SHFT Sampler 1-28-11

Attack of the Giant Pink Snails: No, not an invasive exotic species, but a killer public art project in Florida, featuring oversized pink snails made of recycled plastic.  Purty birdies: Every night at dusk, a cloud of starlings do the tango in the skies above Sterte, England. Mark Sigler caught them in the act in this lovely one minute video.  The Big......read more

Anton Ginzburg Searches for Mythical 'Hyperborea'

In Greek myth, there's a place that's so far north that it's beyond the cold. Hyperborea ("beyond the North winds") is a land of eternal springtime, where the flowers are always in bloom and the sun never stops shining. Recent Russian news reports claim Hyperborea actually existed on the shores of the White Sea, not far from the snowswept sites of Soviet Gulag prisons.  At......read more

Spectral Snow Trails Caught on Camera

While Winter Storm Nemo was dropping between 12 to 40 inches of snow on the northeast, motion designer and photographer Brian Maffitt got busy -- not with a shovel but with a video projector and a camera. Maffit pointed a video projector playing The Lorax out his window, then shot the scene with his Canon 7D. The colorful results, as you can see above, are amazing. "I wanted to capture colors in......read more

Program Partners Shelter Pooches with Joggers

There are good ideas, and then there are ideas so great you can't believe no one ever thought of them before. The Running Buddies Enrichment Program belongs to the latter group. Launched by Stray Rescue of St. Louis, an animal shelter, the program pairs joggers with a dog that’s waiting to be adopted. The idea is to promote good mental and physical health for pooches and people......read more

Goats as Lawn Mowers

In Portland, OR, a new "eco-landscape management" technique is shunning gas-guzzling lawn mowers in favor of a furry, four-legged alternative. At an empty two-acre lot in midtown Portland, a herd of goats is happily working to keep grass and weeds under control. The emissions-free mowers can trim just as much grass as a gas mower, without the requisite fossil fuels and noise pollution.......read more

Tower of Power

For most of us, the vision of a solar-powered future conjures a mental image of rooftops covered in photovoltaic panels. But PV tech is actually only a few decades old, and humans have been harnessing the sun's power for millenia. Concentrated solar power (CSP), or "solar thermal," is an ancient, low-tech version of solar energy capture, in which the sun's heat energy is used to boil water and......read more