Category: Body & Mind

Church: God Cares About the Environment

The Church of England has deemed it good religious policy to protect the environment. I hope those SUV driving religious people are reading this post. I digress. The Church is calling their environment-protecting campaign “Shrinking the Footprint,” a noble cause indeed.

“The current climate change situation is such that it will be a long walk – simply to restore the world’s balance we need to cut carbon emissions worldwide by 60% of current levels by 2050. Not only is this a daunting goal but its end lies at least two generations in the future. The results of our actions will only be felt by our children and grandchildren. For individuals and institutions alike, taking action (however simple and obvious that action may seem) and sustaining it will require considerable effort.”

You too can lower the impact you have on the environment, check out My Foot Print and Carbon Footprint.

Issue Lab

issue lab logoIssue Lab looks like a pretty neat concept! Essentially it’s a place for non-profits, charities, and other research bodies to amplify their research results. You can post your research there to ensure that more people can get access to it and know that it exists in the first place.

Every month they have a feature topic, this month is concentrating on immigration.

“Nonprofit organizations consistently build on an important body of written work that focuses on understanding and solving societal problems. IssueLab was created to help bring this body of work into focus.

Launched in 2006, IssueLab is a wide-ranging, searchable and browseable archive of critical publications. It simplifies the process of locating and accessing research and policy analysis materials, including reports, white papers, fact sheets, case studies, data sets and more.”

India Continues to Blog

The Indian Government recently tried to stiffle free speech of many of its citizens by blocking their access to certain blogs and blogging sites. This was in reaction to the recent terror attack in Mumbai, the blogosphere and many people around the world felt that India reacted too strongly.

India has announced that they wanted to selectively censor some pages and that “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs.”

Well, today, the Indian Government has said that itwon’t ban bloggers. Free speech online can continue in India!

Students Cleanup Their ‘Hood

Students at Spain Middle School, which is nowhere near Spain, in fact the school is in Detroit Michigan. Detroit is renowned for it’s urban areas that are falling apart, well these kids had enough. For a school project they utilized technologies used by NASA and marketing corporations, GIS – also known as Geographic Information Systems.

They went around their neighborhoods documenting all things wrong. They plotted the location of say an abandoned car and took a picture of it and went on to the next sign of urban blight. After collecting all their data they took the next logical step.

“They students have compiled their material into Power Point presentations for Detroit city council members, highlighting areas that have been neglected and need improvement. They were able to show, for example, that the number of abandoned homes in one neighborhood had increased by more than 50 percent. The Wayne County prosecutors’ office began targeting the area.”

With GIS technology becoming more accessible hopefully we can see it used for more projects like this and maybe for tracking environmental damage too.

Scientists Regrow Damaged Nerve Cells in Rats

In an amazing new discovery (ScienceDaily), Researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan have been able to regrow damaged nerve cells in lab rats. The researchers used an enzyme called sialidase from bacteria to treat the rats’ spinal cords.

There is hope that the proceedure will also work on other types of spinal cord injuries.
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