Gleanings of the Week Ending January 24, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Is it possible to reset our biological clocks? - I have just started a Coursera course on circadian clocks so am paying more attention to articles on the topic. This one is from ScienceDaily.

Wild pollinators at risk from diseased commercial species of bee - Honeybees, bumblebees, and social wasps  are all colony living insects that makes the transmission of disease within the colony very rapid…and now there is evidence of transmission between colonies, even colonies of different species.

Google Talking To Automakers about Building Autonomous Cars - I would like to see autonomous cars…but is it just wishful thinking for the near term (say 2020)?

This Ancient Pigment Could Soon Be Used to See Through Your Skin - Egyptian blue (calcium copper silicate). And now it’s becoming a medical technology too. Other applications of Egyptian Blue in an article from Antiquity Now.

How to Uncover a Skeleton’s Secrets - From National Geographic. The examples in the article is from a project in northern Peru

One Scientist's Race to Help Microbes Help You - There has been a lot discovered about the human microbiome…but translating the new knowledge into treatments has been slower. This is a story about the American Gut Project - a massive citizen science experiment - which is focused on accumulating enough data to enable the move toward treatments sooner.

Humanity Is In the Existential Danger Zone, Study Confirms - Scary stuff. Are we engineering a wave of extinctions on our planet that will eventually include ourselves? We are pushing against and past several planetary boundaries.

A Smart Grid Infrastructure Demands Increased Engineering Smarts - One of the skillsets needed for the future. The article is about the program in Syracuse University’s College of Engineering.

Counties Lag Behind National Recovery, Report Finds - A breakdown of ‘recovery’ at the county level reveals key economic indicators on a more granular level that we usually hear about. The clickable version of the map is available here.  I found that the county where I live has recovered 2 of the 4 indicators (which is considered ‘recovered’) but where my daughter lives in Tucson has not recovered any of the 4; having visited Tucson for the past 3 years, I do notice that things have improved - but they are not back to the levels prior to 2008.

Breathtaking Frozen Bubbles Look like Elegant Glass Ornaments - I hope we have a cold day soon so I can try making frozen bubbles like this! I’m pretty sure it takes lots of practice to make them look as good as these!

Sustainability - Choosing Organic Food

Foods that are labelled ‘organic’ are produced to a USDA standard…and that labelling is the best proxy we have for ‘sustainably produced’ so I choose to buy organic food when I can.

Organic products are often more expensive although there is not as much cost delta as there was a few years ago and there seem to be more organic products available in the stores. More farmers are turning to organic methods if they are in the business for the long term because it is the most sustainable way of farming.

So I buy organic to avoid contributing my purchasing power to non-sustainable farming practices:

• Pesticides and fertilizers may temporarily increase crop yields but they degrade soil (by killing soil organisms and encouraging poor soil maintenance practices, with less organic matter in the soil there is faster runoff of moisture) and pollute water (the runoff carries the pesticides and fertilizers into streams and rivers causing algae blooms, changing reproductive capacity of fish, and dead zones as the mouths of rivers).
• Factory farms (dairy cows, pigs, chickens) cluster animals into tight quarters creating waste disposal issues (terrible smells and high potential for polluting water) and requiring the use of antibiotics (which causes antibiotic resistant bacteria, which can make people sick too).

Buying organic is a good step toward living more sustainably!

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 17, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Under-the-Radar Environmental Stories for 2015: The Furtive Five - Five stories and some comments about trends in environmental reporting in mainstream media. Did you know that 33% of the children living the Tehran have asthma or air-pollution related allergies?

Technology to recycle all type of plastics without using water - This sounds like a good technology for the future…and in areas where water is already scarce.  The research/development was done in Mexico.

Chitosan: Sustainable alternative for food packaging - Chitosan is made from shells of crustaceans. The process for manufacturing is not currently economical but could become so….and the material biodegrades much faster than the 100-400 years it takes for most plastic packaging today. I wondered if the packaging would cause people with allergies to shellfish a problem. The research/development was done in Spain (Basque Country). This and the article just above caused me to wonder if countries other than the US are surging ahead when it comes to enablers for a sustainable Earth.

