On the Tail of the Tiger

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A captive tiger at Bannerghatta National Park, Bengaluru, India. PHOTO: Rosanna Abrachan

A captive tiger at Bannerghatta National Park, Bengaluru, India. PHOTO: Rosanna Abrachan

The world has seen the population of individual wild tigers dwindle from 100,000 in 1913 to just about 3,200 now. Classified into six species, a majority of these surviving cats belong to the specie panthera tigris tigris, more popularly known as the Bengal tiger, that are found in India. Here too, their population, estimated to be between 20,000-40,000 at the turn of the 20th century, reduced to fewer than 2,000 by the 1970s, mostly due to hunting and poaching. It has now inched to 2,226, making India home to 70% of the world’s total tiger population.

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Let’s Fill Up on Some Brewtroleum

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New Zealanders can now run their cars on the same fuel they run themselves on—beer. Brewtroleum is a new biofuel which mixes beer by-products with regular gasoline to power the nation's cars. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

New Zealanders can now run their cars on the same fuel they run themselves on—beer. Brewtroleum is a new biofuel which mixes beer by-products with regular gasoline to power cars. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Generally, beer and moving cars don’t work well together. Remember the warnings against drinking and driving? But in a few places, companies are recycling the detritus of the beermaking process into a clean gasoline additive that allows cars to navigate without using as much of the precious fossil fuel.The latest venture comes from New Zealand where for a short time, motorists can fill up their cars with beer. Well, almost beer.

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Helping the Ocean Clean Up

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The Ocean Cleanup started tests in 2014 to see if the floating barriers are a feasible way to remove garbage. PHOTO: The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup started tests in 2014 to see if the floating barriers are a feasible way to remove garbage. PHOTO: The Ocean Cleanup

Dutch engineering student Boyan Slat announced in a 2012 TEDx talk that he had invented a way for the oceans to rid themselves of plastic with minimal human intervention. About 8 million tons of plastic enters the ocean each year. Part of this accumulates in 5 areas where currents converge: the gyres. At least 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are currently in the oceans, a third of which is concentrated in the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Slat’s idea is to building a stationary array with floating barriers that would filter and collect floating plastic using the ocean’s natural currents.

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Goodwill on Two Wheels

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The Bike Project is run by former refugees and mechanics, who work with new refugees to fix up donated bikes. PHOTO: The Bike Project

The Bike Project is run by former refugees and mechanics, who work with new refugees to fix up donated bikes. PHOTO: The Bike Project

13,500 refugees flee to London each year. In that same period, around 27,500 bikes are abandoned. Just one of these abandoned bikes can help a refugee save 20 pounds a week on bus fare. That’s 1,040 pounds a year. Having fixed, donated, and helped refugees maintain over 300 bikes, The Bike Project is turning the wheels of goodwill and community development.

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The Next Big Industry in China?

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Satellites, drones and remote sensors will soon be deployed across China to detect pollution levels over land, sea and air. This may indicate that normal methods to identify pollution levels haven’t really shown expected results. Or, that the levels have exceeded expected limits. In a country that is not only among the world’s top polluters but also has some of the most polluted cities, are environmental reforms becoming the norm? And what do these mean for the rest of the world?

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Sidestepping Oil With Sugar

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A service truck drives past an oil well on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, which produces nearly a third of US' oil. PHOTO: Andrew Cullen

A service truck drives past an oil well on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, which produces nearly a third of US’ oil. PHOTO: Andrew Cullen

Oil is one of the non-renewable resources available on the planet, and its scarcity is inevitable if the supply does not meet the growing demand in the current scenario, and it may even lead to “resource wars” among states in the coming years. Oil prices are now near a six-year low, moving down today to about $44 a barrel. The fall has been precipitous: Only a year ago, crude oil was more than $100 a barrel. With the world of oil production being susceptible to the smallest of changes in the global market, it shows up as a space conducive to innovations that can potentially make it economical.

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Leaving an Ugly Mark in Space

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It’s not just here on earth that litter is a problem. In the last 40 years, there have been more than 5,000 launches into space, and they’ve ended up leaving a mark, and now scientists are worried about the litter they’ve left behind. ‘Space junk‘ are the small objects that we’ve left behind in space.They include things like old satellites, gloves, and toolkits accidentally dropped by astronauts. In 2014, the International Space Station had to move three times to avoid lethal chunks of space debris. The problem also threatens crucial and costly satellites in orbit. So what is the scale of the space junk problem, and what can we do about it?

