Echo

Water-monitoring robofish almost ready to patrol Great Lakes

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After three prototypes and multiple tweaks to his robotic fish, Xiaobo Tan is planning to deploy the water-monitoring device this August.  

 

“Things have been going slower then what we expected, but we are making good progress overall,” said Tan, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University. Great Lakes Echo covered the early development stages of Tan’s robofish in 2009. His latest prototype can submerge, something the initial robofish couldn’t do. It is almost capable of transferring sensor signals in real time, another new development.

Echo

Green Gavels examines environmental impact of Michigan Supreme Court decisions

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A non-profit conservation group recently launched a first-of-its-kind tool for measuring the environmental impact of Michigan Supreme Court decisions. Green Gavels uses red, yellow and green gavels to illustrate the negative, neutral or positive conservation impact of each environmental case that reaches the Michigan Supreme Court. The group heading the project, Michigan League of Conservation Voters, also rates each justice’s decision in each case. People can see if a specific justice’s voting patterns has a negative or positive environmental impact overall. “Our mission is to provide the information necessary for citizens to hold officials accountable,” said Drew YoungeDyke, the league’s policy and communications specialist.

Echo

Federal officials study Great Lakes basin to help prevent future floods

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Federal officials are studying how to help Great Lakes communities better prepare for hazardous floods. “It will be the most comprehensive study ever conducted of shoreline flooding,” said Ken Hinterlong, a senior engineer with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So far, only “…the first phase of the project is done, which is a basin-wide data collection for Lake Michigan and Lake St. Clair.”

The study began in 2009. The agency is holding technical workshops for scientists and informational meetings for the public throughout 2012, to share data collected for Lake Michigan, Lake Erie and Lake St.

Echo

EPA releases new online pollutant tool

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The U.S. EPA recently built a tool to help people find the chemicals polluting nearby waterways. It uses information from annual EPA monitoring reports and presents top 10 lists to determine which pollutants or polluters cause the greatest harm. People can search by city, state, watershed, industry or pollutant. “It was pretty easy to figure out,” Rita Chapman, the clean water program director for the Sierra Club’s Michigan Chapter, said after recently giving it a try. “Everything had hotlinks on it, so if you didn’t know what chlorine was used for, you could click on it and it would probably tell you why it’s on there.”

But while the tool may be user-friendly, Chapman said most people outside the scientific community would overlook it.

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No Impact project inspires sustainable living

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Imagine if you could cause no environmental impact. I’m not talking about recycling a few bottles here and there. I’m talking about no transportation, no plastic, no trash, no meat, no new things, no take-out food and no electricity. Colin Beavan imagined what it would be like as well, and along with his wife Michelle and 3-year-old daughter, Isabella, he turned it into reality. In the 2009 documentary “No Impact Man,” Beavan and his family lived a “no impact” lifestyle in New York City for a year.