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History of technology Google Books scanned thousands of vintage popular science magazines, including Popular Mechanics (1905 - 2005), Popular Science (1872 - 2008) and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (1945 - 1998). (via)
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Travel time Due this year: trains that can go 150 mph (see & read)
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Solar panels You’re heartsick about global warming, so you’ve just paid $25,000 to put a solar system on the roof of your home. How do you respond to news that it was manufactured with a chemical that is 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming? (read)
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Low-tech flying car All you need is a propeller and a parachute (see & read)
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Fake cheese A composition of palm oil, starch, milk proteins, E339 and E452. Enjoy your pizza (read)
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Nanotech Making carbon-based nanomaterials is up to 100 times as energy-intensive as aluminum (read)
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Lost formats Say what you will about the quality of VHS tapes, but at least they could be resold and lent to friends (read)
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Temples of doom The Maya had their rituals and sacrifices. Magic, in other words. And we also believe in magic: that money and innovation can get us out of the inherent limits of our system, that the old rules don't apply to us. (read)
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Los GrumildosLow-tech mechanical puppets on the fringes of society (see)
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DebtThe economic crisis is petty by comparison to the nature crunch. But they have the same cause (read)
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EconomicsMoney grows on trees (read)
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Geek historyJay Walker's library (see & read)
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Saving the seedsThe world’s heritage of seed diversity is the product of thousands of years of experimental plant breeding by millions of farmers across the world (read)
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ActivismI have robbed 492,000 euros to whom most rob us in order to denounce them and build some alternatives for society (read)
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Obsolete toys (2)Tri-ang toys catalogue from 1937 (see)
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Toe socksGadgets that never made it (see)
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I=PAT Too many people are under the delusion that a disastrous end to the modern human enterprise can be avoided by technological fixes that will allow the population and the economy to grow forever (read)
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Keep coolOther cultures have perfected low-tech ways of dealing with the heat (read)
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Energy independenceRussia set to dominate world uranium supply (read)
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HousingThey don't build them like they used to do (read)
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T-shirtsIf biofuels are so bad, why aren't we campaigning against cotton? (read)
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WalkingMy shoes get 220 miles per gallon (read)
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HydroelectricityDam the Mediterranean (see & read)
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HomeNow that's what I call a tree house (see)
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Get an upgradeThe energy required to produce a computer is enough to run it for 10 years (see & read) (via)
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Low-tech writingPen reviews (see & read)
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Where's the fish?Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has led to ecological meltdown (read)
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FitnessThe first gym (see & read)
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Help in case of an atomic bomb attackOne reason to get down flat is to let the worst of it pass over you (see & read) (Via)
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Build an electric carRetrofitting a 1970s Fiat 500 (read)
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Minerals“Peak oil” is just one of several cases of worldwide peaking and decline of a depletable resource (read)
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Travelling lightAirships are one of several green technologies which might be killed by a shortage of materials (read)
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Farms became factories Chemical corporations continue their propaganda efforts to convince farmers that they cannot make a profit without using chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, and genetically manipulated crops and animals (read)
Take it easy
A 0.5 horse power car (see & read)
Robot wars
Airstrikes from unmanned aircraft over Iraq hit record levels in April (read)
TV
A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken (read)
Privacy
How to kill an RFID tag (read)
Insurance versus nature
In the past five years, London councils alone have chopped down almost 40,000 street trees (read)
Long-term storage (2)
How to make a Moleskine notebook (make)
Long-term storage (1)
It only takes five years and archived data is obsolete (read)
Monsanto rules (2)
Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops (read)
Monsanto rules (1)
