Today's Green Minute from Creators Syndicate

Cloning the Extinct? for 10/18/2010

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Editor's Note: The Today's Green Minute column is not available this week. The following column originally was published in December 2008.

It's possible that a baby wooly mammoth carcass that Russian scientists discovered in 2007 — which has been frozen for over 40,000 years — may be able to be cloned. Someday soon. Wow.

Until now, cloning frozen tissue was imp ...

Updated: Mon Oct 18, 2010

Clean Air Equals Longer Life for 10/11/2010

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Editor's Note: The Today's Green Minute column is not available this week. The following column originally was published in May 2009.

If you doubt that clean air has an effect on your health, now there's scientific proof that you're wrong.

Cleaner U.S. air over the last 20 years has added an average of 21 weeks to the life of an American. Those who study these results conc ...

Updated: Mon Oct 11, 2010

LED Price Reduction for 10/04/2010

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Editor's Note: The Today's Green Minute column is not available this week. The following column originally was published in November 2009.

Panasonic's LEDs received some nice buzz at the Japanese electronics fair, CEATEC — and it all centers around price. In 2008, Toshiba highlighted a 60-watt equivalent LED that ran for $90 and a 100-watt equivalent for $360. That's steep ...

Updated: Mon Oct 04, 2010

Water Footprint for 09/27/2010

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Editor's Note: The Today's Green Minute column is not available this week. The following column originally was published in December 2009.

As the public's understanding of the carbon footprint increases, a new aspect — the water footprint — is beginning to dawn on the public's awareness as well. Rachelle Hill and Dr. Tamim Younos at Virginia Tech University have done ...

Updated: Mon Sep 27, 2010

Natural Gas Boom for 09/20/2010

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wellsboro is a rural town in the northern part of Pennsylvania with a population of about 3,200 — mostly farmers who have been struggling to survive. But not anymore. It seems that Wellsboro is situated on the Marcellus Shale, a formation running from West Virginia to New York that has the potential to supply the entire United States with natural gas for some 20 years, according to expert ...

Updated: Mon Sep 20, 2010

Eco-Sex for 09/13/2010

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Greenies everywhere have been reducing the carbon footprint of their lives, and now with Stefanie Iris Weiss' book, "Eco-Sex," they can also reduce the carbon footprint of their love lives. Lovemaking itself requires little in the way of natural resources (maybe heavy breathing uses some extra oxygen), but the handbook gives a "greenover" to all the attending courtship activ ...

Updated: Mon Sep 13, 2010

Eco-Birthdays for 09/06/2010

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Eco-aware parents who have thrown birthday parties for their kids and become chagrined at the amount of waste and conspicuous consumption may want to take note: an organization called ECHOage (www.echoage.com) makes planning "charity-focused, eco-friendly celebrations" a simple operation.

Guests are invited to make an online donation, and then the money is pooled — with h ...

Updated: Mon Sep 06, 2010

No-Drill Pay for 08/30/2010

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Down in Ecuador, there is a 675-square-mile section of the Yasuni National Park called the ITT reserve. The reserve is an ecological treasure-trove, with the most diverse wildlife in the world and more varieties of trees than there are in all of North America.

It also has oil, but even as oil companies itch to build their derricks, the Ecuadorean government (which is so strongly invested ...

Updated: Mon Aug 30, 2010

Stronger Crops for 08/23/2010

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

In the not-too-distant future, it is predicted that the world will be heavy with people. All those people are going to be hungry, so any advancement in the fight against the bugs that reduce crop yields (witness Uganda's $70 million to $200 million banana loss to bacteria) will be welcome.

That's why a new report from Britain's Sainsbury Laboratory is so encouraging. Usually, researchers ...

Updated: Mon Aug 23, 2010

Saving Cranes for 08/16/2010

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The majestic whooping cranes of North America are critically endangered, with less than 250 birds migrating between Canada and Texas. But an extraordinary effort is being waged to establish another flock east of the Mississippi. The work is being carried out by a stitched-together group of agencies, nonprofits, state governments and individuals — called "The Whooping Crane Eastern Pa ...

