Commercial fishing is one of the most damaging things one can do to gather a food source. Trawlers are so inefficient they perform the equivalent task of cutting down an entire forest to get a couple cows. With this hugely negative impact that trawling can have on undersea life in mind Australia has decided to […]
Continue readingAuthor: Adam
Things Are Good: NYC Mayor Bloomberg Loves Bike Lanes
As Toronto fights smart planning and removes sustainable transportation infrastructure (indeed, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so), New York City Mayor Bloomberg continues to espouse how great bike lanes are. In NYC they have added a lot of miles of bike lanes and found local business get more business, neighbourhoods become nicer, […]
Continue readingThings Are Good: Pacific Island 100% Solar Powered
Tokelau is a small island in the Pacific that has switched it’s entire power grid to solar, this is the first of a few islands in the region that will be fully independent from having to import fuel for electricity.
Before the solar power grid was completed, the New Zealand-administered grouping of three coral atolls, […]
Things Are Good: Free Transit Can Improve Cities
A small city in France had a problem: their transit system was failing and it was expensive to run. Their solution was to make ridership free for all, and it has turned out to be a success that other cities are looking into.
The motivations for making a transit system free are obvious. Increased ridership […]
Things Are Good: Online Sex Ed Course Decreases STI Risk in Teens
A lack of education around sex can lead to a lot of unwanted things like sexually transmitted infections and diseases to pregnancies. For many people sex is a taboo subject so delivering worthwhile information to teens can be difficult due to parent’s attitudes. One way to get directly to teens is through the internet and, […]
Continue readingThings Are Good: Vegetarians Live Longer
If you’re not vegetarian yet, this may change your mind: vegetarians live longer than meat eaters. A plant-focused diet is fantastic at helping people with all sorts of ailments from diabetes to heart disease. This is great news for all of us as a vegetarian diet puts very little pressure on the environment whereas modern […]
Continue readingThings Are Good: Solar Panels Break 1/3 Record
Photovoltaic solar panels are measured in terms of how efficient they are at converting light into electricity. Obviously potential energy is lost when this conversion occurs and it has long been speculated that it would be possible to get 1/3 of the energy captured converted into electricity. In labs, this
Continue readingThings Are Good: Good Designs to Protect Against Flooding
The damage of Hurricane Sandy is still being fully realized and we won’t know the full cost of the damage for a little while. What we can do for know is to look into ways to lessen the damage the next time an anthropogenically influenced storm hits the city. The
Continue readingThings Are Good: Singapore Opens Vertical Farm
Sky Green has opened the world’s first vertical faem in Singapore and it’s well beyond a proof of concept. The functioning farm produces one ton of food every other day! This new farm will hopefully encourage more urban vertical farming to increase local food consumption while cutting down on expensive
Continue readingThings Are Good: LA Bans Puppy Mills; Pet Stores to Sell Only Rescued Animals
LA joins quite a few other cities in North America to ban the sale of animals from puppy mills. Puppy mills are horrible breeding facilities focused on profit at the expense of animal welfare and many people buying a pet don’t realize that pet stores get their puppies from such
Continue readingThings Are Good: World’s Largest Bra is up for Auction
Today is Wear it Pink Day in the UK, which is a fundraising initiative to fund breast cancer research, and to make this year unique the organizers are auctioning off the world’s largest bra. Anyone can bid on the bra which is available for bidding on eBay, the bra it’s
Continue readingThings Are Good: Fight Fat with Urban Design
People in urban centres walk more and are generally more active than those who live in the suburbs, which is great for urbanites but not so great for the health of suburban dwellers. Years of poor urban planning in the suburbs have had a negative effect on the health of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Really Cool Aquaponics Setup in Oakland
Oakland California is not known for farming let alone technologically-driven hydroponics. Kijani Grows is a small company in Oakland that is trying to change this with a system of cycling water through fish, gravel, and plants to create a very efficient farming setup in a small space. What makes this
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bike Lanes Save Lives and Lower Risk from Cars
It should come as no surprise that bike lanes are safer than merging bicycle traffic with heavy metal boxes on wheels. A new study from the University of British Columbia confirms this and goes one step further by analysing which type of bike lane is in the safest. Well designed
Continue readingThings Are Good: Saudi Arabia Plans for 100% Renewable Energy
67 year old Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud wants Saudi Arabia to be fully powered by renewable energy in his lifetime. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest oil producers in the world and is probably the most symbolic oil-rich nation. The fact that the country’s leaders want to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Seniors Who Are Social Are Healthier
Seniors who lead active lives like playing cards and generally hanging out with friends feel healthier and are healthier than there less social peers. Friends make things fun and keep you fit! Dr. Nicole Anderson is a clinical neuropsychologist at Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto, where she’s leading a research
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bike Lanes Help Local Economies
As a cyclist the fact that bicycle infrastructure helps business makes senses to me. Bike lanes encourage more cyclists which can bring more people to an area, drivers on the other hand seem to just keep driving though. I hope the backwards thinking politicians in Toronto see this study since
Continue readingThings Are Good: An Extra 32 Minutes a Day for People in Greater Toronto
Your32 is an effort by CivicAction to promote a financially sustainable and more efficient transit solution for people living in the greater Toronto area (GTA). This project is a great way to engage the people in the GTA as the region is regressive when it comes to transportation, even going
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bhutan to go 100% Organic
Bhutan is an amazing little country that has banned cigarettes and measures its success not through the backwards-looking GDP but by Gross National Happiness. In another step to be the one of the friendliest to the environment, the Asian nation has now pledged to produce and consume only organic food!
Continue readingThings Are Good: We’re Helping the NotFound Project
Sadly, even in these modern times, children go missing and finding them can be difficult. The NotFound Project hopes to help find missing children by making use of 404 pages online. 404 pages refer to pages on a website that cannot be found, so it makes thematic sense to use
Continue reading