Inspirational and good news.
The Planet in Focus film festival opened last night in Toronto and Things Are Good is proud to announce that we are sponsoring a screening!!
This Sunday we’ll be sponsoring a double-feature of Remember Chek Jawa and Third Ward TX; two films that celebrate positive things that people have done. More info below.
Sunday Oct. 28th
5:00 pm
Innis Town Hall
Toronto
We have only 14 tickets left, so if you’d like to buy one please email me at Adam (at ) ThingsAreGood.com
Exercise is not only good for you health but also good for your ability to use your brain. Sure, you can stick to sodoku, but to be really smart it seems your best option is to accompany that with some old-school Exercise.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, which show the brain at work, were performed on a percentage of children in each group and found those who exercised had different patterns of brain activity during an executive function task.
“Look what good it does when they exercise,†says Dr. Davis. “This is an important public health issue we need to look at as a nation to help our children learn and keep them well.â€
An Australian industrial designer, Paul Charlwood, has decided that disposable design is a waste. We’ve talked about consumerism here before and how it has a negative effect on the environment, but Charlwood wants to change our mind on that matter by encouraging consumerism to be something that can last.
Once Charlwood turned his mind to sustainability it meant reassessing his design philosophies. He decided he no longer wanted to design throwaway products, which led to him embracing “classic design” – products that you don’t need to, or want to, discard.
Charlwood’s conversion to environmentalism has coincided with what he sees as a “second wave” of environmentalism.
I love how algae can be used for almost anything. If the future is covered in algae, well, I’ll be the first to say that that’s a good thing.
Inhabitat has a post about how algae is being converted into crude biofuel.
The scientists involved in the LiveFuels project are focusing on specialized aspects of the algae-to-biocrude process. Some are breeding algae to find the best high-fat strains, others are refining the fat and oil extraction process and others still are developing cost-effective harvesting techniques. The biggest challenge is to make algae biocrude within a fraction of the time that nature’s biomass decomposition occurs and to do it economically, for less than $60 a barrel.
Princeton University is looking into the details of using biofuels in jet airplanes. The research team will examine what fuel mixture provides the best efficiency and how engines can be designed to better burn the fuels that they are bound to create.
Alternative energy sources, if designed appropriately, also could significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses released in creating and burning jet fuel. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, aviation is responsible for around 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation in the nation, or roughly 2.7 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The second research program, supported by NetJets, augments Dryer’s fundamental MURI work and brings in additional expertise from the Princeton Environmental Institute to develop “greener” alternative fuels.