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More Internet, More Power

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Facebook’s ‘Aquila’, the first solar powered internet drone, parallels Google’s Project Loon PHOTO: Jewish Business News

Facebook has unveiled its ambitious project with its first comprehensive solar powered drone. With the help of its first drone code named Aquila, the social networking giant aims to provide internet connection to 4 billion users across the secluded parts of the globe. In fact, Aquila joins Google’s Project Loon in the space of connecting people and places.

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Talking the Lion’s Share of Conservation

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An image of a lion projected on to New York's Empire State Building in memory of Cecil, the lion hunted down in Zimbabwe recently. PHOTO: BBC

An image of a lion projected on to New York’s Empire State Building in memory of Cecil, the lion hunted down in Zimbabwe recently. PHOTO: BBC

The hue and cry over Cecil the lion’s killing is yet to die down. Zimbabwe’s most popular lion’s death did stir up outrage in the quarters of animals rights crusaders and much indignation at how a ‘man who restores lives’ could take the life of another. While the need for a better conservation-hunting model has risen yet again and efforts are on to chalk out more effective regulation on hunting, the focus returns to how man-habitat-animal conflicts abet loss of lives. More interesting are the isolated voices that call animals in the wild just what they are – “killers”.

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Sri Lanka Says Hello to Project Loon

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In this June 10, 2013 photo released by Jon Shenk, a Google balloon sails through the air with the Southern Alps mountains in the background, in Tekapo, New Zealand (AP Photo/Jon Shenk)

In this June 10, 2013 photo released by Jon Shenk, a Google balloon sails through the air with the Southern Alps mountains in the background, in Tekapo, New Zealand (AP Photo/Jon Shenk)

Technology juggernaut Google changed the way we search with its proprietary algorithims. But the company is constantly working on technologically impressive, forward-leaning projects that have the promise to push broadscale change for billions of people around the world. Project Fi, self-driven vehicles, the delivery system named Project Wing and the three-dimensional mapping system named Project Tango later, Project Loon is here.

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The Blue-and-white Swallow

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A Blue-and-white Swallow with a view of Alajuela and the Santa Ana wind turbines

Nearly every day at Xandari you’re quite likely to spot some swallows zooming around anywhere between roughly ten and seventy feet above the ground, foraging for small insects on the wing. Chances are that these aerial insectivores are Blue-and-white Swallows (Pygochelidon cyanoleuca), although Northern Rough-winged Swallows have been seen here before too. The Blue-and-whites are typically in groups of five to twenty, but sometimes they’re solitary or in pairs, and you can also expect to see some swifts mixed in with the flock if there are lots of bugs in the air.

The footage above is from one afternoon last week when the swallows were enjoying Continue reading →

Prefab Solar Classrooms Power Education in Kenya

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According to a UN report, there are around 57 million children who don’t have a school to go to.The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) says in some areas it could take 70 years before there are enough primary school places for every child. There has been some progress though; there are now half as many children unable to go to school as there were in the year 2000. That means in the past 13 years around 60 million more children now have access to an education. And initiatives like Aleutia’s definitely play a big role in bringing down the number of children who lack access to education.

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When Mines Threaten to Swallow Cities

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Kiruna is Sweden’s northernmost city, and soon, it's about to pick up and move two miles to the east, thanks to a mine. PHOTO: Co Exist

Kiruna is Sweden’s northernmost city, and soon, it’s about to pick up and move two miles to the east, thanks to a mine. PHOTO: Co Exist

Kiruna is home to the world’s largest underground iron ore mine, LKAB, supplying iron ore pellets to the steel industry in Europe. In most places, ore is extracted in opencast mines but not in Kiruna. The ore body in Kiruna is four kilometers long and 80 meters wide and stretches for at least two kilometers in the ground. For the moment, they mine at 1 km deep in Kiruna but they plan to mine until at least 2030 because they don’t know the extent of the ore body. But the city is sinking.

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Sparkle and Twinkle

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The full moon as seen from Xandari on July 31st (photo by S. Inman).

I was quite nervous before my 8am tour as I read through the Sustainability Tour document and general script of facts last Friday. This was going to be my first measurable test to prove everything I have learned so far from working at Xandari for two and a half weeks. The tour consists of making the rounds through the property to each department and having a member of each one describe to the guest their daily practices that are environmentally friendly. My primary role in the tour is to explain in detail the CST (Certificate of Sustainable Tourism) program and its significance not only to the whole mission and vision of Xandari, but also as a greater movement for businesses in the hospitality industry in Costa Rica. In addition, while we are at each department, I become a translator for my coworkers if the guests don’t understand Spanish. Continue reading →