Day: August 24, 2018

The Measure of Things

The Measure Of Things is a search engine for finding comparative or relative measurements of physical quantities.

Want to know how much, how long, how many, how far, how large, how tall, how high, or how heavy something is? Want to figure what weighs 5; 500; or 5,000 tons? The Measure Of Things can tell you what you need to know.

With the Measure Of Things tool, you can take a physical quantity – like 84 kilograms or 23 cubic meters – and see how it compares to a list of famous or well-known objects. For example, 84 kilograms is the weight of about 17 gallons of paint, while 23 cubic meters is about twice the volume of a cement mixer truck.

You can use the Measure Of Things to research equivalent measures for several types of quantities, including weight, length, speed, time, height, area, volume, and computer data.

St. Louis suburb suspends curbside recycling collection

Read the full story in WasteDive.

Officials in the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Kirkwood have decided to suspend the city’s curbside recycling collection program, starting on October 22.

Leaders made the decision because they have been unable to find a company to process mixed recyclables after their current processor, Resource Management, notified the city that it would no longer accept single-stream materials.

The situation is being blamed on unfavorable market conditions brought on by China’s regulatory measures for tighter contamination standards, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Helping soldiers print with reclaimed plastic

Read the full story in Chemical & Engineering News.

Bottles and containers could become feedstocks for 3-D printing on remote military bases.

Can DNA collected from pond water help save frogs?

Help fund this project.

Amphibians are experiencing a global extinction event. Nearly 200 species are thought to be extinct, and two-thirds of amphibian species are threatened with extinction. The Chytrid fungus has received a lot of attention, while the deadly ranavirus has been overlooked. We will develop a way to determine if a ranavirus outbreak has occurred by detecting how much DNA from the virus is in wetlands (this DNA is called environmental, or eDNA).

This new park is designed for a future of flooded cities

Read the full story in Fast Company.

Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn Centennial Park can hold a million gallons of rainwater to help control the city’s increasing floods.

A brief history of plastic, design’s favorite material

Read the full story in Fast Company.

More and more Americans reckon with their wild overuse of plastic. Here’s how we got so dependent on the stuff in the first place.

West Texas Vineyards Blasted By Herbicide Drift From Nearby Cotton Fields

Read the full story at NPR.

On the High Plains in West Texas, hot winds blast through cotton fields as far as the eye can see.

In the middle of it all is a tiny vineyard.

Andis Applewhite is the owner. She’s an artist whose family has worked this land for a century. They once planted crops more typical of the neighborhood, like cotton and wheat. Applewhite decided to try something different: She put in a couple of acres of cabernet franc grapes.

“It’s fun,” says Applewhite as we stand in her fields. She inspects a vine that is starting to wrap itself around a trellis. “It’s looking like a real grape plant.”

But Applewhite has yet to harvest a crop. Over the past two years, something has caused her vines to twist and wither. And she’s not alone. Grapevines in Texas are being damaged by a seemingly invisible force.

‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things’

Read the full story in The Atlantic.

How online shopping and cheap prices are turning Americans into hoarders

Opinion: The Coming Green Wave

Read the full story in the New York Times.

A Green Wave is coming this November, the pent-up force of the most overlooked constituency in America. These independents, Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and Democrats on the sideline have been largely silent as the Trump administration has tried to destroy a century of bipartisan love of the land.

WOTUS is restored—in half the country

Read the full story at the New Food Economy.

A federal court in South Carolina on Thursday restored President Obama’s Waters of the United States (WOTUS), a 2015 rule that expanded the powers of the existing Clean Water Act to put more wetlands and waterways under federal regulation.

By overturning the Trump administration’s attempt to delay its implementation, the federal court’s decision now puts the Obama-era interpretation of the rule back into effect in 26 states—but not in the other 24 with federal court injunctions against it.