Blogs & Ecology

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Digital newspapers are on the horizon, but right now there are issues with creating paper-like readers that are interactive, fast and up to par with consumer expectations on how fancy an e-reader should be.

So scientists in Cambridge, UK have decided that a £12m three-year project to create the next generation of e-paper is the logical step forward.

The Paper that Self-Erases Within 24-Hours
Recycling's better than sending good paper to the landfill. Even better is not printing in the first place. But there's still a lot of stuff that comes out of printers and some studies show that more than 40% gets discarded on the day it was produced (and a lot of the rest gets discarded not much later, or gets stuffed in a box and is never looked at again).

The researchers at XEROX looked at that problem and came up with a paper that self-erases within 24 hours and can then be re-used. Read on for more details....

Steven Kurutz of The New York Times gives good exposure to the small house movement, "whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.

“It’s a very exciting moment,” said Shay Salomon, a green builder in Tucson, Ariz., and the author of “Little House on a Small Planet” (Lyons Press, 2006), “because it feels like a chapter of American history might be ending, the chapter called ‘Bigger is Better.’

Many of us have become quite comfortable reading our newspaper at breakfast on a laptop screen, albeit with the occasional butter on the touchpad. But the newspaper companies are still dreaming about the electronic substitute that would end their struggle with rising production and delivery costs.It would also be far greener, saving thousands of trees and tons of fossil fuels.

Eric Taub writes in New E-Newspaper Reader Echoes Look of the Paper in the New York Times, that "Plastic Logic will introduce publicly on Monday its version of an electronic newspaper reader: a lig...

Image source: Metcalf Institute

This year's Metcalf Institute Diversity Fellowships in Environmental Reporting, were awarded this morning. The awards are given to minority journalists early in their careers to encourage diversity and excellence in environmental reporting. Environmental journalism is still a relatively new field and as climate change becomes a daily topic of conversation many newspapers and media outlets are scrambling to find reporters who can not only cover the issues but understand the science enough to translate what it means to the reader.

Transportation Coverage
According to the Wall Street Journal (via Streetsblog), advertising money from car companies represents about 27.6% of revenue for local TV stations and 18.1% for local newspapers, which is significantly more than for national newspapers or broadcast TV, with the Internet and cable TV coming last.

We can understand how people usually are looking for local dealerships to buy and ads in local media can ...

Image credit: James Ebbinger and Esquire

Esquire Magazine: the Darth Vader of Electronic Reading

Which US or Canadian environmental journalist or team of journalists will win $75,000 for exemplary reporting in 2007? And more importantly, have you read their ground-breaking work yet? To learn the identities of this year's finalists for the Grantham Prize and to link to their stories, read on. The Grantham Prize was established in 2005 by the University of Rhode Island's Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment....

Image credit: National Geographic/Getty Images

"We will soon discover whether this bold evolutionary experiment of combining a large forebrain with opposable thumbs was really a good idea. Over the next decade, our species takes its university finals. Get revising."