Lofty Matters

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Personal injury lawyers have gotten a bad rap over the years as ambulance chasers. I’m sure the people over at Morristown personal injury lawyers are find, upstanding attorneys who are ready and waiting to help people who have been injured. I was just reading about how our state was forced to spend $3.9 million to fix a curve in a road that caused a fatality. They determined that the curve was unsafe and forced the state to straighten the road…right through a sand bluff! Now THAT’s some personal injury lawyers hard at work!

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Glorious weekend to you all! We have had some heat this week but I’m not complaining. My garden is thriving, the kids are busy, and I am trying to keep up with both! Hope your weekend is off to a great start. Kick back, find a cuppa, and chill with this GOOD news!

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Beating the Radar: Getting a Jump on Storm Prediction

Monitoring cloud temperatures by satellite may enable the accurate prediction of severe thunderstorms up to 45 minutes earlier than traditional radar alone. Scientists have developed a way to measure temperature changes in the tops of clouds to improve forecast times for growing storms.

Clouds start cooling long before radar can identify them as storms. As a warm cumulus cloud grows and expands upward into higher altitudes, it will quickly cool. Cloud-top cooling indicates that a cloud top is rising into the frigid upper reaches of the atmosphere and can reveal the formation of a severe storm. By running high-speed satellite scans through a carefully designed algorithm, the scientists can quickly analyze cloud top temperature changes to look for signs of storm formation.

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Dogs Being Trained to Sniff Out Diabetes
Dogs are being trained as potential life-savers to warn diabetics when their blood sugar levels fall to dangerously low levels. Dogs are capable of sniffing out certain cancer cells and have long been working to find illegal drugs and explosives. A dog’s nose can detect tiny changes that occur when a person is about to have a hypoglycemic attack.

Dogs will be paired up with diabetic owners, many of them children. Dogs have been trained to detect certain odors in tiny amounts. The move into diabetes followed the case of Paul Jackson, who has a dog that warns him when his sugar levels get too low and he is in danger of collapsing.

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Women Step Up to Breastfeed Motherless Infant

When Susan Goodrich lost her life shortly after giving birth to her son, an important wish for her child was fulfilled by a group of moms who heard a baby needed their help. The father, Robbie Goodrich, even in the midst of his shock and grief, realized that he wanted his son to be breastfed. Through a series of phone calls to close friends, the news quickly spread and volunteer mothers were found who were willing to breastfeed the motherless baby.

A schedule was created whereby mothers would come to the Goodrich home six times every day to breastfeed the baby. The baby has never been sick and is happy and thriving. Robbie Goodrich hopes to be able to have his son breastfed until he is a year old.

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Tags: blood sugar levels, breastfeed, cloud temperatures, diabetics, dogs, Robbie Goodrich, severe thunderstorms, storm prediction, Susan Goodrich

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Need a Plano Dentist? Check this out…if not, check this out:

A New York City boy’s essay about a personal hero has earned him and his favorite teacher a role in a Superman book. Hakeem Bennett is a special-needs student at Public School 36 in Brooklyn. He recently won the Stone Arch Books national essay contest. Students were assigned to write about their real-life heroes and Hakeem chose his eighth-grade teacher, Matthew Brown.

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The first day of summer is sneaking up and almost here! Father’s Day is tomorrow…these long June days are the best days of the year in my opinion. Just love ‘em. The fireflies are starting to flit in the balmy night air and my kids are pretty excited about that. What do you love about summer?

Anyway…here’s some good news for y’all!

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‘Craigslist’ for Volunteers to Debut Soon

A group of nonprofits, technology developers, and more are about to unveil a new website called All for Good. The site is currently managed by Google and will provide a wide variety of information about volunteer positions and events.

The project has attracted support from Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post. There has also been active participation from many nonprofit groups that have agreed to share their volunteer opportunities on the site.

The coalition has released an “alpha” version of the website and plans to showcase the project at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service later this month.

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Today’s Dairy Farms Use Less Land, Feed and Water

Improved dairy genetics, nutrition, herd management and animal welfare have resulted in more efficient milk production with a smaller carbon footprint.

A recent study compared 1944 milk production with 2007. The study showed that the carbon footprint for a gallon of milk produced in 2007 was only 37% for the same amount of milk produced in 1944. Improved efficiency has enabled the U.S. dairy industry to produce 186 billion pounds of milk from 9.2 million cows in 2007. In 1944, 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 million cows was produced.

Additionally, modern dairy systems only use 10 percent of the land, 23 percent feed, and 35 percent of the water that was required to produce the same amount of milk in 1944. Also, 2007 farming produced 24% of the manure and 43% of the methane per gallon of milk compared to 1944.

