City Invincible

Designers of Lunar Resonant Street Lamps–Anton Willis, Kate Lydon, and Christina Seely–won this year’s Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition.

According to www.metropolismag.com, “This re-engineered light has an ultra sensitive photo-cell that responds to the brightness of the night sky, turning on and dimming as needed, cutting down both on unnecessary light pollution and energy consumption.”

Lunar Resonant Street Lamps take city LED lighting to the next level.

A student at Arizona State University named Joe created an idea to harvest the wind created by fast moving automobiles on highways to create energy. His design, pictured above, could turn our highways into almost endless power sources. While highways aren’t the ideal form of transportation, they’re not going anywhere soon. So why not make the best of them?

Read Joe’s blog entry about his semester project.

Happy May Day everyone. May the workers of the world unite. In celebration of May Day, I bring you three labor articles. Some happy, some sad.

The AP reported today that, “Demonstrators demanding a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants hope that nationwide marches will spur Congress to act before the looming presidential primaries take over the political landscape.” While most American workers remain quiet on May Day, it’s great that immigrants, and their supporters, will be taking to the streets in hopes of reforming immigration laws for the betterment of the country.

Sadly, news has gone out about Wal-Mart’s latest efforts to bust unions in their stores. According to a Guardian Unlimited article today, “The world’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, today stands accused of routinely flouting its workers’ human rights through a sophisticated strategy of harassing union organizers, discriminating against long-term staff and indoctrinating employees with misleading propaganda.”

It’s time for global unions to take on companies like Wal-Mart. In an article titled “Only Global Unions Can Stop the Race to the Bottom,” Stephen Lerner argues, “At no time in history has there been a greater urgency or opportunity to form real global unions whose goal is to organize tens of millions of workers to win economic and social justice by counterbalancing global corporations on the world stage even as the power of the state declines.”