Greetings!
Like many of us, I’ve been contemplating how blessed I feel to be living in relative safety here in the U.S. It seems so hard to believe that it’s been eight years since the terrorist attack. Our family has our own private little benchmark for that day because we have a daughter who was born four days before 9/11/01. What a horrible, yet bittersweet time that was for us as a family…celebrating the birth of a baby and going through that tragedy as a country. Sigh…
Anyway…on to the good news!
Man’s Next Blood Donation Will Be Gallon 40
A New York man is donating his 320th pint of blood this week, making him one of two people in the U.S. donating 40 gallons of blood.
Seventy-five-year-old Al Fischer reaches this milestone 58 years after he started giving blood. Only 83-year-old Maurice Wood has donated more blood than Fischer.
Fischer donates blood about six times a year. It is estimated that the blood donated by Fischer has helped almost 1,000 people.
Michigan Town to Promise Scholarships to All
A small rural school district where nine out of ten students are in financial need is offering high school graduates $5,000 a year for four years to attend college.
A ceremony will be held to launch the program to 25 students who will graduate next spring. All students will be covered by the new scholarship offer of up to $20,000.
This community is the first in Michigan to implement a program similar to the “Kalamazoo Promise.” This is an anonymously funded scholarship that attracts new residents to this city who want to have their children’s tuition paid at universities and community colleges in Michigan.
Watermelon Could Be Source of Ethanol Fuel
Watermelon is being shown to be a promising new source of renewable energy.
Leftover watermelons from the harvests of farms might be converted into as much as 2.5 million gallons of renewable ethanol fuel every year.
Every year farmers leave between 20 and 40 percent of their crop to rot in the fields. These are the undesirable watermelons, although they are actually perfectly good on the inside of the rinds. These are the melons that are oddly shaped or that have blemishes and won’t sell. Is is estimated that 360,000 tons of watermelons rot in fields each year.
Watermelon juice is approximately 10 percent sugar by volume. A team of researchers calculated they could make about 2.5 million gallons of ethanol each year from waste melons.
