and grafts fruit branches onto non fruit-bearing public trees, hiding farm-fresh produce in an urban environment.
Officials have banned fruit trees from the city sidewalks in the hopes that it will help keep urban areas clean
à  According to Hui, There's no ownership of these trees. There's just stewardship. The LA Times reports that though city officials disapprove of the grafts,
The group (which consists of about 30 people) has grafted about 50 trees so far. Perhaps it will always be a small-scale project,
This time, she's spreading a fungus that is attacking juniper trees, which yield the berries that give gin its flavor.
No juniper, no gin. Juniper is in serious trouble, said Plantlife Scotland, a Scottish charity supported by Prince Charles that has asked the public to help monitor the decline of juniper trees in Britain.
The U k's Forestry Commission is also on the case of the conifers. Not so merry berries.
The juniper berry from coniferous juniper plants and trees, faces a fungal enemy. Among the problems:
A fungus called Phytophthora austrocedrae is so much on the rampage that according to The Telegraph it could wipe out the already shrinking population of the U k.'s native juniper trees.
Although juniper used in most commercial gins is largely from Eastern europe nowadays, The british population is key to survival of the whole species,
the Telegraph claimed. Shudder at the thought of a world with no gin. Tennessee williams, The Great Gatsby, Somerset Maugham and Raymond Chandler could not have done without.
James bond would lose his signature refreshment, as his martinis feature gin and vodka. Gin gave Dutch courage to 17th century soldiers before battle-the word gin comes from
among other sources, the Dutch jenever for juniper. In a life bereft of junipers, there never would have been a gin joint for Humphrey Bogart's Rick to lament inã Â Casablanca.
Gin drinkers of the world unite! Fight back against Phytophthora! As a side benefit, the sooner you stamp it out,
the sooner you won't have to pronounce it. Photos: Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca from Filmfoodie. Juniper berries from MPF via Wikimedia.
The Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities based in North carolina is using Geographic Information systems (GIS) data to map available infrastructure against the racial characteristics of different neighborhoods in the United states. The organization studies everything from water
The Cedar Group Institute tied together geo-coded data from public sources with government census data to show that black neighborhoods were deliberately being denied access to city water service.
The Cedar Grove Institute has examined also communities in California, Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and North carolina. Time and time again, the organization has collected substantial GIS evidence supporting cases of racial discrimination.
In Modesto California, the Cedar Grove Institute's data analysis shows that many Latino neighborhoods are marked by their lack of sewer access,
In Moore County in North carolina, Cedar Grove maps show sewer lines that literally branch around some of the black neighborhoods without going through them.
None of the Cedar Grove Institute's work would be possible without the digital geographic data
Full disclosure-the founders of the Cedar Grove Institute are old friends of mine. I continue to follow their work
and the Cedar Grove Institute
Google unveils deforestation monitor to combat climate changethe  philanthropic arm of Google, Google. org, introduced on Thursday a deforestation monitor that could be a useful tool to combat climate change.
make the trees worth more as they are than cut down. Â According to the Stern report, keeping forests intact is one of the most cost-effective ways to cut carbon emissions.
native plants and trees will be added  around the banks to complete the stream habitat. Residents can assist the effort by stabilizing bare soil with plants
Black beans and pinto beans, rice and amaranth, soups and dressings, milk, yogurt, cheese and coffee, sweets and jams:
who grows organic coffee, bananas and other fruits in southern Oaxaca state. And it keeps growing at that pace.
Honeybees pollinate close to 90 crops such as avocados, cucumbers, sprouts, apples, onions, broccoli, coffee and tomatoes.
Foods and beverages produced with the help of animal pollinators include almonds, apples, blueberries, coffee, melons and soybeans.
The rainwater filters through a teak patio and garden of cherry, orange and lime trees and carpets of lavender, mint and thyme into storage tanks.
and design of the shop itself come from the team that created the typography and interior of Mexico's fast-expanding, homegrown coffee chain, Cielito Querido.
How much is a tree actually worth? We all know that trees are beneficial to a neighborhood-they are pretty,
they are good for the environment -but how much is a tree actually worth? David Nowak, head of the U s. Forest Service's (USFS) Northeastern research unit, hopes to provide an answer.
