy consumption, thus taking the heat from the object and […]
Read more…
October
German Researchers Dramatically Improve Electrolyte Filling Time in Batteries, Reduce Costs
A discovery made by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) can eventually make lithium ion batteries cheaper by improving a key process that currently takes a lot of time to complete: filling the batteries with liquid electrolyte. The porous electrodes inside modern rechargeable batteries have to be properly filled with liquid electrolyte. Actually, […]
Read more…
November
London Uses Special Glue for Trapping Air Pollution
London has been famed for its dirty air even since the early days of industrial revolution. Things aren’t like that anymore, however the city hall has decided it’s high time to meet the European legislation in the matter – if not for anything else, then for the $450 million fine the EU is going to […]
Read more…
December
Mathematical Model Proves Anti-Fungal Paints Negatively Affect Ecosystem, Food Chain
At least once in your lifetime you’ve heard about anti-fungal painting, or even used it on your own home. Did you know that the same anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties of such a paint are unbalancing the ecosystem? A scientific study performed in Lausanne, Switzerland, says so. Sylvain Coutu, from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), […]
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