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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
It’s not easy to catch an Egyptian vulture.
Evan Buechley knows. He’s hunkered down near garbage dumps from Ethiopia to Armenia, waiting for the highly intelligent birds to trigger a harmless trap. But no matter how well he and other researchers hid the traps, he says, “somehow the birds could always sense that something was up.”
Cheap, flexible and sustainable plastic semiconductors will soon be a reality thanks to a breakthrough by chemists at the University of Waterloo.
Professor Derek Schipper and his team at Waterloo have developed a way to make conjugated polymers, plastics that conduct electricity like metals, using a simple dehydration reaction the only byproduct of which is water.
Drop an electric motor into a ship and you’re all set to sail into a cleaner environment, right?
If only it were that simple, says a University of Victoria mechanical engineer whose research focuses on hybrid electric propulsion systems.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including eating a healthy diet, regular exercise and not smoking, could prolong life expectancy at age 50 by 14 years for women and just over 12 years for men, according to new research in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation.
Last year, University of British Columbia zoologist Wayne Maddison travelled to the highlands of southern Mexico in pursuit of undiscovered species of jumping spiders. He kept a journal of his adventures, documenting his encounters with resplendently beautiful arachnids.
A new conductor material and a new electrode material could pave the way for inexpensive batteries and therefore the large-scale storage of renewable energies.