He has spent the last couple of decades analyzing trees in several U s. cities and is trying to standardize their valuation.
The USFS has developed a platform, called i-Tree, that uses data from sampled areas, maps the trees across a city, calculates a city's leaf surface area,
and derives the economic value of trees, factoring in everything from carbon stored, to ozone, nitrogen,
and particulates removed, health impact, effect on building heating/cooling costs, and hydrology. i-Tree,
which is free to use and has a mobile version (for remote data logging), also uses localized weather
and pollution data in determining the trees'value based on official sources. As an example, New york has approximately 876,000 trees,
which cover 23.1%of the city. The trees provide $11. 2 million in annual energy savings,
have a carbon sequestration value of $386, 000, and a pollution removal value of 836,000.
Nowak's goal in creating the i-Tree platform is twofold: firstly, it allows cities to place trees in budgets along with other quantifiable items.
And secondly, it lets us understand what s out there, and understand its importance, he said.
We see trees all the time, we just haven t quantified them. via Co. Exist
How to feed an astronaut: a talk with NASA's space food managerwhile it's not exactly five-star cuisine,
astronauts survive on more than the freeze-dried space food found in museum gift shops. To get a look inside NASA's kitchen,
If you drink your coffee with cream and sugar, we have to add the cream
If they think they like black coffee and they get up there and say,'I really want it with cream,
Hydrogen fuel made from a tiny forest of nanotreeselectrical engineers at the University of California-San diego have built a forest of nanowire trees that use solar energy to turn water into  hydrogen  fuel.
One of these nanowire trees can reach up to a couple of microns in length. Ten thousand of these suckers could fit on the cross-section of a human hair.
The nanowire trees also have an efficiency problem. The device the team created has 3 percent hydrogen generation efficiency compared to the world record of 12.8 percent,
Wang told Discovery News. The nanowire trees have managed to crush the cost-effectiveness of conventional technologies that separate hydrogen from water.
IBM Â's Sequoia helped regained the top spot on the TOP500 list of the world s top supercomputers.
In less technical terms, it would take 6. 7 billion people continuously typing on calculators for 320 years to complete as many calculations as the Sequoia can get done in just an hour.
though much slower with less than half as many cores than the Sequoia. And just behind the Japanese system is another IBM machine, the Mira,
The Sequoia will also be used to advance our understanding in the fields of astronomy, energy, genetics and climate change.
In fact, the Sequoia consumes 7. 9 megawatts, much less than the K computer which uses 12.6 megawatts.
the morning of our interview, in fact, she shared coffee with someone seeking advice. One of the things that I believe in is lifelong learning,
Apple, pear and cherry trees will follow later this year, Yi said. Goldenway plans to IPO in the next two years,
--When the owner of a historic villa called Ho Tung Gardens wanted to demolish her property's main building and construct a dozen new homes on its valuable land,
and what s just taking up valuable space at taxpayers expense it has been reported that keeping Ho Tung Gardens could cost taxpayers $380 million.
The most high-profile debate is over Ho Tung Gardens a privately owned mansion in a ritzy residential area,
Deciduous trees are sketched onto the monochromatic walls sheltering the area from the throngs already crowding the convention center early on the show's first Sunday, a nod to wood sculpture artist Louise Nevelson.
trees and cakes that are included in the display and borrowed from booth partners as far away as England.
which sells custom teak wood garden and patio furniture, has made the return visit for 15 years.
Pulling down a tree for widening the highway connecting the cities of Lucknow and Allahabad in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
revealing which forests store the most carbonclick to enlarge Forest trees are renowned for their ability to store large amounts of carbon dioxide in their trunk and roots.
Prior estimates estimates were derived from a rudimentary process where researchers would manually measure the size of forest trees
Skittish Tree, created by artist Martin Bravo, is a sound-reactive projection that came from
The tree beautifully illuminated, behaves normally in a quiet environment, swaying every now and then, as if with the wind. But with loud screams or shouts, the tree will then adopt the behavior of a skittish animal,
hence the title of the project, getting scared and dropping its leaves and eventually branches.
Skittish Tree was developed originally for an exhibition at the gallery and the street version of the tree uses slightly different technology,
using stereo microphone inputs to change the way the tree behaves based on the direction and volume of the sound, evaluates background noise
and adjusts accordingly. The tree's reactions to the winds of noise offer a multi-sensory and participatory experience for the audience.