Sweet potato leaves a good source of vitamins - I just discovered that sweet potato leaves are edible from my CSA last fall. It’s thrilling that they are very nutritious as well. I liked them a lot in salads; they are best if eaten within a few days of being picked so I don’t anticipate they will find their way into grocery stores very often.

6 Birds That Are Champion Flyers - Champion flyers from different perspectives: Arctic Tern, Bar-tailed Godwit, Peregrine Falcon, Grey-headed Albatross, Hummingbird, Purple Martins.

The Chemistry of Decongestants - This was a timely post on the Compound Interest site.

Lose Yourself in These Photos Of Europe's Most Magnificent Libraries - Books and buildings….what will they be in 100 years? They already have a museum quality.

The 19th-Century Photography Trick That Changed How We See Snow - How William Bentley made his famous images of snowflakes….spurs me on to try more snowflake photography next time in snows in my area. I may add a feather to my supplies!

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Charted - Is your daily pattern similar to any of these ‘famous creative people’?

‘Kitchen of the future’ here, now - I like the idea of a high definition backsplash! There is a film available from the location of the materials for the Science Daily story here. I already use my ceramic cooktop as working surface when I’m not cooking on it…so I agree that there are certain components of the ‘kitchen of the future’ that are now.

Six ways city landscapes can be more flood resilient - in pictures - With rising sea levels - more cities will be looking at flooding mitigations. These are some beautiful solutions. In our area of Maryland - rain gardens are often included in new housing developments.

Sustainability - Join a CSA

Joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm is often a good step toward living more sustainably.

• Generally the farms are already certified as organic or heading in that direction because their customers demand it….and “organic” is the closest we get to sustainable farming.
• I found that I had less waste with the CSA because the veggies were ‘just picked’ and remained edible for longer once I got them home. I also learned that parts of plants that I used to throw away were actually edible (carrot tops and sweet potato leaves, for example). This is even more important in households where composting is not possible and food waste is part of the trash headed for the landfill.  We should all be striving to minimize our contribution to the landfills.
• Generally the packaging done by the CSA is minimal. Mine provided reusable bags at the beginning of the season and I could use my own mesh bags for things like spinach leaves, green beans, and small potatoes.  Sometimes the cherry tomatoes came in pulp paper bins; they are recyclable but I think next year I’ll transfer them to my own bag and just leave the bin with the CSA for them to use again. The only ‘trash’ I haven’t quite decided how to avoid are rubber bands they used for portions of onions, carrots, beets, etc.
• Another aspect that makes the CSA option more sustainable may be fuel costs for transport and post-harvest processing. The farm is less than a mile from my house. The veggies are harvested and picked up on the same day so there are minimal costs for refrigeration. The barn where the shares are picked up by participants is not air conditioned.

My first experience with a CSA was last summer and I am now a huge fan of the concept…and my particular CSA. It supplied produce from June through October. Maryland is too far north for it to operate year round (like they do in Arizona, for example). I really am missing it this winter. There are more CSAs popping up all the time; joining one is a way to begin living more sustainably (and most likely eating better too).

Sustainability - Reusable Bags vs Single Use Plastic Bags

Single use plastic shopping bags are not part of a sustainable future. They:

• Are made from a non-renewable resource
• Can only be recycled if they are clean
• Do no biodegrade very rapidly
• Are hazards to wildlife - both on land and in water

Here is how I’m avoiding the single use plastic shopping bags completely.

Avoiding plastic shopping bags from grocery shopping has been a story of ongoing improvement for me. The first step was to remember the ‘bag-of-bags’ for the major grocery shopping trips. I’ve been doing that for a few years now.

Then I started carrying a thin fabric bag folded in a pocket of my purse and that enabled another reduction in the rate of plastic bag accumulation in my home over the past year or so. My husband started carrying a bag in his car but kept forgetting to take it into the store until we got one that was a brighter color that folded flat to fit in the pocket of the driver’s side door of his car. Now he uses his reusable bag the majority of the time.