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Is the Sky the Limit for Wind Power?

A new study has identified New York as a prime location for exploiting high-altitude winds. These winds may contain enough energy to meet world demand 100-fold.

A new global survey of wind energy available at high altitudes in the atmosphere was compiled. Researchers assessed potential for wind power in terms of “wind power density.”

“There is a huge amount of energy available in high altitude winds,” said coauthor Ken Caldeira. “These winds blow much more strongly and steadily than near-surface winds, but you need to go get up miles to get a big advantage. Ideally, you would like to be up near the jet streams, around 30,000 feet.”

There is enough power in these high altitude winds to fuel all of modern civilization, however, there are still times when the winds are not blowing. The wind can be expected to stop about five percent of the time. This means there has to be back-up power or a way to store large amounts of energy. High-altitude wind may be a potentially major energy source but it will require substantial infrastructure.

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Tags: All for Good, carbon footprint, Craigslist, dairy systems, high-altitude winds, Huffington Post, wind energy

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Looking for diet supplements to get you ready for summer? I happened upon this tidbit today so wanted to share.

Curcumin is the major polyphenol present in turmeric. This ingredient appears to reduce weight gain in mice and also suppresses the growth of fat tissue in mice. Researchers have been studying mice by feeding them high fat diets and then supplementing their diet with curcumin.

Weight gain happens because of the growth and expansion of fat tissue. This won’t occur unless new blood vessels form (angiogenesis). Curcumin appears to suppress angiogenic activity in the fat tissues of these mice in the study. Researchers do not yet know whether these results can be replicated in humans.

Turmeric is known for flavoring curry.

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Documents with the signatures of U.S. presidents are appearing have historically appeared in some unexpected places: attics, libraries, or thrift stores.

Here’s an interesting mystery for you, though. An innocuous Civil War-era memo with Abraham Lincoln’s signature has been found in the state archives of Hawaii. Hawaii was not even part of the United States at that time! State researchers are attempting to solve this mystery.

The memo is dated September 22, 1862 and it orders the secretary of state to affix the U.S. seal to a separate piece of paper (a proclamation dated the same day). That proclamation was the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Hawaii records indicate they’ve had the memo for at least 74 years. That’s some pretty impressive work by some long distance movers, I’d say.

Hawaii was overthrown by American residents in 1893, annexed to the United States in 1898, and became America’s 50th state in 1959.

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Not that any of the jobs in sales my husband has been looking at lately would give us this problem, but I found this interesting…

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, told other billionaires that they should consider giving away the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. He also said they would find they enjoyed it. Gates has given much of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a philanthropic powerhouse.

“I think all billionaires should give away the vast majority of their fortunes — though I don’t say they shouldn’t leave anything to their kids,” he recently said. “I think they would enjoy it, their kids would be better off, and the world would be better off.”

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I was just reading a really interesting study that confirms what I have believed for a long time. Researchers from the University of Toronto have found evidence that one’s mood actually changes how the visual system filters perceptions. This means that those who see the world through rose-colored glasses are doing things right.

Good moods and bad moods affect how our visual cortex works and what we see. A positive mood lets us takes in more information and a negative mood prevents us from seeing as much. I know that one of my teenage sons would probably be gifted with x-ray vision if we started shopping for PS3 players. Much as I’d love to, however, I won’t be able to lift his mood to that level.

The research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine how the visual cortex processes sensory information in good, bad, and also neutral moods.

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Habitat for Humanity International has announced a $100 million gift by J. Ronald Terwilliger. This gift represents the largest donation from an individual in Habitat for Humanity’s history. Think of all the porcelain tile this will buy!

Habitat for Humanity estimates that this donation will help 60,000 families receive improved housing conditions.

Within five years of this gift, 70 percent will be used by Habitat for housing micro-financing so that families in countries around the world can improve their living conditions. The remaining 30 percent will be used to make annual distributions to help support affordable-housing efforts.

Terwilliger has become the driving force behind Trammell Crow Residential (the nation’s largest multi-family housing developer). He retired as CEO in 2008, but is still the company’s chairman.

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Astronomers have discovered more than 300 planets that orbit stars other than our sun. Most of these are gas giants like Jupiter. Powerful new space telescopes will make it easier to spot much smaller rocky extrasolar planets that are more similar to Earth. A team of astronomers and astrobiologists has devised a technique to tell whether these planets have liquid water. This could tell whether it might be able to support life.

It will be years before the launch of space telescopes capable of making similar observations for Earth-sized exoplanets. Creating this technique now could guide the construction of those instruments, however. These planets will be much farther away but the techniques will be similar. Imagine the bathroom faucets! ha!

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