Observe the tree in action below: Skittish Tree from Omar ZÃ Â Ã Â iga Hidalgo on Vimeo.
Cool Hunting, JS55 Image and Video:
ipad opens digital doors for the elderlywhat would happen if Apple seeded assisted-living homes with ipads?
I believe such a measure would help bridge the gulf between the elderly and technology.
and spilled coffee. Â The ipad's soft keyboard is on screen and has no mechanical keys.
who tells me the Palm Pre acts as a mobile broadband WIFI hotspot (mobile broadband in, WIFI out).
and a Palm Pre would save me $30 a month! It's not a bad phone, either...
I just hope Palm survives. The ipad also does not allow saving of PDFS and it's not Flash-friendly as one blogger writes.
replant trees, create windmills, but we ll never solve the problem and we ll never catch up.
trees--will eventually happen to animal life and will eventually happen to human life. I ve seen this in country after country.
and it bought more than 34,000 metric tons of coffee certified by the alliance last year. That's 12 times the amount of sustainable coffee that it bought in 2003.
It has extended this purchasing to cocoa, and Kraft is now the biggest buyer of both coffee and cocoa from the Rainforest Alliance.
Watch for Kraft to become an even bigger activist related to this commodities, as well as palm oil. Deforestation will be another place it places its sustainability investments.
snapping a picture of a Ginkgo biloba leaf on a white piece of paper. He explained that Leafsnap is interactive
Sure enough, in less than 30 seconds, the response came back from the computers up at Columbia, with Ginkgo at the top of the suggestions.
Currently, Leafsnap includes the 191 species of trees found in New york s Central park and Washington s Rock creek park.
and eventually it will include all the native trees in the United states, plus 50 to 100 introduced species,
such as the Ginkgo. Users can play leaf identification games mark the species they ve identified to add to their collection,
As they identify trees, the app automatically shares their images, species identifications and the tree s location with a community of scientists.
These scientists will use the information to map and monitor population growth and decline of trees nationwide.
Jacobs said that within a single species leaves can have quite diverse shapes, while leaves from different species are sometimes quite similar.
The top biodiesel crops--palm, soybean, and rapeseed oil--are all the least energy efficient. However, they are also the cheapest to produce,
Yes to oak trees, no to centralized power grids HOK vice president and co-author Thomas Knittel says we can learn from the ways plants
An oak tree and a jay, for example, have a strong alliance in which the jay eats
and buries the tree's seeds. But the bird won't go back and find every cache,
either become new oak trees or food for other animals. Energy and nutrients are moved through the ecosystem this way,
Starbucks'Geisha'coffee $7 a cupimage via Starbucks Already viewed by many as a symbol of prosperity,
high end coffee company Starbucks has upped one themselves, rolling out their most expensive coffee yet.
The new brew, named Costa rica Finca Palmilera and made from a rare kind of coffee called Geisha, costs $7 for 16oz--a grande in company lingo.
A tall, the smallest size, costs $6. The high price is a result of the fact that Geisha is very difficult to grow due to conditions in high-altitude farms in Costa rica where it's cultivated.
The availability of this coffee is limited very and 450 half-pound bags of a differently-named Geisha coffee sold out just 24 hours after becoming available on the company's website.
Those bags cost $40 each. The coffee is only available for purchase at locations in the Northwest United states. Each of those 46 locations is equipped with a special Clover Brewing Machine. via TIME,
Washington post Related on Smartplanet: Dunkin'Donuts: not the best coffee in America Will coffee soon be a thing of the past?
Is there really a Starbucks on every corner
Maine dairy isn't just milking sustainability anglethe 88-year-old, family-owned Oakhurst Dairy in Maine isn't just milking sustainability as a business differentiator.
She spent most of her time in the trees. She stood about four feet tall,
She ate in the trees, raised her offspring in the trees, slept in the trees.
But sometimes she came down to the ground, and stood upright. She could walk on two legs.
She was, in a sense, taking baby steps on a journey that would change the world. In an interview
How to get more trees, create cashew nurseries, implement better agricultural practices. What percentage of your cashews come from Africa?
