DeepRoot: A New Solution For Saving Cities Money By Planting Trees
A tree isn’t just an aesthetic improvement to a city. The services it provides–in terms of cleaning the air, managing water, and more–are incredibly valuable. An innovative new solution makes the process easier, and might result in more foliage-friendly urban environments. City trees have a hard life. Polluted, pruned, and squeezed into tiny spaces, but [...]

Aussie investor mulls garbage-to-power plant project
Australia-based Trisun International Development on Wednesday organized a seminar in HCMC to tout a US$400 million project to turn garbage to power. Gavin Holland, technology director of the firm, said at the event that the facility, if approved and developed, would use the plasma technology to generate electricity. The plant in the first phase could treat [...]

New smartphone app lets users text ‘eyes-free’
For visually impaired iPhone users, text messaging poses a definite problem. Voice recognition software may help, but what to do when a message needs to be a bit more discreet? Now, thanks to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, those who have trouble seeing can now text “eyes-free” by using BrailleTouch, a piece of [...]

Crime chiefs agree to get tough on illegal tiger trade
Crime chiefs from countries with populations of wild tigers have agreed to work together in order to combat the illegal trade in the big cats. Heads of police and customs from 13 nations agreed to tighten controls and improve cross-border co-operation at a two-day meeting in Bangkok. Only six subspecies remain, with fewer than 1,000 [...]

Great news for chimpanzees
The Republic of Congo has formally expanded Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park to protect an increasingly rare treasure: one of Africa’s most pristine forests and a population of ‘naïve’ chimpanzees with so little exposure to humans that the curious apes investigate the conservationists who study them rather than run away. Known as the Goualougo Triangle, the 100-plus [...]

Digital tools ‘to save languages’
Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world’s endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century’s end. Globalisation is usually blamed, but some elements of the “modern world”, especially digital technology, are pushing [...]

Environment Bank And Mission Markets Launch Online Conservation Credit Platform
The Environment Bank today launches the first online ‘conservation credit’ trading platform.  The Environment Bank, the first organization to deliver biodiversity offsetting in the UK, and Mission MarketsTM, a professional services firm specializing in the impact and sustainability sectors and operating an international platform for exchanging environmental credits, today jointly announce the first online marketplace [...]

Gold Coins Found In French Attic Worth Nearly $1 million
Money doesn’t grow on trees, but apparently it does sometimes fall from the ceiling. According to the Guardian, builders working to renovate a building at a former French winery were suddenly showered with hundreds of gold coins as they broke through old layers of plaster. The discovery was made in an old grape-drying facility that [...]

Bittersweet – Lottery Winner Months After Wife Dies
(CHNL) – The Canadian Press KAMLOOPS, B.C. – A struggling single father in Kamloops, B.C., has gone from tragedy to triumph with a $500,000 lottery win. Forty-seven-year-old Richard Bankier won the money by matching all four numbers on the Extra in Wednesday’s 6-49 draw. His wife, Adele, died last Dec. 1 of complications from kidney [...]

BioLite Camp Stove – a clever little gadget!
After extensive user testing and field research, the BioLite team has redesigned the camp stove unit to be smaller, easier to light and more durable. The BioLite stove burns wood or other small combustible materials. Using energy captured from the fire, the stove can power or charge small gadgets and cell phones. Currently in production, [...]