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The ecofriendly font that saves on ink
Will a new, free-to-download, environmentally friendly font that cuts down on printing ink mean less paper use?
Om pictures: Satellite eye on Earth - December
Volcanoes in Russia, typhoons in Asia and snow in the southern US were all captured by Nasa's Earth Observatory this month
How to save energy and money by turning off electrical appliances this Christmas
Can the last one out please turn off the lights? Oh, and the computers, monitors, printers, scanners, fax machines, photocopiers, watercoolers, hot water units and any other electrical devices that usually get left on overnight. The amount of energy that will needlessly be consumed while businesses are closed over Christmas will be bad enough without your office adding to the waste fest.
According to Canon, the nation's offices are using up enough energy to roast 4.4m turkeys when they leave on office equipment over the festive period. Or, put more meaningfully, businesses waste £8.66m on powering empty offices each Christmas. That figure should be enough to scare into action the boss of any company struggling to make ends meet in these dark days of recession.
So, how to act? The first thing to do is make sure you shut down your computer when you leave and turn off any peripherals (such as printers). Don't just leave them on standby or in energy-saving mode, as this still gobbles up electricity. To be sure they are off, turn them off at the wall.
People often complain that it takes too long to restart the next day if you turn everything off completely, but there will be less onus, surely, on you springing straight back into action after the Christmas break. So, even if time is usually too pressing for you to shut down every night, make an exception this Wednesday.
For some, doing this will be enough. You can now go home and enjoy your turkey knowing you've done your bit. For others, though, the thought of all those machines whirring away in that empty office while the polar ice continues to melt will take the edge off the festivities. If you are one them, you might want to turn off all the computers in the entire office.
You could do it covertly, waiting until everyone has left the building – pretending to have some last-minute spreadsheets to finish or something – before zapping every power switch in sight.
Alternatively, you could talk to your boss or office manager – not forgetting to mention the £8.66m figure when broaching the subject – and get him or her to instigate an official shutdown policy. A politely worded email from on high could make a big difference.
If your company is on board and wants to go one step further and eliminate the waste from even those staff too forgetful or incompetent to do a complete shut down, it could invest in some Intellipanels. These are multiplugs that realise when the main device (ie, the computer) is switched off and automatically cut power to all the peripherals (printers, monitors, and so on). When the computer is switched back on, so are the other devices.
In many offices, people are told not to shut down their computers overnight because it is when IT departments run security and software updates. While this is unlikely to be happening over Christmas, it is worth checking before you instigate your mass shutdown.
If leaving the lights on is important for security reasons, at least make sure you have them set on timer devices so they only come on at night. Outside security lights that only come on when someone approaches are also better than lights left on indiscriminately.
And if the last people in your office before it fully closes for Christmas are the cleaners, then don't forget to make sure they're on board with your shutting-down policy and that they turn off the lights when they leave.
Work & careersSaving moneyEnergy billsEnergy efficiencyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Science Weekly Extra podcast: A visit to London's Science Museum's GM exhibition
We visit the Science Museum's new exhibition on GM technology - Future Foods.
Director of the Science Museum, Chris Rapley, explains why the debate is so important.
Tim Lang, Professor of food technology at London's City University, tells us why the GM industry in the US is at risk.
Director general of Bioversity International, Dr Emile Frison, discusses the company's current research.
The Science Museum's Dana Centre is holding a debate on the issue on the 22nd January 2009.
Feel free to post your comments about the programme on the blog below.
You can also join our Facebook group, where you can scrawl your thoughts on our wall.
Hundreds of Brazil's eco-warriors at risk of assassination, according to new report
Twenty years after the killing of Chico Mendes, one of the world's most prominent rainforest defenders, hundreds of human rights and environmental activists still face the threat of assassination in Brazil, a new study claims.
The report, compiled by Brazil's Catholic Land Commission (CPT) and due to be released in full early next year, reveals that at least 260 people, among them a Catholic bishop, live under the threat of murder because of their fight against a coalition of loggers, farmers and cattle ranchers.
The list names Frei Henri des Rosiers, a French priest based in the Amazon town of Xinguara, as a particular target. Police are investigating claims he has a £14,000 price on his head because of his fight against slave labour. Also named are Maria José Dias da Costa, a union leader in the remote town of Rondon do Pará, and an Austrian bishop, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has been under 24-hour police guard for two years because of his battle against developers and child prostitution in his Amazonian diocese.
In February this year, Francisco da Silva, a 51-year-old leader of the landless movement in the Amazon, was killed with a single shot to the head. He had been named in a previous CPT report about rural leaders receiving death threats.
On Monday night the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to address the country on television to pay homage to the life of Mendes, a rubber tapper turned environmentalist who was gunned down outside his home on 22 December 1988. Lula's address is part of a wave of tributes across Brazil, from marches on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrations in his hometown of Xapuri. But while his standing as a symbol of protest is not in doubt 20 years on, environmentalists and human rights activists are divided on Mendes's practical legacy.