American Canyon High school, courtesy AIA Redwood Empire The high school received $800, 000 from the State of California to help pay for the high performance features on the campus,
Tauhid Zaman, a Phd candidate at MIT, spotted an interesting pattern while he was following tweets and retweets surrounding different events and topics,
 Zaman said in a phone interview. There was always a so-called superstar  that would drive the entire conversation
Zaman means by a huge margin. For example, let s say 100 people actively tweet during the BET awards he might see a few people who would be retweeted a few times,
 Zaman said. I wasn t expecting this, and I knew it wasn t an accident.
Zaman then gathered data from retweets during specific events, stitched together the pathways between users who retweeted.
What emerged shocked Zaman. It was a mind-blowing graph. I couldn t believe that everything lined up perfectly.
This summer Zaman hopes to develop the system into an online search engine where marketers, politicians, grass roots organizations,
Zaman notes that the superstar is not always obvious. Sure there are the Lady gagas that trump others in the number of retweets they get.
 Zaman said. via Technology Review
New york city home to world's largest rooftop farmnew York City is celebrated often for its rooftop views.
They need to fell old growth trees of a certain dimension and take the moisture out the traditional way,
Davidson's lens is trained now on a Los angeles population that is often overlooked--the trees. I had this vision of the superhighways, the freeways,
 commingling  with trees, Davidson recently told Elissa Curtis of  The New yorker:  People don't stop
the interchange, is with these enormous, wonderful trees. Underneath the 405, ivy was growing. Nature clings, nature will adapt,
and to look at something as magnificent as these enormous, wonderful trees. It's not natural to fall in love with a palm tree.
You'd have to have examined your head. But I did. The New yorker Some of Davidson's other work will be available for public view  at the  New york Photo Festival as part of Glenn Ruga's The Razor s Edge:
The plan calls for building green infrastructure like stormwater tree trenches, vegetated bumpouts, porous asphalt, rain gardens,
trees and tree boxes, porous pavement, cisterns, and other features to infiltrate, or otherwise collect, the first inch of runoff from any storm.
De Chant argues that trees should not be thought of as a luxury. While understandable in areas where street lights are being shut off
the non-cosmetic benefits of trees should be taken seriously: They shade houses in the summer, reducing cooling bills.
Large, established trees can even fight crime. Wealthy cities are taking action-New york city is trying to double the amount of trees to 1 million,
London is aiming for 20,000 new trees before the Olympics, and over the course of the last twenty years Chicago has planted over 600,
000. But what about the areas that need more trees the most? De Chant says the nonprofits are underfunded and hyper-local,
remaining largely unnoticed by the federal government. The U s. Forest Service's urban and community forestry program has a laughable $900,
How the FBI can read your emails Will coffee soon be a thing of the past
 There is even a building in Boulogne-Billancourt that is attempting to plant trees. In February Natureparif will publish a 200-page architectural industry guide with an entire chapter devoted to helping architects better understand how to construct rooftop gardens Photo:
We ve been using decorative lighting, trees, and have paved along the sidewalk. We want to make the whole corridor much more attractive for development
For The Bird Tree, which is 52 feet tall and the biggest exhibit that has been done,
The flowers, the plants and the trees cannot grow faster than nature permits. Planting Plane trees to Attract the Phoenix (Beijing) All in a Row (Madagascar) The Man Who Planted Trees (Mosaã Â cultures Internationales de Montrã Â al) Photos by Guy Boily
, courtesy of MIM2013
Q&a: Lindsay Smith on sidewalks with a better futureconcrete sidewalks weren't designed with trees in mind.
That's clear to anyone who takes a stroll down any tree-lined street, just about anywhere.
Concrete sidewalks block the resources that tree roots need to grow and as a result,
the roots grow higher up toward the surface. Eventually, they break through the concrete. This causes obvious problems for the landowner,
And it can be extremely costly to maintain sidewalks in places with abundant, large trees. Oftentimes, the choice comes down to replacing sidewalk
or removing the trees (and fixing the cracked sidewalk). And oftentimes, the trees lose. Lindsay Smith It was such a loss--sidewalk-slicing ficus trees cut down in her Gardena, California,
neighborhood--that served as the impetus for Lindsay Smith to start Rubbersidewalks in 2001. She learned about a pilot project in Santa monica in
which rubber sidewalks were being tested as a way to prevent cracked concrete around trees. The rubber sidewalks allow air
and water to percolate down into the tree roots, which in turn grow thinner, less aggressive roots than trees hemmed in by concrete do.
