best regards

According to a post in the Guardian, urban bees are healthier and produce better honey than do their rural counterparts. For some reason they seem to do better in cities than the countryside.

As a result, many beekeepers are moving their hives to city parks and gardens all over the world, including Chicago, Toronto, Paris, London, New York and more. Often this dovetails nicely with increasing efforts in creating rooftop gardens. The city hall in Chicago has one such garden on its roof and a number of beehives.

This year, laws were passed in France that allows private beekeepers to set up hives in the city and courses have sprung up for the general public in urban beekeeping.

While it’s not proven that this will steady the bee population once and for all, it is absolutely a big step in the right direction. Hurray for urban beekeepers

With the schools’ help, we can impact the diet or our children for the better and in much easier ways than you’d think.

Chef’s Ann Cooper and Jamie Oliver have been doing exactly that as they run their campaigns for healthier food in schools. There is even a sizable non-profit organization with the same goal, Healthy School Lunches.

The first step all of them fight for is to get the schools to actually offer healthy alternatives. Many schools are reluctant to do so as they believe the kids wont partake of them.

With the help of psychologists and other scientists, as reported by Ode magazine, a number of methods have been developed to increase consumption of healthy foods:

• Just having a salad bar nearly doubles consumption of fruit and vegetables.
• Placing fruit in a basked lit by lamps resulted in fruit sales increasing by more than half when compared to keeping them in a normal, unlit, steel bowl.
• When the salad bar was moved to the highest-traffic areas, consumption of salad increased to almost three times the amount before.

I’m sure there are many other ways to accomplish the goal but the main point here is to make the healthier options available and to present them as the first choice. If the fast food is set up front and the fruit and veggies are somewhere in the back as “healthy alternatives”, this isn’t likely to get good results. However, if we present the fruit and veggies prominently and put the fast food in the back as “unhealthy alternatives”, this can make all the difference.

The high prices often cited go up to 40 cents per kWh. A kWh (or kilo Watt hour) is enough power to light 10 x 100W lightbulbs for one hour. The cost of coal and oil is well below this price.

But Ken Zweibel at Renewable Energy World tells us the it’s not so simple. The price of solar energy is actually variable and 40 c/kWh is the upper limit.

In places with a lot of strong sunlight the price can go as low as 10c/kWh, which makes it easily competitive with any other method of generating energy.

The price of solar panels should continue their downwards price trend of 20% each time their supply is doubled, even as they are gaining in efficiency. At the same time coal and oil are becoming more and more expensive, so before long they will be unable to compete.

Image by Irish Typepad

The new law, accepted unanimously in Iceland’s parliament earlier this month, allows same-sex couples to get married, as opposed to only having a civil union.

This law has been a bone of contention within Iceland’s Lutherian church, which is the largest denomination in Iceland. However, the bishop of Iceland has urged all parish ministers to comply with the law and perform marriages regardless of the individuals’ sexes.

The happy couple have been in registered partnership since 2002 but as the new law came into effect on Sunday they took the chance to transform that into a legal marriage, though without a ceremony.

We wish the two all the best and hope our readers witness similar things in their own countries before long.

Image credit: Teegan

Don’t want to give too much away but it’s about a guy who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. Being who he (thinks) he is, he acts a revolutionary, staging a strike in his father’s warehouse and standing up for the rights of students in his high-school.

As the movie rolled by I realized that there is something romantic and almost antiquated about standing up for your rights in these ways. Unionizing, striking and revolutionizing is something most of us think of as happening by other people, in the past.

Today, anyone expecting and/or agitating a revolution in the western world would be considered rather wonky.

But all these tools are still available to us. Most of us have it rather good today but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we’d like to chance. We may not need to take drastic action but we can still learn from the revolutionaries and political agitators how to rally crowds, how to exert real influence on corporations and governments and how to transform our environments based on our ideals.

A revolution may not be necessary but there are still ideals to fight for, influence to be had and changes to be made. The tools are there, we just need to learn to use them again.

What they are about to do is to collect plastic from a number of marine habitats around the world that they then sort, clean and recycle into their new vacuums.

They are doing this for two reasons: There isn’t enough recycled plastic on land to satisfy their demand and there is too much plastic in the oceans where it is a problem. So they started this initiative to increase awareness of the lifecycle of plastics and the importance of using them in an environmentally conscious fashion.

Didn’t think I’d ever get excited about vacuum cleaners…

Rodale reports on research done on 138 Seventh Day Adventists, living in a community in the southwestern US. The group was chosen for study because it’s members are very consistent in their day to day lives, making it easier to rule out external influences.

What the researchers found shocked them. Despite not having access to the fish-sourced omega-3 oils, the vegetarians were happier on the average and has lower chances of mental issues.

“While dietary intake of EPA and DHA has an important role in brain function, we found no evidence that the absence of direct intake of these fatty acids in vegetarians adversely affects mood state,” the study reports. “These results challenge what is known about the link between dietary fats and brain function and suggest an unrecognized benefit of vegetarian diets.”

Bonnie Beezhold, PhD, MPH belives that this may not just be a matter of whether they eat meat or not but also how healthy the diet is outside of that.

They don’t just eliminate meat and replace it with unhealthy, meat-free processed foods, she adds. They incorporate lots of fruits and vegetables and round their meals out with a variety of other healthy foods like healthy oils and nuts that are rich in the plant-based omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). The diets are also low in arachidonic acid (AA), she says, which is found in factory-farmed meat and been associated with a host of problems, including mental health issues and inflammation in the body.

You can get most of the benefits without going full vegetarian though. Replace your factory-farmed meat with grass-fed organic meat to cut down on the level of AA, eat plenty of nuts to get those good omega-3 oils and switch your vegetable oil out for canola oil. This can take you a long way.

Normal reading glasses help them while seeing close but they need to be taken off to see further away.

Bifocals are glasses with two different strengths but that means a smaller field of view for each strength, which many find uncomfortable.

The high tech solution to these problem is emPower! These electronic glasses have been under development for 10 years by PixelOptic.

In automatic mode the glasses automatically increase in strength when one’s head is tilted down, as to read a newspaper for instance. When the head it tilted back up, the strength decreases and one can see long distances with full field of view also.

The wearer can also freeze a certain setting, which is convenient when you will be doing a lot of work up close but want to be able to tilt your head up without losing focus.

I wonder if the next step will be a laser that detects how far you are looking and how much the glasses need to correct the vision. What do you think?

Bifocals by SunflowerDave

The WWF has said they generally support fishfarms as long as they are up to spec and environmentally responsible (as reported by Reuters)

“The rapid expansion of the aquaculture industry has not come without impacts. However, when done responsibly, aquaculture’s impact on wild fish populations, marine habitats and water quality is minimal,”

But not only can the environmental impact be kept low, there are also human health considerations.

Dusko Zmijanjac, a manager at the Plankton fish farm, believes that farmed fish is safer for human consumption.

“Farmed fish is healthier than wild fish which gets everywhere, included into polluted areas,” he said. “Tests have never revealed the presence of heavy metals in our fish.”

According to Torgeir Edvardsen, of the European Aquaculture Technology and Innovation Platform, aquaculture will be a key factor in feeding Europe as it’s population continues to increase. Being more dependable than wild fish stocks, they provide more stable employment and need less space to make an impact.

“There is no question — aquaculture is the way of the future,”