Green Options

 

 

I knew little about Foreign Animal Disease (FAD) when I walked into a Wisconsin Department of Agriculture (DATCP) talk on the subject Nov. 3 at the Microbial Sciences Center on the UW-Madison campus.  Here is a description of foot-and-mouth disease, an example of FAD, from www.cattletoday:

Foot-and-Mouth Disease is a severe, highly communicable [...]

Trail mix is a favorite fall time snack of mine. Fun to take on hikes and picnics, it always hits the spot. Try mixing some seasonal seeds in your favorite nut mix to stay healthy this season. Here is a simple recipe with remarkable immune boosting powers.

Sunflower Seeds: Rich in vitamin E, magnesium and selenium, sunflower seeds are high in phytosterols which are known cholesterol reducers.

Pumpkin Seeds: Carve that cute [...]

When you need to urgently need to blow your nose in Germany and don’t have a tissue on hand, you might ask a friend “Hast du ein Tempo?” (Do you have a Tempo?)

Tempo, it turns out, is a brand of tissue, not the German word for tissue.

Substituting a brand name for a general product description is relatively common across a number of languages. How many times have you heard someone say “Just Google that” or “Can I have a COKE please”? Over the years, powerful brands have impacted our culture and slipped into our language. For a brand, this is the ultimate compliment and a big awareness driver. In fact, Coke and Google (the 2 examples above) are now the #1 and #2 brands respectively on Interbrands latest list of powerful brands. Tempo continues to be a very powerful brand in Germany.

Craft Hope is a faith-based, love inspired project designed to share handmade crafts with those in need, and their goal is to combine love for crafting with desire to help others into a project to make a difference around the world.

I love eating locally produced foods when I have the chance.  I enjoyed having access to fully tree-ripe stone fruit when I lived in Davis, CA. Today I get to enjoy the ultra-local herbs, vegetables and fruit from my garden part of the year, and I make 10-20 gallons of wine from my little vineyard.  I feel that I am fortunate, not noble.  In January our county (San Diego) is one of the few places producing strawberries and I certainly enjoy those, but it doesn’t mean I don’t buy them later in the year when they come from further North.  Local food can definitely be a treat, but to think that it is a noble thing to be a “locovore” is a bit silly and often quite pretentious.  There are plenty of non-local foods that you should eat with no sense of guilt. In this and my next blog I’ll talk about why.

After a  White House announcement last April regarding the provision of $777 million to fund 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC’s) advancing innovation in clean energy technology, the Department of Energy (DOE) recognized the completion of the funding process last Thursday. The investment represents a much-needed show of governmental support for the research and development of the numerous energy breakthroughs necessary to transition the U.S from dirty to clean energy.

Among the list of 46, 31 centers are affiliated with universities, twelve are DOE national laboratories, two are non-profit organizations, and one is a corporate research laboratory. In total, the DOE has awarded $377 million in funding this year, with $277 million coming from the economic stimulus package (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -ARRA) and the additional $100 million provided by the DOE’s FY2009 budget.

Stacey Avarinia, best know for being the woman behind the “drunk breastfeeding” case, was sentenced today in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

The judge gave her 18 months in jail but suspended all but 6 months of the sentence.

Judge Sonja Clapp said she could reduce her sentence by getting substance abuse treatment. I wonder, is her allegedly woman-beating boyfriend going to get anger management treatment? Or are we only going to punish the mother, who has apparently been separated from her daughter all this time.

Said Avarinia at her sentencing:

The world is awash in a glut of crude glycerin, a major byproduct of biodiesel manufacture. The big question is what to do with it all.  In the U.S. alone, about 340,000 tons of unrefined glycerin came into the market in 2007.  Over half of that came from biodiesel, and those numbers are bound to go up as the market for this alternative fuel grows.  Glycerin is used to manufacture soaps, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and many other products, but crude glycerin is an impure form that is unsuitable for many of these purposes.  Right now most crude glycerin is simply incinerated, a practice which undermines biodiesel’s potential as a truly sustainable fuel.  But all that is about to change.

I don’t do this ‘green diva’ thing for the financial rewards (slim pickins these days), but there are times when a special event or product review opportunity comes along and I experience a sense of purpose and well, it is just flat out fun!

This week is one of those times when I love being a green diva. The smart PR folks for Lexus found me and decided I should test drive this beautiful not-available-till-2010 HS 250h hybrid sedan. Unfortunately, I’m on lock-down at my office most days and couldn’t get to the event in NY back in June. I whined a little by email with this sweet PR rep about how my man, Wayne drives a Lexus 400h and he rarely shares it.

She indicated that the cars would be back on the East Coast in July and she could hook me up with a ONE WEEK test drive! I asked her to repeat that message and she confirmed that they were offering to drop off a car anywhere I needed them to and let me play with it for a week and then pick it up at my convenience at the end of a week. Hmmmmmm? I played along, but expected a catch, like a huge deposit or ransom to include one of my children or something.

Apparently there are no catches and it’s all real and I aim to give you a daily account of my experience in fostering this car that I will want to adopt at the end of this week . . .

Could a regular light bulb end up being an energy efficient competitor to a compact fluorescent bulb? Researchers at the University of Rochester say yes.

A team of optics researchers at the school say they’ve developed a process that makes a 100-watt incandescent bulb use less electricity than a 60-watt bulb. The process, they say, would keep the cost of a traditional light bulb well under that of its fluorescent counterpart while maintaining the more pleasant light an incandescent bulb gives off.

Professor Chunlei Guo  (pictured above) and his team developed a laser process that treats the tungsten filament in a traditional bulb. The process creates nano- and micro- level structures on the filament that dramatically improve its efficiency.

According to a new report released by the Interior Department, shallow-water offshore wind farms could supply as much as 20% of the electricity in most coastal states. The report, released last week by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, said that the greatest offshore wind energy potential in the U.S. lies off the Atlantic Coast.