In September this year government figures showed that deforestation in the Amazon had risen by 64% over the previous 12 months. Earlier this month, members of Ibama, Brazil's environmental taskforce, discovered that nearly 3,000 hectares (7,410 acres) had been deforested, mostly illegally, inside a reserve named after Mendes. "Each year on 22 December I ask myself if he died in vain or not. And today, after all these years, the answer is not yet clear to me," said Alfredo Sirkis, a prominent member of Brazil's Green party and friend of Mendes.
Sirkis said: "I won't say that nothing has improved," but he added that the last 20 years had seen a "continuation of this project of devastation".
Born in the remote Amazon state of Acre on 15 December 1944, Francisco Alves Mendes Filho followed in his parents' footsteps early in life, becoming a rubber tapper at the age of nine.
By the mid-1980s he was spearheading protests against local cattle ranchers and their gunmen, who sought to tear down the forest and drive out the impoverished rubber tappers. Renowned for visionary views on sustainable development, Mendes quickly became a poster-boy for the international green movement, travelling to the US to lobby against infrastructure projects he believed would devastate the Amazon.
"He knew how to talk to the rubber tapper in the middle of the forest in the same way he knew how to talk to a technocrat from the World Bank," said Sirkis. His murder turned him into an eco-martyr both at home and abroad, and catapulted the issue of rainforest destruction further up the international agenda.
"Chico left a great legacy," said Brazil's former environment minister, the senator and former rubber tapper Marina Silva. "Twenty years on, the environmental question has gained strength across the whole world."
She added: "He was a guy that spoke of things which were ahead of his time ... [and he] made me want to be part of that fight."
Bishop Krautler agrees: "It was never in vain. In death he [Mendes] spoke even louder than when he was alive."
Soon after his death, Brazil's government began introducing the "extractivist reserves" of which Mendes had dreamed. The reserves were areas of rainforest where local populations could earn their living while simultaneously protecting the environment. The first, created in 1990, was named after him and now covers 11m hectares of land.
Chico Mendes: Martyr for our timesWhen I heard, 20 years ago this week, that Chico Mendes, leader of the Brazilian rubber tappers' union, had been murdered, I was sad but not surprised. The last time I saw Chico, five months earlier in the town of Xapuri in the western state of Acre, he told me the ranchers had already tried to kill him six times.
Looking at my notebooks, I now notice that Chico actually named the man later convicted of organising his killing: Darly Alves da Silva, a rancher who has not been seen since escaping from jail where he was serving a sentence for the crime.
Darly already had a murder charge against him in another state, something Chico reported to the police.
It was when Chico's union successfully defended a piece of virgin rainforest sprinkled with rubber trees against the ranchers' attempts to claim it that the struggle became personal. Before the shooting of Mendes only 10 people had ever been brought to court for around 1,000 murders in the Amazon in the 1980s.
But Chico was different and his murder sparked an international furore.
In his speeches he used to say: "Come here and kill me. My chest is open." He knew he might achieve more by his death than he had by his life.
Today the extractive reserves Chico championed are relatively successful in protecting parts of the Amazon, as are reserves run by the rainforest's indigenous people.
Now people talk of using carbon credits to protect similar areas around the world. And I realise that I had met the martyr for our times - the Gandhi, or perhaps the Che Guevara, of our environmental age.
Charles Clover
BrazilActivistsConservationHuman rightsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Over 2T tons of ice melted in arctic since '03
More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.
More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.
Greenland's glaciers losing ice faster this year than last year, which was record-setting itself
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers watching the loss of ice flowing out from the giant island of Greenland say that the amount of ice lost this summer is nearly three times what was lost one year ago.
The loss of floating ice in 2008 pouring from Greenland's glaciers would cover an area twice the size of Manhattan Island in the U.S., they said.
As ice melts, Antarctic bedrock is on the move
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- As ice melts away from Antarctica, parts of the continental bedrock are rising in response -- and other parts are sinking, scientists have discovered.
The finding will give much needed perspective to satellite instruments that measure ice loss on the continent, and help improve estimates of future sea level rise.
Coral Reef Loss Suggests Global Extinction Event
The world is on the brink of a massive extinction event, according to the United Nations.
Rapid releases of greenhouse gas emissions are changing habitats at a rate faster than many of the world's species can tolerate.
"Indeed the world is currently facing a sixth wave of extinctions, mainly as a result of human impacts," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme in a statement.
Climate change effects on imperiled Sierra frog examined
Climate change can have significant impacts on high-elevation lakes and imperiled Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged frogs that depend upon them, according to U.S. Forest Service and University of California, Berkeley, scientists.
Their findings appear in the current issue of the journal "Herpetological Conservation and Biology" where they show how a combination of the shallow lakes drying up in summer and predation by introduced trout in larger lakes severely limits the amphibian's breeding habitat, and can cause its extinction.
