Happy Holidays!
Hey Folks, enjoy this break! …We definitely will!
Be happy, have fun, and let these holidays be one of the best in your life!
See you in January.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
by BenettonTalk
Filed Under Events
Recyling sewage for drinking
Using sewage to obtain drinking water? It may look strange or disgusting but… Read our special feature article about water.
Which is the world’s driest continent: Africa? Asia? Not at all, it’s Australia. For long time the settlers have dreamt to find a way to turn costal rivers inland. Without success. Global warming and growing population have worsen the situation. Moreover an exceptional drought has made the lack of water supplies more severe and what has been the major problem for much of the rural economy is now concerning also Australian cities.
Since decades wastewater has been recycled and used for watering parks and golf courses or for agricultural and industrial purposes, however the need to find and adopt innovative, sustainable methods to slake Australian’s thirst for water has driven two towns, Toowoomba and Gouldburn, to propose to recycle sewage and use it to top up drinking supplies. The project, which couldn’t win the social acceptance, was rejected.
Filed Under SPECIAL FEATURE, Water
UN against death penalty
Two days ago, there was another crowded assembly asked to vote for something in a hall in New York City. Again, a group of people (104) raised hands in sign of favor of something whilst another group of people (54) kept them down in sign of disapproval. All considered, nothing new. Yet, what was going on in that hall was something pretty extraordinary, since the UN General Assembly was finally approving a moratorium against death penalty. Which means that all state members are asked to suspend executions; if they go on with executions, they will do it against the official UN’s opinion. It’s the first time that the biggest international institution agrees, at least on paper, about a ban on death penalty. Two previous attempts to have the General Assembly adopt a moratorium on the death penalty, in 1994 and 1999, failed.
Filed Under Human Rights
The craziest ideas to save the Earth
Rising temperatures, greenhouse effect…is worse the problem or the solution? You will be the judges: this year the global warming alarm aroused the most radical geo-engineering ideas ever.
Scientists had come up with drastic proposals. And some were really weird!
Here are the craziest ones: do you remember James Lovelock’s “cure” for global warming that we posted on BTalk last September? His idea is to tether millions of vertical pipes across the oceans to pump nutrient-rich deep water to the surface. These waters would fertilize the growth of algae, which in turn fix carbon dioxide. The pipes, reaching to depths of 200 metres, would have flap valves at the bottom operated by the energy of waves, which would push deep water up the pipe.
Filed Under Environment, Research, World Health
Ancient Tree Hunt in England
How much woodland have we lost since 1800’s?
Thanks to historical maps more than 200 years old, the Woodland Trust, the UK’s leading woodland conservation charity, is trying to determine how landscapes once looked, when England was covered in forest.
The Ancient Tree Hunt is a five-year project that aims to find, record and preserve our oldest trees, creating a huge database (at least 100,000 ancient trees by 2011).
Recently the Trust has teamed up with the Landmark Information Group, a digital mapping company with the UK’s largest archive of historical maps dating back to the 1840’s.
Everyone in the UK can help the project find and point out suitable candidates for the list in their own areas.
Beautiful idea, isn’t it?
You can step back in time with you imagination and see online the former landscapes of parks, gardens and tree lined avenues.
It would be nice if the Ancient Tree Hunt could be extended to other countries, although UK has an exceptional number of ancient trees compared with elsewhere in Europe.
Filed Under Environment, History & traditions
South America’s Coast to Coast Highway
Nothing beats unity, absolutely nothing, especially if it’s unity via continent-wide, West Coast to East Coast highways. A meeting in Bolivia’s city of La Paz, between the presidents of Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, resulted in the agreement of a linking highway between the aforementioned countries by 2009. The road will be 4,700 km long and is seen as a “chance to improve strained ties between Bolivia and Chile and boost Bolivia’s links with Brazil”. Which might mean in simpler terms that these South American neighbours will be able to use each other to benefit from trade. The country to benefit most blatantly is Bolivia, as it’s been landlocked for years, having lost its access to the sea in a 19th Century war with Chile.
Filed Under Environment, History & traditions, Politics
Googling ourselves
We use you all the time. With no moderation, with no consideration. We make you work extra hours, elaborate the most exhausting researches and go all around the world to find what we are exactly looking for in a matter of seconds.Thanks to your easygoing flow, our life is now much efficient and complete. Thanks to your competency, we can always rely on you, especially when we need to find ourselves. Especially during those mysterious days where our curiosity inquires about our own and the steps we are taking in our life, even when we over know them.The unique experience of finding ourselves can bring such delight in our overestimated ego, that once we star it, we cannot stop it; we have to find us by our name, second name, surname, or even that disrespectful nickname that we never really liked. We have to be somewhere. We have to be there even if it’s in the most minimum form.But what an unsatisfying experience when in fact, we find ourselves, but others, especially when those ‘others’ that have our same names are first that our real us, taking all of our space; our precious cyberspace. Read more
Filed Under Media & Society, Research, Technology