Caribbean Sea Turtle Sea Aquarium wallpaper
$200 Million for Smart Grid Ideas
The program, called the Ecomagnination Challenge ( sponsored by G.E.), is aimed at fostering ideas that will help speed up the development of the so-called “smart grid” — that is, what energy experts say is a much-needed digital upgrade to the nation’s aging and largely analog electric system.
The goal is to foster ideas and innovative new technology that will improve the efficiency of the grid, maximize penetration of clean energy into the grid and help electricity customers use energy more wisely. The last goal is also a way of saying – to save people money.
Ecohome Improvement, Inc. to Offer ClearLite(R)’s ArmorLite(R) A Safer CFL(TM) Product Line
Clear-Lite Holdings, Inc. (“ClearLite”) a leading innovator of eco-friendly lighting and the appreciably safer ArmorLite(R) CFL, announced that its line of ArmorLite(R) A Safer CFL(TM) product line will soon be offered on http://www.ecohomeimprovement.com, an ecommerce site that offers ecological and healthy home improvement products.
Based in Berkeley, California, Ecohome Improvement, Inc. offers ecological and healthy home improvement products that are inspired by innovation, driven by sustainability and enhanced by the Ecohome experience.
The special coating/container inside the bulb keeps the mercury contained even if the bulb shell breaks. Ecohome also makes a line of LED lighting which they have on their web site in use in a kitchen.
A bag and a trap. Oil spill invention is a keeper
“I’m always inventing something,” said the gruff 61-year-old captain of an oil supertanker. “When I was a boy, a wristwatch was never safe in my hands. I’d dismantle anything to see how it ran.”
So when Matherne learned of the runaway BP oil leak, he considered it a personal challenge. He drove to a hardware store, bought some window screens and PVC pipe, and began to tinker.
The result is the first device that, according to BP engineers and Coast Guard officials, promises a faster, cheaper and more efficient way to remove spilled oil than traditional skimmers in the Gulf of Mexico.
Matherne’s apparatus looks like a trash bag in a big crab trap, but it works like a sieve to snag sludge and oil while seawater passes through. BP officials say they aim to build and deploy 100 units by the end of the month, and add more after that if needed.
BP and the Coast Guard have been receiving lots of advice from the public on how to handle the spill including throwing dynamite at the oil slicks – which would do zero to degrade the oil. My favorite is blowing up the oil well itself with a nuclear bomb – which would not only not do anything to help but would make the spill worse in addition to adding nuclear waste to an already catastrophic disaster.
Workers on Doomed Rig Voiced Concern About Safety
A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oil rig exploded showed that many of them were concerned about safety practices and feared reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems.
In the survey, commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and that they “often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.”
Some workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, “which they believed was as a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance,” according to the survey, one of two Transocean reports obtained by The New York Times.
“At nine years old, Deepwater Horizon has never been in dry dock,” one worker told investigators. “We can only work around so much.”
“Run it, break it, fix it,” another worker said. “That’s how they work.”
According to a separate 112-page equipment assessment also commissioned by Transocean, many key components — including the blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves — had not been fully inspected since 2000, even though guidelines require its inspection every three to five years.
The report cited at least 26 components and systems on the rig that were in “bad” or “poor” condition.
Congressional leader John Boehner (R-OH) recently exclaimed the way to national economic recovery was to do away with all new regulation. From the meltdown of Wall St to the pet food tragedy of 2007 and now the BP Gulf spill there has been something akin to a religious zealotry that screams deregulation is the key to national prosperity and utopia, regardless of how many times that notion has been proven catastrophic and in many cases deadly.
tangledwing 