Lene Vestergaard Hau can stop a pulse of light in midflight, start it up again at 0.13 miles per hour, and then make it appear in a completely different location. “It’s like a little magic trick,” says Hau, a Harvard physicist. “Of course, in all magic tricks there’s a secret.” And her secret is a 0.1-mm lump of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate, cooled nearly to absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a steel container with tiny windows. Normally — well, in a vacuum — light goes 186,282 miles per second. But things are different inside a BEC, a strange place where millions of atoms move — barely — in quantum lockstep.
About a decade ago, Hau started playing with BECs — for a physicist, that means shooting lasers at them. She blew up a few. Eventually, she found that lasers of the right wavelengths could tune the optical properties of a BEC, giving Hau an almost supernatural command over any other light shined into it. Her first trick was slowing a pulse of light to a crawl — 15 mph as it traveled through the BEC. Since then, Hau has completely frozen a pulse and then released it. And recently she shot a pulse into one BEC and stopped it — turning the BEC into a hologram, a sort of matter version of the pulse. Then she transferred that matter waveform into an entirely different BEC nearby — which emitted the original light pulse. That’s just freaky. Hey, Einstein may have set that initial speed limit of light, but he only theorized about BECs. “It’s not breaking relativity,” Hau says. “But I’m sure he would have been rather surprised.”
This 47 minute video on the essence of debt currency briefly touches on perhaps the critical environmental issue of the time: can anything be done about our deficits in the real world (in carbon sinks, fisheries, clean water, etc.) if we have no way to think about public policy except through the language of "what it will do to the economy"?
Despite the paranoid tone, the fundamental question asked in this video is the right one: is a sustainable world even plausible if we continue to accept a monetary system that must grow without end?
The delay in autumnal leaf coloration and leaf fall in trees is caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and not by increased global temperatures, suggests a new study by researchers at the University of Southampton.
In recent years, woodland autumnal colour changes have been occurring later in the season whilst re-greening in spring has been occurring earlier. During the last 30 years across Europe, autumnal senescence – the process of plant aging where leaves discolour and then fall – has been delayed by 1.3 – 1.8 days a decade. To date, this has been explained by global warming, with increasing temperatures causing longer growing seasons.
The Longpen, an invention that allows books signings to take place without the need for an author to travel miles, has graced our pages many times before. From the Longpen Bookfest at the Green Living Show, to keeping Conrad Black out of jail, the concept has been saving emissions and opening minds all over the place. We’ve just come across an interview with the pen’s inventor Margaret Atwood, over at the Friends of the Earth UK website, explaining her motivations behind…
Technology is generally about letting our species be more effective and efficient, which is why it has become such an overwhelming force for green. But sometimes, technology is bad…even an EcoGeek must recognize it.
And the worst new energy technology in the world is undeniably liquid coal. Some people (mostly people who own coal mines) want to replace 100% of America’s gasoline usage with a fuel that comes from coal. It produces two times more CO2, consumes three times more water than gasoline, and gives us more incentive to tear down our mountain ranges.
Even better, it’s not currently economically viable, so coal companies are trying to get Congress to subsidize these billion-dollar coal to liquid plants. Luckily the NRDC and the Union of Concerned Scientists are on our side. The NRDC has created a great (and frighteningly accurate) animation to spread the word, while the UoCS has released a report on the dangers of the technology.
The best thing we can do is get educated. Coal is the fuel of the past, not the future…if Congress is going to subsidize anything, it ought to be, at the very least, clean.
Recently we covered a new service (buymybrokenipod.com) that, instead of making you pay to get your borked iPod recycled, actually pays you! And then, instead of sending the device to get torn apart by desperate people in desperate places, they actually use the parts for repairs so that the devices can continue their lives.
A fantastic service…and it just got better. BuyMyBrokeniPod has become BuyMyTronics.com. Now they’ll take your iPod, your iPhone, or any game console back to the GameCube/PS2 generation including PSPs and GBAs. Answer a few questions about the condition of your device and they’ll let you know what it’s worth to them (a severely damaged Wii without controllers or games nets $33, while a perfect GameCube with controllers gets you $20.)
Used in concert with CellForCash.com there aren’t many electronics you’ll have to throw away anymore! Unless…of course…you’re me, and you still have an N64…
The website Eternal Sunset uses 272 west-facing webcams in over 50 countries to show a live sunset 24 hours a day. Right now, for example, we’re checking out the pastel hues over the water in Valle Gran Rey, Spain.
Now all we need is a never-ending bottle of merlot and a loop of Marvin Gaye.
We love treehouses here at Inhabitat and are enamored with eco-architect Mitchell Joachim’s visionary ideas about how to grow living treehouses from ficus molded around frame structures. We’ve covered these brilliantly playful architectural ideas before on Inhabitat, but now we have a video from Mitchell Joachim explaining the details of how they work. Joachim does much better justice to his future-forward ecological designs than we are able to do in a mere post, so if you have any interest in living treehouses (and we know you do), check out this fascinating video below.
a music video titled “The Child” created by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet for the french DJ Alex Gopher. it shows a virtual world created only with animated typographics.
a simple story set in New York in which a young couple rush across town to the Central Hospital in order to deliver their baby is made into an exciting race. they travel through an alphabetical jungle where buildings, bridges & roads are made up entirely of words.
a set of geo-visualizations, based on the time, explicit location & people’s description of thousands of Flickr photos. by considering that uploading, tagging & disclosing the location of a photo can be interpreted as an act of communication, rather than a pure implicit history of physical presence, the resulting maps reveal patterns of tourists & citizens consuming a city. for instance, the flow of people between city attractions, the monuments areas of influence or what is happening with day/night & working/weekend periodicity.
a real-time news “translation machine” representing appearing & disappearing information about our times. the news content is reduced to the most frequent headlines & their according keywords. the reduced news headlines are then visually translated in a dynamic pictogram language that is considered to be universal & instantly understandable. online users can add keywords to an icon to determine which news will be displayed.
“Falling Times refers to the heavy InfoPollution we live in. the InfoSociety has created a new kind of consumer – the InfoConsumer!“
a computer program for analyzing film sequences, by extracting single frames of any given movie sequence & arranging them behind each other in a three-dimensional space. the resulting tube-like set of frames “freezes” a particular time span in a film. application examples include motion analysis of sport actions or the visualization & comparison of crash-test recordings.
abstract data is visualized by manipulating individual frames, for instance, sound volume is mapped to a frame’s width & height, or the frame frequency is translated as rotation.
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The Longpen, an invention that allows books signings to take place without the need for an author to travel miles, has graced our pages many times before. From the 
Technology is generally about letting our species be more effective and efficient, which is why it has become such an overwhelming force for green. But sometimes, technology is bad…even an EcoGeek must recognize it.