And as roots grow below them the rubber sidewalks rise evenly. Ten years and more than 140 installations later, the company now has three main products.
The original Rubbersidewalk, made from used vehicle tires; Terrewalk, a second-generation version which uses a less energy-consumptive manufacturing process,
when near trees or in freeze thaw climates everything must be demolished and started over.  That so called â Ëoelower cost â â¢is doubled now often in less than 5 years.
Although some people add extras to it such as coffee or flavors. But the default version is everything the body needs and nothing else.
Tiffani Williams, computer scientist, on creating an open source tree of lifethe Open Tree of Life project culls years'worth of segmented scientific research in an effort to create a current, open source version of our knowledge
said the Open Tree of Life will eventually be a Wikipedia-like living document for scientists
I spoke recently with Williams about the segmented nature of the tree of life  the challenges of the project and how an open tree of life could impact science in schools.
Below are excerpts from our interview. What is the tree of life and why should people care about it?
One way I explain the tree of life is to think about it from the human perspective.
A lot of us are interested in understanding our family tree. We want to know about our grandparents and great-great grandparents and down the line.
All the tree of life does is take that to another level. Instead of thinking of a family in terms of your human ancestors, the tree of life is the world's ancestry,
which includes all of the world's organisms. It's still thought of as a family tree
When thinking of the tree of life, we want to have a family tree that shows the relationship between all of the world's organisms.
A lot of people talk about the tree of life from the medicinal perspective. But for me it's this whole notion of understanding who we are
In your Poptech talk, you said research on the tree of life is segmented very. Some scientists are studying insects
and all of the thousands of other distinctive species. How will the Open Tree of Life project unify them?
we would look at our separate trees to find points where they intersect. If we go back far enough in history,
We can use that connection of points to put our two trees together. Â We need to figure out how to take all the separate trees
and merge them into a single one. We have 1. 7 million species we know exist.
We build this base tree, a foundation tree. Then all the different trees we can get our hands on--trees researchers have published on spiders
and beetles and big cats--are layered on top. That will give us a view of where we are with our knowledge of the tree of life.
This is not the tree everyone will agree on. The tree represents our state of knowledge.
It relates to the different analyses we found to date. The tree is a combination of all of the researchers'efforts to understand parts of the tree of life.
Our goal is to understand it more holistically. There are going to be parts that we may not have enough information about.
There's certainly a lot of conflict. We're showing what is possible now. We want to get the community involved to continue making refinements and improvements of the tree,
so that it more accurately reflects the truth. How long have you been working on this project and
One of our goals was to get a tree of life out to the public, but also to the scientific community, within the first year.
We'd like more people to help with giving us trees. Many older papers simply describe the tree.
There is not necessarily a visual artifact of the tree except the drawing in the paper.
Our first release of this tree has been about taking trees already in digital form in different databases and building them into this first tree of life.
The next step will look at what's missing. Are there any essential studies that haven't been incorporated?
If we don't have the digital version of the tree, we contact the author. A lot of our e-mails weren't answered.
We're saying we're building a tree of life and it's true. But really we're building a tree of life based on the information we were able to obtain that's out there.
We're using our current state of knowledge to put those findings together in a meaningful way.
Once the tree is out there, we'll see how well of a job we've done in terms of helping people interpret it.
We have all these different trees and we're trying to come up with a meaningful way to merge them.
How do you represent conflict in the tree of life? Handling conflict in the tree of life is something that not only are we facing now,
but we will be facing that for quite some time. People use different data. People study different perspectives.
How can we entice the community to embrace this effort of building a tree, even though the initial efforts were just a few people?
'That would be great for the tree of life in the sense that people who do phylogenic studies can't imagine working without access to it.
I think about how having a tree of life could inform how we teach science in our schools.
 Does the tree of life allow us to produce some curricular changes? Does it allow us to have children with a better connection with the world
because they can use the tree of life? Those are the kinds of things I'm interested in for the future.
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