Lasting from May 1st to Oct 31st 2010, the Shanghai World Expo will be the biggest event in its history, with 192 countries and 50 International organizations having confirmed participation. 70 million visitors are expected from both inland and abroad to attend this world event. More than 20,000 cultural shows will be held during the Expo.
Themed Better City, Better Life, the 2010 World Expo Shanghai conveys a common wish of mankind for a better future and better city life.

World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

A dream team of talented and renowned designers, architects, artists, environmental and technology professionals from near and far are coming together for the upcoming World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China.

With 12 pavilion groups covering 5.28 square-kilometers, the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion is bound to be one of the highlights of the Expo experience!

To say the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion is eco-friendly, is putting it mildly. The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, designed by Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, embodies sophisticated elegance using environmental technologies both inside and out.

Often referred to as the Dream Cube, the pavilion’s exterior is constructed out of polycarbonate transparent tubes made out of recycled plastic. CD cases to be exact! Once the Expo is over, the tubes can be recycled. Those in attendance at the ground breaking ceremony in April, poured recyclable granules into the tubes which will be used on the building’s exterior.

Shanghai Corporate Pavilion. The Dream Cube.

Multi-colored LED lights, controlled by a computer system, will transform the building’s exterior in an array of color.
The Pavilion also features a solar energy system. The “ultra-low temperature power generation technology,” will generate electricity using solar power. 1,600 square-meter solar heat-collecting tubes on the roof will produce hot water, generating energy for everyday use.
The rainwater will be stored and recycled. The filtered rainwater will be utilized for everyday use and for a special mist system. The mist will regulate the temperature in the building and purify the air.
The misters will also dazzle visitors entering the entrance hall in an array of patterns, creating special effects “mist shows.”
Construction of the pavilion, themed “My City, Our Dreams,” is expected to take about 10 months to complete.

Construction of Shanghai Corporate Pavilion.

Looking forward for an exotic escape? The Swiss pavilion (check out video below) features a 4-minute chairlift ride above a rooftop alpine meadow.
The United Arab Emirates has a pavilion shaped like sand dunes, Israel’s mimics a sea shell (see video below), Romania’s a green apple, Macao’s a jade rabbit lantern.

Outside the Expo site, the city has built a new airport terminal, subway lines, expressways, tunnels and bridges to accommodate hundreds of thousands of extra visitors a day.
More than 70 million people are expected to visit the Shanghai World Expo 2010 which takes place from May 1st through October 31, 2010. Electric vehicles will be used during the event to transport those in attendance.
It brings great pleasure and new hope for a better future for humanity to witness an eco-friendly themed event of this scale.

Check out this video on Shanghai 2010 World Expo Official Preview.

For those of us who will not be able to personally visit and see this wonderful world event, have a guided tour through the world expo with this video:

Israel at World Expo 2010.

Swiss Pavilion – World Expo Shanghai 2010.

In an area of Ngatimoti, four neighbours who share green values in their lifestyles are about to open their properties to the public.

Labor of love: The Laufkotters’ home in Ngatimoti was constructed from 80 percent straw and 20 percent clay over a two-year period.

Sixteen years ago, Peter and Mechthild Laufkotter decided their seaside Motueka home was limiting their self-sufficiency, so they made a move that many people dream of.

The couple now live on a 25-hectare block in tranquil Ngatimoti, 20 kilometres from Motueka, with a charming light earth house that overlooks vegetable gardens, fruit trees and surrounding bush and forest.

There they take pleasure in the delights of eating home-grown produce, preserving it for storage in their cellar and for use throughout the year. On their path to greater self-sufficiency they’ve learned many new skills, and enjoy being independent.

“If you live in harmony with the land, it’s something that is deeply satisfying. You put your energy into all the food that you eat. It has a different value than just the nutrition,” says Mrs Laufkotter, a trained dietician who now works as a teacher aide at Ngatimoti School and as a yoga teacher.

The Laufkotters’ property is one of four organic Ngatimoti properties that will feature in the Green Lifestyles tour on Sunday, March 14.

Organised by the Motueka branch of the Green Party, its aim is to show how simple green concepts have been applied to create beautiful homes, gardens and lifestyles for the four host families, and how an eco-friendly life works for those looking for inspiration.

Motueka Greens treasurer Heather Spence says as well as the Laufkotter’s property, the tour will go to a commercial organic plum and apple orchard, a home-based flax-growing and craft business, and a home that features an outdoor bathroom and woodlots.

