Forget picketing. If you really want to make companies change their ways, you’ll turn to stock divestment.

How big of an impact are fossil fuels having on climate change? Big enough for Stanford University to divest close to $19 billion worth of stock in coal-mining companies. The announcement came just after the White House released an 840-page report on climate change earlier this week. It makes Stanford the first major university to divest its fossil fuel funds. But not the only one.

According to the New York Times, the university said that the stock divestment move was in accordance with its guidelines that allow the school’s trustees to consider “whether ‘corporate policies or practices create substantial social injury’ when choosing investments.” The university has removed companies “whose principal business is coal” from their investment portfolio.

The move involves close to 100 companies around the world that depend on coal extraction as their core source of revenue. “Not all of those companies are in the university’s investment portfolio, whose structure is private,” Stanford’s associate vice president for communications, Lisa Lapin, told the Times. And over all, the university’s coal holdings represent “a small fraction of its endowment.”

“But a small percentage is still a substantial amount of money,” Ms. Lapin added.

Stanford’s decision now leads the way in a stock divestment movement actively happening on approximately 300 university campuses, reports the Times. “At least 11 small universities have elected to remove fossil-fuel stocks from their endowments, but none approaches Stanford’s prestige or national influence.  Tuesday’s decision seems likely to increase the pressure on other major universities to follow suit.”

Stanford “knows the havoc that climate change creates around our planet,” Bill McKibben, the president and co-founder of the environmental group 350.org, said in a statement. “Other forward-looking and internationally minded institutions will follow, I’m sure.”

The anti-GMO movement is utilizing stock divestment as well. A recent video released by the faceless organization, Organic Spies, calls for consumers to petition mutual funds managers to drop Monsanto from their portfolios. “Who owns Monsanto stock?” The video asks. “You do. The time is now for Fidelity, Vanguard and State Street, who each own billions of dollars in Monsanto stock, to dump it.”

Friday May 9^th is being dubbed the “National Day of Action” to divest Monsanto stocks. Groups including the Cornucopia Institute, Food Democracy Now! and the Institute for Responsible Technology are all supporting the campaign. Protests will be held at Fidelity locations across the country.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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The pomegranate is nutritious, delicious, and its unique design could be a key ingredient in super-powerful rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. 

Beautiful and tasty, the pomegranate is also a powerful superfood. The benefits of pomegranate juice are almost as plentiful as the seeds contained under its thick, pink skin. Now new research has shown that a healthy heart, happier stomach, and stronger skin and hair aren’t the pomegranate’s only life-improving benefits.

According to a study out of Stanford University, the way pomegranate seeds are clustered together within the fruit’s rind provided an important clue for inventors looking to design the next generation of lithium-ion batteries.

“Silicon anodes could store 10 times more charge than the graphite anodes in today’s rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but they also have major drawbacks: The brittle silicon swells and falls apart during battery charging, and it reacts with the battery’s electrolyte to form gunk that coats the anode and degrades its performance,” explain researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a joint effort of Stanford and the DOE.

An electrode designed like a pomegranate – with silicon nanoparticles clustered like seeds in a tough carbon rind – could allow battery developers to overcome these remaining obstacles, and finally pave the way for silicon based lithium-ion batteries.

Yi Cui, the lead researcher on this project, has spent the better part of a decade working on a way to encase silicon nanoparticles in carbon ‘yolk shells’ that give them room to swell and shrink during charging. Just like the pomegranate’s skin protects the seeds within, these carbon rinds hold the nanopartical clusters together and provide a sturdy highway for electrical currents.

“Experiments showed our pomegranate-inspired anode operates at 97 percent capacity even after 1,000 cycles of charging and discharging, which puts it well within the desired range for commercial operation,” said Cui.

This means that batteries built to mimic the pomegranate could hold 10 times more charge than a standard rechargeable lithium-ion battery, an improvement that could revolutionize the smartphone industry as well as all the other wireless gadgets that depend on battery power.

Now that they’ve demonstrated the pomegranate battery’s power storage potential, Cui and his team have to tackle new challenges, like a simpler process and a cheaper source of silicon nanoparticles. They say one possible source of silicon could be found in rice husks, a common type of inedible food waste.

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