Recently I started the next reduction in plastic bags: using reusable mesh bags for veggies (like the potatoes, sweet potatoes, and parsnips in the picture). In the past, all the reusable type bags I tried in the produce section were a failure because the labels from the scales would not stick to the material. Now I am used some large safety pins that I’ve had for over 20 years to hold the labels in place.

I know I’m making progress because it takes me a very long time to collect one small bag of plastic bags for recycling. Most of them are not shopping bags (they are bags from flyers/papers delivered to the driveway, bread wrappers, or plastic bags over boxes delivered to the doorstep on a rainy day).

Ultimately - my goal is to have no single use plastic shopping bags to take back to the grocery store for recycling…and I’m getting very close to that goal!

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 3, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

2014 in Numbers: Huge Valuations, Shocking Security Stats, and a Big Climate Deal - Factoids for the year. The last one was the one that caught my attention the most 4.4 zettabytes = all digital information in the world….and it is growing by 40% per year!

2014: An amazing year in space exploration - Philae, Orion, SpaceX Falcon 9, and Mar Rover Opportunity setting off-Earth, off-road distance record.

2014 in Materials: Rhubarb Batteries, the Gigafactory, and Printing Body Parts - It’s hard to keep up with all the innovations. How fast can any of these really get to market and be affordable?

Researchers create method that recovers high value metals for industries while protecting the environment - A step in the right direction. Hopefully the metals recovered will be valuable enough to drive the technology from the lab to application.

The Year in Pathogens - Ebola tops this list from The Scientist.

2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence - Seeing the aggregate for the year….2014 was quite a year for AI in a number of areas.

2014 in Energy: The Year in Energy and Climate Change - Increased urgency of warnings….only slow progress. Frustrating.

Young entrepreneurs innovate in green energy with an in situ organic waste digester - Kudos to the young Mexican entrepreneurs….and the company that is implementing their innovation.

American cities are many times brighter at night than German counterparts - The US could learn from German….and help us all see more stars in the sky too.

Social Media Sites Offer a Nice Sampling of Winter Scenery in Parks - Winter brings a different perspective.

Coursera - January 2015

The beginning of January is the lull period for Coursera courses just as it is winter break/between semesters for the universities that provide the content. I did two on-demand courses during the lull. I’ve finished all the videos for Introduction to Sustainable Development from Columbia University and am enjoying the first modules of the Astrobiology course from the University of Edinburgh.

The Sustainable Development course more about ‘why’ we need to do it rather than ‘how.’ It meshed well with the course from National Geographic about Water and the US Food System course from Johns Hopkins earlier this year. It is almost overwhelming how the big issues of our time are so interrelated.

The Astrobiology course also links well with other courses: The cosmology section of Philosophy and the Sciences (also from University of Edinburgh), Origins (from University of Copenhagen) and the Exoplanets course (from University of Geneva) that I finished last summer.  Having some of the same evidence discussed from a slightly different perspective deepens my overall understanding.

I struggle a little with the accented English of the lecturers in the Recovering the Humankind’s Past and Saving the Universal Heritage from Sapienza University of Rome…but I am still filling in some gaps in my knowledge.  It too links to some other courses from earlier this year - particularly The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Nubia from Emory University and Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets from Brown University.

Two new courses will start in January. Both are quite different that the courses I have taken recently….and are from universities new to my Coursera experience.

2015 Begins

Beginnings are so full of potential. I always celebrate on the 1st day of the year for that reason. If there is a beautiful sun rise - it just feeds into the celebration. It is easy to get up early enough to see it since we are not that far past the solstice.

I’m starting another ‘tradition’ this year: a hike. Many state parks are hosting hikes but my husband and I are planning something short because it is so bitterly cold. I’ll get to experiment with my new monopod/walking stick.

I’ve decided on a theme for this year (rather than a resolution): to live more sustainably. I have not figured out all the ways I’ll change over the course of 2015…just that I will.  I already know it will be a learning experience.