She says people on the tour – the first of its type held by Motueka Greens in part as a fund-raising event – will be able to talk to the hosts about such things as sustainable house design, different building materials and techniques, and how to achieve things like productive organic gardens, solar power, composting toilets and smart water use.

The tour is structured so people walk a 3km route in groups from one property to the next through fields, woodlots, orchards and gardens.

The Laufkotters, who have three grown sons, moved to the region from Germany in 1981 and lived for 14 years by the sea in Motueka. When they bought their Ngatimoti property about 16 years ago, they bought it with a friend to reduce the mortgage, but later bought his share.

The couple opted for a three-bedroom light earth house, which is of timber construction with walls made from a mixture of 80 percent straw and 20 percent clay. Lighter than mud-brick homes, the house, which is built on a hillside, also has great insulation, says Mr Laufkotter, who works from home as a sign writer.

They built the house over two years, and in a further bid to save money “and not end up with a huge mortgage”, they collected windows, doors and other features for the house during the years in advance of building. They managed to secure a whole house lot from Christchurch, with other parts coming from Nelson.

“We designed the house around what we had,” Mrs Laufkotter says.

The home features solar water heating and a composting toilet, which separates solids from liquids. The liquid gets fed to the citrus trees, which, like the nitrogen it contains, and the solids, are also spread around fruit trees.

They said they wanted a composting toilet because they don’t have a huge supply of water on the land.

“With every flush [from a conventional toilet], we might not have much to drink by the end of February,” Mr Laufkotter laughs. Over the years, they’ve established large organic vegetable gardens fed with lots of rich compost and organic manure, fruit and nut orchards and a 50-tree olive grove, and have regenerated bare paddocks by planting hundreds of native trees. They also keep some chickens and 14 Scottish highland cattle.

The cattle are kept mainly to control the pest plant old man’s beard on the property, but the Laufkotters also occasionally kill them for food to keep the numbers manageable. As the Laufkotters are not big meat eaters, one animal supplies them with meat for a year.

Their increasing self-sufficiency means they’re always trying new things and learning new skills. Mr Laufkotter learned butchering and makes his own salami and dried meats, which are stored in the cellar along with homemade juices, wines, beer and other preserves.

Hops that Mr Laufkotter found growing wild in the Graham Valley line the entrance to the cellar, which provides a cool sanctuary in the heat of summer.

“Every season is different and there’s always new things to be learned,” he says.

“Coming from Germany, chutneys didn’t exist. We have learned that [how to make them]. We make them here and never have to buy them,” Mrs Laufkotter says.

“We’ve got everything we need here and we never go hungry at all,” Mr Laufkotter adds.

“I don’t have to spend eight hours in my workshop. I don’t have to chase the jobs.”

He also makes his own bread, which led him to last year grow a 20-square-meter patch of barley for a trial, because he wanted to know how to grow grains. The birds loved the experiment.

“I made about 2kg out of 20sqm. If I wanted to support my bread making with my own grain, I’d have to grow a paddock of it.”

Mrs Laufkotter, who makes her own herb teas, says being as self-sufficient as possible takes effort.

“People will come here and say `this is beautiful’, but wouldn’t really have a clue about what it means to sustain something like that.

“I try to be in the garden every day for at least an hour. There are some days on the weekends I would spend the whole day [outside on the property].

“Most evenings in summer, I’d be in the garden until it’s dark.

“When you’ve got a lot like this, that creates a huge workload, but if you know it’s for yourself, you don’t mind.”

One of the nicest aspects of where they live is that their neighbors share their green philosophy, they say.

In fact, once a year, the neighbors get together to maintain White Rock, a special area of quartz at the top of the Laufkotters’ property.

“The best thing about it is you never have an argument about things like spraying,” Mr Laufkotter says.

“They’re all on the same wavelength.”

Source: stuff.co.nz

Image by www.why-yachts.com

The problem with everyone’s favorite desert island fantasy is that peaceful, unspoiled beaches never stay undiscovered for very long, with even the most secluded of spots becoming overrun by others with Robinson Crusoe aspirations. Cue the collaboration between Monaco ship-builders Wally and luxury-brand Hermes for the £90 million Wally Hermes Yacht.

Image by www.why-yachts.com

A three-level, 58 x 38 meter yacht, the boat houses twelve guests and twenty crew in a spacious and, as you’d expect from Hermes, supremely stylish interior. But it’s the 30-meter ‘beach’, which offers panoramic views of your chosen destination, that explains the Why’s bottom-heavy shape and sets it apart from your average super yacht. The extra-long stern has been designed not only to replicate a stretch of private beach in shape, but to physically calm the water behind the boat, protecting guests from any annoying waves.