Updated: Mon Aug 16, 2010

Dueling Cities for 08/09/2010

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Many municipalities have become more energy conscious and sustainable, but down in big ol' Texas, there are shootouts for the "greenest city" bragging rights. In Irving, Texas, where the Dallas Cowboys play, they had to tear down the old stadium (implode it with explosives, actually), but they reused 95 percent of the concrete rubble in highway construction. Irving's convention center ...

Updated: Mon Aug 09, 2010

Menhaden Alarm for 08/02/2010

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

You may not have heard of a fish called the "menhaden" — or "bunker" or "pogy" — but it's at the very crux of so much ecology that one author has titled his book about menhaden, "The Most Important Fish in the Sea." Menhaden feed on plankton, and in turn, an enormous number of species feed on menhaden.

That's the balance of nature in ac ...

Updated: Mon Aug 02, 2010

Deforestation News for 07/26/2010

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

If you're the type who sees a glass as half empty, you'll despair in the news that an area of the world's forest — the size of Costa Rica — is disappearing each year. But if you're the half-full type, you'll rejoice that efforts to save forests are actually slowing deforestation.

The United Nation reports that 13 million hectares of forestland were converted to other land use ...

Updated: Mon Jul 26, 2010

Doomsday Vault for 07/19/2010

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

For those happy souls who ponder the doomsday scenarios of worldwide nuclear destruction, the existence of a "Doomsday Vault" (actually named the Global Seed Vault) may be a bit of a comfort. The vault's purpose is to store seed samples of the world's crops in case something were to go very wrong — if crops everywhere were destroyed and mankind was in need of a serious reboot.
Updated: Mon Jul 19, 2010

Flying Solar for 07/12/2010

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

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Updated: Mon Jul 12, 2010

Chocolate Formula 3 for 07/05/2010

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Researchers of all stripes have been working to find sustainable materials that can replace environmentally sensitive ones — particularly in automobile fuel — but now a research team has taken sustainability to the very edge of automobile performance: Formula 3 race cars. Researchers from England's University of Warwick displayed their work at MIT's energy conference in Boston.

...

Updated: Mon Jul 05, 2010

Used Boxes for 06/28/2010

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Marty Metro was an MBA guy who spent 10 years working as a technology consultant for the likes of Boeing and AT&T. In 2002, Metro began a neighborhood experiment where he bought and sold used cardboard boxes — just to see if anything came of it. The result was usedcardboardboxes.com, an international technology business that purchases truckloads of used boxes from Fortune 500 companie ...

Updated: Mon Jun 28, 2010

Cat Food Fix for 06/21/2010

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Australia took an environmental action way back in 1935 that has been called "one of the country's worst environmental mistakes." And that mistake is only now being rectified. It seems that a particular type of beetle was a big problem back then, so somebody had the bright idea of importing cane toads from Hawaii to control the beetle population.

As you might guess, the toad po ...

Updated: Mon Jun 21, 2010

Flexible Solar for 06/14/2010

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The promise of free, clean power from the sun is so great that researchers all over the world are scrambling to develop manufacturing methods that are cheaper, more efficient and more flexible. The flexibility part is moving along nicely, thank you, by using both organic and inorganic materials.

At the California Institute of Technology, researchers are working with new organic films and ...

Updated: Mon Jun 14, 2010

Stadium Implosion for 06/07/2010

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Stadium Implosion

We're all finding ways to recycle the old stuff in our lives, and that applies to the city of Irving, Texas, as well. The city had to demolish the old Texas Stadium, one-time home of the Dallas Cowboys, and they did it with "reuse and recycle" as the focus. First, there was an auction to sell off two giant video boards, thousands of seats and anything else not ...

Updated: Mon Jun 07, 2010