from TreeHugger

This is why Shawn-Yu Lin of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute thinks he can change the solar power game:

To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every single photon of light, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky. Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.

from ForTheFuture.org 

Most of us live in the suburbs, in single-family homes surrounded by a little bit of land. Most suburbs are located on the finest agricultural land on earth, and yet very little food is actually grown there. Most of our food is produced on distant, impersonal mega-farms and delivered to us using large amounts of fossil fuels. Many people are concerned that this fragile and unsustainable system does a lot of environmental damage and could easily collapse for any number of reasons. We have a wonderful opportunity to bring food production back home, literally, by cooperating with our neighbors to grow our own food on our own land. This is especially easy here in Santa Barbara where our growing season is year-round and the climate is suitable for a wide range of crops. Think of your neighborhood as a potential "noshosphere," a place to create yummy abundance from the ground up.

What's a foodshed?
The Wisconsin Foodshed Project says, "The term 'foodshed,' borrowed from the concept of a watershed, was coined as early as 1929 to describe the flow of food from the area where it is grown into the place where it is consumed. Recently, the term has been revived as a way of looking at and thinking about local, sustainable food systems."

Another excellent article from the folks over at TreeHugger.com about various resources being depleted around the world and some of the root causes. Here's a brief summary of these scarcities. Be sure to visit this page and the additional :More links for each to get more details about each Peak Resource.

• Peak Corn

Blame Earl Butz. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford's Secretary of Agriculture brought in the Farm Bill that dramatically increased the amount of corn produced in America. He encouraged farmers to "get big or get out," and to plant crops like corn "from fence row to fence row." Further billions in subsidies to farmers encouraged production, and soon America was awash in cheap grain, and with it cheap meat. Food costs as a portion of the American diet dropped to the lowest level in history; we became corn. Michael Pollan writes: "If you eat industrially, you are made of corn. It holds together your McNuggets, it sweetens your soda pop, it fattens your meat, it is everywhere. It is fed to us in many forms, because it is cheap- a dollar buys you 875 calories in soda pop but only 170 in fruit juice. A McDonalds meal was analyzed as almost entirely corn."

• Peak Oil

In 1956, American geophysicist M. King Hubbert calculated that the rate of production of fossil fuels would peak in the United States in about 1970 and then start declining. He was laughed out of the conference room. However, ultimately he was proven correct; now we are probably at the worldwide Hubbert's Peak. A hundred years ago you just stuck a pipe in the ground and the oil rushed out; now it is not so easy, and America's oil comes from deep under the ocean, is cooked out of rocks in Alberta, or is purchased from nations with security issues. Now the United States, Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom are well past their peak, while Saudi Arabia and Russia are approaching it. Oil is still being found (there was a recent big hit in Brazil, and there are thought to be big reserves in the Arctic.) but it harder to get at and a lot more expensive.