Image by www.why-yachts.com

An inbuilt helicopter pad enables a quick departure if the yacht’s optimum 12 knot speed doesn’t suffice. With a 25 meter swimming pool in the bow, however, along with a library, music room, cinema and spa, you’d be forgiven for wondering why they’d bothered at all with an escape route. Then again, that’s what the captain of The Titanic thought. www.why-yachts.com

Image by www.why-yachts.com

Article by Guy Pewsey.

As part of its green energy resources, this yacht uses thermophotovoltaic panels to power its heating and airconditioning requirements. The “WHY” Yacht also uses wind generators, latest generation batteries and other green energy systems.

On 60 Minutes tonight a brand new energy company unveiled what is believed to be a potentially revolutionary energy technology called Bloom Boxes.

Based on fuel-cell technologies, Stahl unveiled the formerly secret company Bloom Energy stating that “the idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.”

Bloom Energy says this:

The Bloom Energy Fuel Cell Boxes are the device of the future being made to help provide a clean energy source. Bloom Energy Fuel Cell Boxes are going to be debuted in two days according to their website.

With the clean energy global initiative being one of the most focused on in the world, these boxes are able to run clean and inexpensively. Major companies are involved in the experimental testing including Google and Ebay.

The Bloom Box is a device that can power approximately 100 houses.

According to a press release, the box was developed by NASA scientists and can be used in different ranges of temperatures which makes the way it can be used more expansive.

Several competitors are also trying to develop similar devices in Silicon Valley but Bloom Energy is about to reveal the first in two days.

This is secretive fuel cell company Bloom Energy’s big week. Tonight 60 Minutes aired an exclusive look inside the Bloom Box, and on Wednesday the company is officially launching, after operating for 8 years and having reportedly raised around $400 million from investors like Kleiner Perkins.

Watch the video clips, embedded below, to see what the Bloom Box actually looks like — kind of like an industrial-sized refrigerator, that sucks up oxygen on one side and fuel (natural gas, biomass, solar energy, etc) on the other. 60 Minute’s reporter Lesley Stahl takes a look at the “secret sauce” behind the Bloom Box, and reports that Bloom bakes sand and cuts it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic, which are then coated with green and black “inks.” Using a special process Bloom creates these ceramic discs and stacks them together interspersed with metal plates of “a cheap metal alloy.” The bigger the stack the more power the Bloom Box will create.

Stahl dug up some interesting tidbits beyond being the first reporter to get a glimpse of the device. Like the fact that Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar originally came up with the idea for the Bloom Box after developing a device for NASA that would be able to create oxygen on Mars. After NASA ditched their Mars mission, Sridhar had the idea to reverse the oxygen-creating Mars box and use oxygen as the input instead.

Stahl also reports that a Google data center has been using 4 Bloom Boxes for the past 18 months. Google was Bloom’s first customer and while Google’s Bloom boxes use natural gas, they use “about half as much as would be required for a traditional power plant,” reports Stahl.

Additional sources: mediaite.com

IF you have driven along Barnes Creek Road recently you may have noticed a bizarre contraption resembling an airplane – you are not the only one.

The wind turbine sits on top of a set of solar lights at the road works near the Forgan Bridge Replacement project, helping decipher changes in lighting.

According to a Main Roads spokesperson, yesterday the temporary solar street lighting was installed along Barnes Creek Road and at the Kooyong intersection as part of the Forgan Bridge Replacement and Duplication Project.

“These solar lights are being used on a temporary basis during construction works, due to a host of different lighting requirements when speed restrictions and changed traffic conditions are in place,” the spokesperson said.

“However, they do not meet height and illumination requirements for permanent use, as per Australian Standards for road lighting. Permanent street lighting will be installed in the centre medians in the later part of this year.”

The solar light at the Kooyong intersection is supplemented by a wind generator as a secondary energy source for charging the battery, the spokesperson said.

“This helps to ensure this intersection is lit at all times.”

The Forgan Bridge Replacement project is the largest bridge and road construction project in Mackay Australia.

Work commenced on the $148 million project in May 2008 and once completed, the new four-lane Forgan Bridge will reduce congestion on the busy commuter route while improving safety and network efficiency.

Traffic is expected to be traveling on the new bridge in April this year, weather permitting.

© Image by Shandong Jingchuang Solar Technology Co.,LTD.
Solar Street Lights similar to this one were installed temporary along Barnes Creek Road and at the Kooyong intersection as part of the Forgan Bridge Replacement and Duplication Project.

Article by Fallon Hudson.
From dailymercury.com.au.