Site News Archive

Wirelessly Charging Electrical Vehicles While Driving

by Mark Swartz, via Stanford University News,

Wirelessly chargingA Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that wirelessly charges cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.

The new technology has the potential to dramatically increase the driving range of electric vehicles and eventually transform highway travel, according to the researchers.  Their results are published in the journal Applied Physics Letters (APL). 

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Empowering Minorities to Shape Urban Landscapes

by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, via Grist.org,

Seventh grade students transforming a Detroit community garden. (Photo by Michelle White.)When people ask me why I write about architecture, design, and cities — why I focus on these topics instead of all of the others — I like to tell the story of a park bench.

I first read this story many years ago in a book of essays on urbanism. It starts auspiciously enough with the development of a new neighborhood outside of Los Angeles. The developers promoted the neighborhood as one of inclusivity, a place where community would reign supreme. They designed everything from the houses to the garbage cans and the sidewalks.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Fast Food, Fat Profits: Obesity in America

This amazing video gives an stunning and sobering look into the obesity epidemic in America, the complex causes behind it and some sensible solutions. It is rare that we have seen such a comprehensive, well composed and objective overview of the situation.

Obesity in America has reached a crisis point. Two out of every three Americans are overweight, one out of every three is obese. One in three are expected to have diabetes by 2050. How did the situation get so out of hand?

Fault Lines', Josh Rushing explores the world of cheap food for Americans living at the margins.

What opportunities do people have to eat healthy? Who is responsible for food deserts and processed food in American schools?

YouTube Preview Image
GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Magnesium: The Mineral We Can’t Live Without

Magnesiumby Katherine Czapp, via Weston A. Price Foundation,

Magnesium is an alkaline earth metal, the eighth most abundant mineral found in the earth’s crust. Because of its ready solubility in water, magnesium is the third most abundant mineral in sea water, after sodium and chloride. In the human body, magnesium is the eleventh most plentiful element by mass—measuring about two ounces. Most magnesium contained in the body is found in the skeleton and teeth—at least 60 to 65 percent of the total. Nearly the entire remaining amount resides in muscle tissues and cells, while only one percent is contained in our blood.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

GMOs in the Wild: The Great Gene Escape

by Lindsey Konkel, via Environmental Health News,

Feral flowers: Escaped gene-altered canola has some experts concerned that herbicide-resistant “super weeds” could result.Throughout North Dakota, little yellow flowers dot thousands of miles of roadsides. These canola plants, found along most major trucking routes, look harmless. But they are fueling a controversy: They prove that large numbers of genetically modified plants have escaped from farm fields and are now growing wild.

About 80 percent of canola growing along roadsides in North Dakota contains genes that have been modified to make the plants resistant to common weed-killers, according to a team of University of Arkansas researchers.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Are Diet Sodas a Health Risk?

via Springer Media,

The unexpected health risks of diet sodaIndividuals who drink diet soft drinks on a daily basis may be at increased risk of suffering vascular events such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death.

This is according to a new study by Hannah Gardener and her colleagues from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and at Columbia University Medical Center. However, in contrast, they found that regular soft drink consumption and a more moderate intake of diet soft drinks do not appear to be linked to a higher risk of vascular events. The research appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, published by Springer.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Making Greenbacks by Going Green

by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office,

green manufacturingNearly a third of companies now say that the adoption of sustainable practices has added to their profitability, according to a new MIT study — and manufacturing firms are in the vanguard.

Two-thirds of more than 2,800 companies surveyed by MIT Sloan Management Review say they have made sustainability a permanent agenda topic within their companies, up from 55 percent a year ago. And most respondents — based in 113 countries, and spanning a wide variety of sizes and industries — now see sustainability as “necessary to be competitive” in today’s economy. The study was conducted with the help of the Boston Consulting Group.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

The Hidden Risk and Cost of Mercury Pollution

By Robert Lalasz, via Grist.org,

Wood thrush. (Photo by Jeff Whitlock.)Mercury pollution — nothing to worry about if I don’t live in the rural Northeast and don’t eat tons of fish, right?

Guess again, says a new report done by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy. The report, “Hidden Risk,” details the widespread and deep impacts of mercury pollution in terrestrial nature — particularly on animals such as songbirds and bats. Researchers are discovering how mercury is causing big declines in reproductive success among these species, as well as physiological oddities — like developmental asymmetries and an inability of some birds to hit high notes.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Mexican Farmers Go Local

by Mike Wold, via Yes! Magazine,

San Pedro Coxcaltepec. Many young people here have left because of the difficulty of making a living with farming. Photo by Reid Mukai.Tío Joel rode his small donkey down the dirt road to his greenhouse to show us his solution to keeping small farmers on their land in southern Mexico. At about seventy years old, he could handle a machete or lift a 20-kilo sack of compost as easily as any of us, though the brace he wore around his waist was a sign of problems to come.

