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Throughout history, through his need for civilization, man has created buildings that consume resources. The skyscraper is the epitome of this voracious consumption, its highly dense grouping of activities ie work, play, rest etc has become an ominous harbingers of our ecologically bleak future. As a reaction to the modern skyscrapers and its dilemmas the world’s eminent minds have created many variations of the skyscraper in the form of the antithetical subscrapers, groundscrapers and even depth scraper. Yet still they still struggle to achieve zero input/zero output in terms of resource production. There are greenscrappers which , though themselves are ecologically sound, are tied to and urban fabric and interconnection of production networks which are still contributing negatively towards the environment. The h O 2 + scraper proposes to break free of the urban fabric and functions as self-sufficient ambassadors in the sea. The h O 2 + scraper is an autonomous floatin...

“The Southwest is in the midst of a decade-long dry period. Lower-than-normal rainfall combined with higher-than-normal temperatures (likely due to  greenhouse warming ) has substantially altered the region’s hydrologic conditions. From 2000-2009, the Colorado River exhibited the lowest 10-year-running-average flow of any 10-year period in the last century. A team of researchers led by  Connie A. Woodhouse at the University of Arizona in Tucson examined paleo-climatic records to place this recent decade-long drought in a longer-term (1,200-year) context. Their findings, published in the  December 13 online edition of the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , are more than sobering: they are a call to assess risks and prepare for the worst. Woodhouse and her colleagues found that as bad as the current drought is shaping up to be, it pales (so far) in comparison to one that lasted two decades during the middle of the 12th-century–and these dr...

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest desalinated water producer, plans to raise water prices for non-residential users. Higher prices will be applied to commercial buildings, industries, government, schools and hospitals, Riyadh based National Water Co chief executive officer Loay al Mussalam said on December 21 in response to e-mailed questions. He said Saudi regulators are discussing the timing and structure of the tariffs. Saudi Arabia wants raise prices to encourage water conservation. The kingdom needs $33.3bn in investments in desalination and water recycling plants to meet water demand, Riyadh based NCB Capital said in a report .