Intellectual property thuggery is not restricted to the IT and entertainment industries (read)
Time is money
From New York to Los Angeles in 48 hours (read)
Solar
One of oldest forms of energy used by humans -- sunlight concentrated by mirrors -- is poised to make an astonishing comeback (read)
Food crisis
What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? (read)
Green cars (2)
Cars like the Aptera are severely impeding humanity's faltering steps towards creating a sustainable society (read)
Green cars
From rainforest to rubber plantation (read)
Time capsule
2000 A.D. (see)
Time capsule
2063 A.D. (read)
Green buildings (2)
It takes 90,000 kWh of energy to construct a single family dwelling (read)
Green buildings (1)
Even if 40% of the materials in a new building are recycled, it would take 65 years for a green, energy-efficient new office building to recover the energy lost in demolishing an existing building (read)
Flying
The revival of propeller-driven planes (read) (picture)
Water
Low-tech lemonades (make)
The front lawn
What is that chasm between house and street? Why is it there? Or rather, why is nothing there? (read)
Ethanol
The road to hell is paved with good intentions (read)
Wheels
The car of the future (see)
Communications
Build a telegraph (make)
Housing
Build an eco village (make)
Magnetic levitation
Germany ditches Transrapid project (read)
Writing
Emoticons on paper (see)
Trees versus solar
What happens when one neighbour with solar panels sues another with big, shady trees? (read)
Public transport
A bus to keep pace with other transportation (see)
Obsolete skills
People would actually have to hold what they called Pens or Pencils if they were very old, and put this in contact with paper, which would make marks that they called "writing" (read) (edit)
The new black
Clean coal is a combination of two technologies, one of which is expensive and the other completely unproven (read)
Bat phones
The low-tech hearing aid is an update to simply cupping your hand to your ear (see & read)
Space travel
After travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the landing crew of the Apollo 11 lunar mission barely covered an area the size of a football/soccer pitch (see)
Food miles
There is only one way of being sure that you cut down on your carbon emissions when buying food: stop eating meat, milk, butter and cheese (read)
Who killed the bicycle?
Young men used to save up their money to buy a horse or a watch. Now, they save to buy a bicycle, and there are thousands who are cutting off unnecessary expenses in the way of clothing, cigars, and amusements and luxuries, so as to possess a wheel (read)
Water crisis?
Only 10 to 30 percent of the available rainfall is being used in a productive way (read)
Access to information
All UN statistics in one database (search)
Leapfrogging
Emerging economies are better at adopting new technologies than at putting them into widespread use (read)
SimCity
Dubai is nuts (see)
Soil
Terra preta might just save modern agriculture (read)
Global warming
For those who insist on seeing only technical problems with technical solutions, the forest remains lost from sight behind a single tree (read)
Saving the planet
Moves by green consumers and nations to cut energy use will prove pointless if oil-producing states simply maintain production (read)
Biodiesel
The discharges, which can be hazardous to birds and fish, have many people scratching their heads over the seeming incongruity of pollution from an industry that sells products with the promise of blue skies and clear streams (read)
Gardening
You need 297 square metres of wheat to provide your family with bread (read)
Attack
Hacking a pacemaker (read)
Education
About a motor car (see & read) (via)
Identity crisis
On average science unveils a new invention every day, and almost without fail these days, that daily invention disrupts the notion of ourselves (read)
Car versus man
If you want to see some powerful environmental technology, you don't have to look any further than your big beefy quadriceps (read)
Do it yourself
Build a small Savonius wind turbine (make)
Fotomo
Snap, print, fold, paste (make)
The real problem
We may have too much energy (read)
Child labour
Powering African schools with playground toys (read)
Solar energy
Investors and utilities are increasingly turning to solar thermal power, a comparatively low-tech alternative to photovoltaic panels (read)
Power
There is no Moore's Law for batteries (read)
Robot wars
We are beginning to see the first steps towards an international robot arms race (read)
Sign of the times
Little does the city dweller realize the extent to which his life depends on the fragile arteries by which he is supplied food, gas, electricity, water, milk, fuel, and communication with his associates (read)
Agriculture
Insects can feed the world. Cows and pigs are the SUV's; bugs are the bicycles (read)
Encryption
Want to break into a computer's encrypted hard drive? Just blast the machine's memory chip with a burst of cold air (read)
Cargo traffic
French ship their wine under sail (read)
Man and machine
Bill Gates still believes speech will replace keyboards (read)
The flywheel
It's striking how many of civilization's energy and environmental problems can be traced back to inadequate energy storage (read)
Plan B 3.0
Mobilizing to save civilization (read)
Electronics
Most laptops are like SUV's. You're using most of the energy to move the car, not the person (read)
Green your life (2)
Going green? Easy doesn't do it (read)
Green your life (1)
We are constantly being told that easy personal actions will save the climate (read)
Biofuel
A new generation of biofuels turns out to be another environmental disaster (read)
Information technology
How our multi-channel, multi-tasking society is making it harder for us to think (read)