Taking a break from chopping green manure for compost for his popular tomatoes, he explained why a campesino like him could benefit from using organic methods:  “In the harvest this year a lot of tomatoes were being harvested and the price went way down to five pesos per kilo, but we sell ours for seven. I go from house to house and sell it small-scale, but we sell out our tomatoes because they’re well-known … on Sunday we ran out of tomatoes, we sell so many.”

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Paula Deen and the Diabetes Epidemic

by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post,

Paula DeenIn a spate of recent media appearances, Paula Deen, the unapologetic queen of culinary excess and indulgence would have us believe that she didn't eat herself into type 2 diabetes -- that it was just Russian Roulette. Genes do matter, but just a little. Sorry Paula, but type 2 diabetes, and in fact over 90 percent of chronic disease, happens because of bad choices, not bad genes. New research proves that type 2 diabetes is nearly 100 percent reversible without medication or gastric bypass.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

School Lunches and Children’s Health: Fixing Both

by Chef Ann Cooper, via The Huffington Post,

Chef Ann Cooper and customersI never imagined myself cooking for kids. I spent most of my first three decades as a chef, not knowing or caring what kids ate, and not really wanting to feed them. In fact, as a restaurant chef, my worst nightmare was the host coming into the kitchen on a Saturday night, saying, "Chef, there's a screaming kid on table 19. What do I do?"

My response: "Tell them to leave. Why did they bring kids here on a Saturday night, anyway?"

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Why Are Kids Suddenly So “Mentally Ill?”

by Prof. Allen Frances, via The Huffington Post,

BigPharma targeting kidsThe three major "epidemics" of psychiatric illness occurring during the past 15 years -- childhood bipolar, autism and attention deficit disorder -- have all mainly involved children. And two new DSM-5 proposals that also apply mostly to youngsters -- "psychosis risk" and "temper dysregulation" -- may trigger the next fads in psychiatric mislabeling. Giving a name to difficult problems that are poorly understood provides a kind of false comfort, but the label often doesn't really add to the understanding and may carry risks of its own -- especially unnecessary treatment, stigma and wasted resources.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Poor Urban Design and America’s Health

by Scott Carlson, via The Chronicle of Higher Education,

Subdivision housingResearchers can have revelatory moments in remarkable places—the African savannah, an ancient library, or the ruins of a lost civilization. But Richard J. Jackson's epiphany occurred in 1999 in a banal American landscape: a dismal stretch of the car-choked Buford Highway, near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Dr. Jackson, who was then the head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, was rushing to a meeting where leading epidemiologists would discuss the major health threats of the 21st century. On the side of the road he saw an elderly woman walking, bent with a load of shopping bags. It was a blisteringly hot day, and there was little hope that she would find public transportation.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

High Fructose Consumption by Teens May Put Them at Cardiovascular Risk

Fructose consumptionEvidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk is present in the blood of adolescents who consume a lot of fructose, a scenario that worsens in the face of excess belly fat, researchers report.

An analysis of 559 adolescents age 14-18 correlated high-fructose diets with higher blood pressure, fasting glucose, insulin resistance and inflammatory factors that contribute to heart and vascular disease.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Shale-Shocked: How Fracking Got “Occupied”

by Ellen Cantarow, via The Huffington Post,

Fracking well. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Geoengineering and Global Food Production

Geoengineering ideas for a cooler planetCarbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Personal Care Chemicals and Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesityResearchers from the Children's Environmental Health Center at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York have found an association between exposure to the chemical group known as phthalates and obesity in young children – including increased body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference.

Phthalates are man-made, endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can mimic the body's natural hormones. They are commonly used in plastic flooring and wall coverings, food processing materials, medical devices, and personal-care products. While poor nutrition and physical inactivity are known to contribute to obesity, a growing body of research suggests that environmental chemicals – including phthalates – could play a role in rising childhood obesity rates.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

GMO Controversy at Monsanto Shareholder Meeting

Monsanto signOn Tuesday, January 24 at 1:30 PM, Monsanto officers and shareholders will vote on a shareholder proposal to create a study of "material financial risks or operational impacts" associated with its chemical products and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The proposal represents one of the strongest signals to date that the biotech food conglomerate is facing growing consumer, legal, and regulatory uncertainties. As of today, however Monsanto has told John Harrington that they will not recognize his proxy who would speak on behalf of the resolution for only three minutes under normal circumstances.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

The Arctic Permafrost Climate Threat

by Jared Sagoff, via PhysOrg.com,

Argonne ecologists Roser Matamala (front) and Mike Miller (right) with University of Alaska Fairbanks collaborator, Gary Michaelson (left), collect samples of permafrost-affected tundra soils in northern Alaska.A significant source of greenhouse gases has started leaking into the Earth's atmosphere from an unlikely place. Above the Arctic Circle, land frozen for tens of thousands of years has begun to thaw for the first time. Current estimates indicate that perennially frozen ground, called permafrost, holds more than twice the amount of carbon present in today's atmosphere. As permafrost thaws, a huge amount of this stored carbon could be released as carbon dioxide or methane gas.

