British Petroleum or BP has had a tough time of it as of late, and with little wonder. Still reeling from the gulf oil spill of 2010, the petroleum giant seems to be ensnared in a myriad of secrets relating to the incident that’s been noted as the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Their lack of swift action in the April 2010 catastrophe drew heavy criticism from the public, environmental agencies and the White House, prompting President Barack Obama to begin the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the leak and say “Plug the damn hole” in an unusual show of force and irritation on the part of the usually even keeled president.
(more…)
|
|
|
HIV, just the acronym alone strikes fear in the hearts of those who utter it and those that hear it. It’s been roughly 25 years since it first came to the forefront of the public’s attention, and so many advances in it have been achieved, yet there’s still no real promising cure in sight — or is there? So far, all we’ve been able to do with the virulent disease is find ways to slow its progress, but little else. Not that that’s any small feat considering the rampant pace with which it was claiming lives 20 years ago. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed much in third-world countries.
Hurricane season is both an exciting and stressful time to live in many of the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean.
As his blue eyes peer out from behind no-frame glasses, 71-year-old inventor Bob Rigby sits drinking his second coffee of the morning. Born and raised in Venice, Fla., Rigby is familiar with the area and smiles at each person walking by. Rigby has experienced all that comes with growing up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, including red tide. After seeing some of its terrible affects, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and in 1992, he began research to find a cure. Nine years later, Rigby found it.
The term “autism” was coined in 1911 by a Swiss psychiatrist named Eugen Bleuler. It applied to only adult schizophrenics and later became the term to diagnose children with schizophrenia. Regardless of the term, medical and psychological diagnoses were rarely correct at that time. It’s only been within the last 50 years that true knowledge and awareness of autism has become popular. Within the past ten years, celebrities like Jenny McCarthy have brought awareness to popular culture about what autism is and how to protect your children from an increased risk. Because of books like Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism, by McCarthy, and many others, Americans have become interested in learning more about the disability that could affect their own children. Controversy surrounds everything attached to autism. While scientists try to prove if children immunized or vaccines and autism are connected, parents must decide whether or not to take a chance and immunize saying, “They haven’t proved it does, but they haven’t proved it doesn’t.” It’s hard to know what to do especially considering there’s not very much known about the cause.
(NERD ALERT) Like many children, when I was younger I dreamed of being an astronaut. The thought of flying into “outer space” to see all kinds of planets and moons was the coolest thing to me in the world and, honestly, it’s still pretty much the coolest thing to me in the world. As I got older, I began to learn more about the solar system and became especially fixated on something called black holes. Black holes basically rule out everything that we could learn from physics. They are formed from the cores of supermassive stars once they collapse. And there’s something called escape velocity, which means that the larger the mass, the faster you have to travel to escape its pull. With that in mind, this means that black holes are so massive that nothing can escape them, including light. (To make this even more intense, please don’t forget how fast the speed of light is at 186,000 miles per second.) To further understand black holes, we can look at dear Mr. Einstein who developed the general theory of relativity. This theory states that gravity affects time, which means that the more massive an object (a.k.a. has a greater gravitational pull), the more it can slow down time. So, obviously, since black holes have the highest gravitational pulse, the concept of time is completely diminished. Essentially, there’s no time.
It’s been said that in California, it will be the crowds, the traffic, the cold or the pollution that kills you. Well, in regard to my own personal and eventual death, none of these means appeal to me in particular. Not the smothering by strangely dressed tourists, the collision of a several-ton vehicle impacting my tiny frame of a body, or the slow takeover of freezing cold temperatures gripping me so tightly as to extinguish all the life remaining inside me. But pollution? I don’t think I could imagine the possibility of some thick, smoggy, chemical substance finding its way into my body and then taking over some invaluable major organ, forcing me to battle it out in an end-all, beat-all fight to which I inevitably lose. With this in mind, I don’t know if California is a place I want to visit, let alone call home, any time soon…or is it?
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, levels of organic pollutants in our homes – the place where we spend about 90 percent of our time – are between two and five times more polluted than the air outside. And all along you thought not smoking, buying an air purifier and that can of Oust air sanitizer you keep next to your lounge chair for moments when you just aren’t feeling clean enough, were all making a big difference. Indeed, this statistic is frightening, but it’s not one we have to live with. The Daily Herald online has outlined 10 of the easiest, most effective and cost-friendly ways to get greener – and cleaner – in you home. 1) Dump the dry cleaning. Dry cleaning requires harsh chemicals, and those chemicals don’t stay at the dry cleaners when you bring those clothes home. Try steaming your clothes while you’re in the shower and buying more washable fabrics.
In the midst of our “green revolution,” sometimes the steps we’re taking toward living green seem minute. Sure, cutting down on our plastic bag use by using carrying those $2 totes will help the environment, but to what extent? What we need is an entire country of eco-sustainable cities… right? Well, we’ll see. Central Florida is home to Destiny, Fla., which is the nation’s first eco-sustainable city. Just an hour south of Orlando, Destiny sits leading the country in alternative energy ideas.
It was about nine months ago when news of a massive magnetic machine that many were convinced would be the end of our planet began to make many, many headlines. This machine is known as the LHC or Large Hadron Collider and was scheduled for its highly anticipated, and also highly dreaded, green for “go” light in September of last year. With as much controversy and attention that the turning on of the LHC received, it’s a wonder how almost a full year later most people don’t even know what happened to it. So what did happen to the LHC? It obviously didn’t rip the world in half, kill a large percentage of the population via cosmic rays, or serve Earth a similar fate to that of Vulcan in the latest Star Trek film by creating a black hole that would suck us all into a place only theory can imagine. |
|
