- 🐁 🤯 Fuzzy Green ‘Glacier Mice’ Move In Groups And Puzzle Scientists. “Each ball is like a soft, wet, squishy pillow of moss. The balls can be composed of different moss species and are thought to form around some kind of impurity, like a bit of dust. They’ve been seen in Alaska, Iceland, Svalbard and South America, although they won’t grow on just any glacier — it seems that conditions have to be just right.”
- People are using Red Dead Redemption 2 to hold conference calls. “But then, as it turned out, it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as expected. ‘The thing is,’ Viv explained, ‘the Cowboys just look right when they’re sitting around the campfire? They look like they’re in a meeting: scratching noses and frowning, and occasionally gesturing.’”
- 🇸🇮 ♻️ 👏🏼 From no recycling to zero waste: how Ljubljana rethought its rubbish. “The Regional Centre for Waste Management (RCERO) opened in 2015 and today services almost a quarter of all Slovenia, uses natural gas to produce its own heat and electricity, processes 95% of residual waste into recyclable materials and solid fuel, and sends less than 5% to landfill. It even turns biowaste into high-quality gardening compost.”
- 🇰🇷 🦠 How South Korea turned an urban planning system into a virus tracking database. “That platform was originally designed to let local authorities share urban planning information, from population to traffic and pollution, by uploading data in Excel spreadsheets and other formats. Now it forms the foundation for a data clearing house that has turbocharged South Korea’s response to the virus.”
- 💚 🏥 World health leaders urge green recovery from coronavirus crisis. “More than 200 organisations representing at least 40 million health workers – making up about half of the global medical workforce – have signed an open letter to the G20 leaders and their chief medical advisers, pointing to the 7 million premature deaths to which air pollution contributes each year around the world. … Chief medical officers and chief scientific advisers must be directly involved in designing the stimulus packages now under way, the letter urges, in order to ensure they include considerations of public health and environmental concerns. They say public health systems should be strengthened, and they warn of how environmental degradation could help to unleash future diseases.”
- 🇦🇺 🤬 Insanity in Oz. Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine. “An earlier 1 metre test dig, conducted in 2008, dated the site at about 20,000 years old, but the salvage expedition uncovered a “very significant site” with more than 7,000 artefacts collected, including grid stones that were 40,000 years old, thousands of bones from middens which showed changes in fauna as the climate changed, and sacred objects.”
- 🚲 ⚡️ Very nice. Very slick. Very expensive. Gogoro’s Eeyo 1 is the ‘sports car’ of e-bikes. “[P]owered by what Gogoro is calling the Eeyo Smartwheel. Instead of attaching the battery to the frame or putting it in one of the tubes, Gogoro has placed it in a hub in the back wheel along with an electric motor and some sensors.”
- 🤬 💩 🚲 Uber is scrapping tens of thousands of Jump bikes during a nationwide bike shortage. “Uber is sending tens of thousands of its electric Jump bikes to the scrap yard, weeks after offloading the money-losing bike-share division on Lime. The news of the scrapped bikes has incensed bike enthusiasts on social media, one of whom decried the act as ‘unconscionable.’”
Note — May 31, 2020