In more temperate environments, most of the in dead plant material cycles relatively quickly back to the atmosphere thanks to the action of that break down organic materials. However, the remains of dead plants have accumulated for millennia in the permafrost soils and sediments in regions like the North Slope of Alaska and .

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

EPA Begins Water Delivery to Fracking Contaminated Town

by Abrahm Lustgarten, via ProPublica.org,

Dimock, Pa. resident Craig Sautner shows off his water. Photo: hudsonriverkeeper / via FlickrFirst, the earth around the rural town of Dimock, Pa., was cracked open as gas drillers used fracking to tap the vast energy supplies of the Marcellus Shale.

Then, in April 2009, residents there lost their access to fresh drinking water. Wells turned fetid. Some blew up. Tap water caught fire.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

The Tar Sands Battle Continues in California Courts

By Maria Gallucci, InsideClimate News,

Valero's Benicia refinery in Solano County, Calif. Credit: Craig MillerA high-stakes legal battle is underway in California over whether the state's clean air agency can enforce a first-ever rule to slash carbon emissions in transportation fuels. The fight is being closely watched because the rule could choke global market demand for Alberta's carbon-intensive oil sands at a very precarious time for the industry.

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, the Obama administration rejected a permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which could have increased imports of the fuel into the U.S. by up to 830,000 barrels a day. It was a major setback for the oil industry and its allies and an unexpected victory for environmentalists and their allies. The two sides are now facing each other down in this court case.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

The Trouble with Soy

by Claire Thompson, via Grist.org,

One way to make sure your veggie burgers are made with sustainable ingredients is to make them yourself. (Photo by Marni Moilna.)Like bikes, Birkenstocks, and buying local, soy products are a standard part of today’s stereotypical green lifestyle. But as many in the sustainable food world already know, we should proceed with caution when it comes to consuming processed soy products, as some are much more complicated than they seem.

To start with, it is much harder to find an organic soybean than, say, an organic carrot – only 0.2 percent of the soybean acreage in the U.S. is used to grow organic beans (compared with 13 percent of the carrot acreage). After corn, soy is the second-most-planted field crop in the U.S., and 92 percent of U.S. soybeans are genetically engineered to either withstand large amounts of pesticide or to produce it themselves.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Hypersolar: Making Fracking Obsolete

Hypersolar reactor complexHyperSolar, Inc., the developer of a breakthrough technology to make renewable natural gas using solar power, announced that its technology can help reduce the need for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) used to access underground natural gas resources. The company’s renewable natural gas is a clean, carbon neutral methane gas that can be produced above ground and used as a direct replacement for traditional natural gas to power the needs of the world.

“Even though the United States has vast natural gas resources, a majority of these reserves are only accessible through fracking, a potentially environmentally-hazardous process that many environmentalists claim could contaminate our water supplies and the air we breathe,” said Tim Young, CEO of HyperSolar. “Rather than extracting difficult-to-reach fossil fuel reserves, we think that the focus should be on alternative technologies that can provide the world with affordable and clean sources of energy. We believe it is far better to consider sources of energy that are renewable instead of limited depleting resources such as coal, oil or natural gas.”

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

Ding Dong the Pipeline’s Dead—Or at Least Corked for Now

by Lucia Graves and Joshua Hersh, via The Huffington Post,

A protestor against the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline climbs on a Keith Haring sculpture as he demonstrates outside of the W Hotel where U.S. President Barack Obama was holding a fundraiser on October 25, 2011 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Acting on a recommendation from the State Department on January 18, 2012, President Barack Obama denied a permit for the contentious Keystone XL pipeline proposal, which would have linked a vast oil deposit in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

In rejecting the permit, Obama laid blame on Republicans in Congress, who forced passage of a measure late last month requiring the administration to render a decision on the pipeline by Feb. 21.

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...

GMO Labels Matter to Moms

Robyn O’Brien, mother, activist and founder of the AllergyKids Foundation shares her story on why she wants the FDA to label genetically engineered foods.

Join her — and over half a million Americans — in contacting the FDA to require the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods?

Read the rest of this feature »

GD Star Rating
loading...
GD Star Rating
loading...
« Previous Entries
QR Code Business Card