Take That Boring News!

By now I am sure most of you have seen the story but Scientist, using good old oxygen, have started making giant dragonflies.  Now I decided that there really wasn't enough content to make it a full conversation piece, but it definitely makes a good starter.  After the jump, some green news, car news, Bill Nye, and more!

Now first in the news today.  PNC Bank, the 12th largest bank in the nation from some data I have seen, has moved to drastically reduce their investments in companies that use mountain top removal as their primary mining technique.  Why does this matter?  Well, it is a statement from essentially the biggest bank based in one of the biggest coal mining areas in the nation that they are moving away from investing in companies that have no sense of responsibility towards the environment and will even go against the grain in a town that was built on the backbone of coal miners.

In other news, Canada is looking to build some wind turbines, and so today they announced that they have purchased 55 turbines from GE to get the job done.   While I personally think that wind turbines are sort of silly once you look at how much land they take up as compared to how much power they produce, this is still a good move to increase Canada's renewable generation portfolio.  The strange thing is that the company who is doing this is also the one doing the Alberta oil sands.

In other news, the second ugliest car in the world, behind the PT Cruiser, the Urbee has been made using a 3D printer.  While the manufacturing method isn't especially... practical right now, it does have the advantage of not having to use any material removal methods during manufacturing so there is essentially no waste so it is greenish.  This is ugly little vehicle though is actually greener than it seems.  This little ugg-wagon has been designed to run on electricity, have one of the lowest drag coefficients, and be remarkably light.  I would offer more links for it I can only encourage viewing this thing for about as long as it takes to realize that from this angle, it looks like a snake turning it's ugly reptilian face towards you.

Why am I now posting useless pictures about Gundams?  Well world events have been pointing to the reason.  As rare earth minerals become more valuable and more scarce, a global conflict over resources seems more and more likely.  See China locking Japan out of minerals because they arrested a fishing boat.  See Japan and India then forming a pack to trade technology and said rare earth metals.  Hopefully we can begin to find more of the goods because I don't want to have to move to Japan so I can pilot a GUNDAM after nuclear fission gets wiped out by the damn space cadets.  But in more practical current issues China has begun to lock other countries out of certain industries because of their own demand for the material.  Hopefully, we can find some more sources in more dependable locations than Argentina and Chile, otherwise there really will be a world crisis not only for these materials, but on moving away from heavily fossil fuel dependent technologies in the coming years(the prius uses 30lbs of rare earth metals, solar panels use them, and wind mills also rely on them).

As a super treat I am going to send you off with a video of Bill Nye the mechanical engineer science guy talking about space missions he is currently involved in.  Because none of you are actually going to go past this video I will tell you in advance.  Remember to keep the moment positive!