Word: humanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...creating the narrative of French greatness, of the power and glory of its empire. Like so much in French culture, the Louvre is organized around the unspoken principle that the French are a great nation with a mandate to instruct and lead the world in all matters of human progress...
...film, which has made them effective counterfeit deterrents used on credit cards and identification documents. But movie-quality, 3-D holography - think Princess Leia in Star Wars - is a whole other beast. For one thing, researchers need to find a way to create moving, three-dimensional images of human beings without burning them with lasers. Researchers at the University of Arizona are developing technology for 3-D video but predict that a usable, commercial product won't be available for at least 10 years. Many other scientists say it could take much longer...
...world off the flush handle took center stage. Though the common flush toilet has remained largely the same since it's invention in 1596, the world it inhabits has changed drastically. City populations have mushroomed, sewers have become overburdened and water has become scarcer. Now, the flushing loo - that human innovation that lifted the industrialized world out of its own dirt, cholera and dysentery - is quickly becoming one of the more egregious instruments of waste in this time of acutely finite resources. "The world can't sustain this toilet," says Jack Sim, the founder of the World Toilet Organization...
...ecologists say. If you don't put waste in water in the first place, then you don't have to spend money to remove it at the back end. The process also leaves a huge carbon footprint, says Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. In the UK, she says, "the sewage system uses as much energy as what the largest coal fire station in the [country] produces" - about 28.8 million tones of carbon dioxide a year...
...fundamental shift in how we think about our waste, and by extension, dispose of it, needs to be to stop mixing liquids and solids, says the WTO's Sim. "The human body is designed to separate solids from liquid waste," and we should follow suit, he says. By separating fecal matter from urine at the source in what's called a "urine diversion toilet," a wider ecological system of waste disposal becomes possible. Solids can be composted for fertilizer and harvested for methane gas. Urine can be used to produce phosphorous and nitrogen and clean, drinkable water. (The question...