Environment in the News

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Bloom Box: Secret App May Be Key to Tiny Energy Plant


"Bloom Energy set to unveil green household power plant."

"Set to be unveiled today, the much anticipated Bloom Box—a residential "power plant" about the size of a mini-fridge—could provide cheap, environmentally friendly electricity to U.S. households within ten years, according to Bloom Energy, the company behind the fuel cell based invention."

Wow, when I saw this headline, I thought about everything my group was learned and reading about in Chapter 4 about better energy! They say it is about the size of a fridgerator. "One of these jumbo Bloom Boxes, called Bloom Box Servers, could power a hundred homes, and four of them could power a 35,000-square-foot (3,250-square-meter) office building, Sridhar said on CBS."

In the middle of the bloom box are solid oxide fuel cells. They are coater size plates. Oxygen and natural gas are fed into the Bloom Box and undergo a high-temperature chemical reaction in the fuel cells to produce electricity, heat, carbon dioxide, and water.

A residential Bloom Box should cost around U.S. $3,000.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100224-bloom-energy-bloom-box-sci-tech-green/

Field Trip #2--ECHO

ECHO is awesome…plain and simple. It was a fun after school field trip for my two oldest kids on February 3, 2010. As we walked up to the office there were samples outside provided for the public. The middle green sample was cut up green cactus that you can eat. Both children tried it, but my daughter Jayde (7) loved it. It was not until we went on our walk and I pointed out the actual plant that the pieces came from did she realized what she was eating.

We learned about an urban stacked garden where a person can build a couple layers to his or her garden to achieve the most out of it in a small area. I took a picture of a chicken coop built on the bottom with a planter for plants on top. This makes the area double in size.

My children thought it was neat to learn about planting inside tires using soda cans and socks as the compost. They were using cinder blocks as planters also.

If you stack tires up a hill horizontally that can become planters and double the space of an area that might not have been as useful because of its vertical slope.

A great idea that was presented to us was making a slender portable chicken coop that can fit between the rows or your garden. The chickens are put inside and placed in the walking rows between the planted rows and the chickens are caged enough not to get loose but eat the weeds, thus producing a nature weed eater! HAHAHA

We learned about many different plants like the Moringa that is like the ultimate medical plant, but I think the Neem plant is my favorite plant of all time. They even sell Neem toothpaste in the bookstore at ECHO. We were told that in areas where they do not have access to products like tooth brushes or tooth paste the natives would chew or brush their teeth with branches of the Neem plant and their gums and teeth were well preserved. Some dentist would say better than some people who have access to all the proper products. Our guide shared and showed us a manual water pump that they made at ECHO that you step on like a stair climber to pull the water from the ground. My kids were dying to try it out. Our overall day at ECHO was very educational and fun….my kids loved it!