From WhoFish.org
Highlights for this weekend include:
-- Statewide, July 4th Celebrations
-- Esplanade, Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular
-- Marblehead, Marblehead Festival of Arts
-- Brockton, Brockton Fair
-- Boston, Boston Harborfest
More...
Source: Environmental Working Group (EWG)
In a new investigation of 952 name-brand sunscreens, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that 4 out of 5 sunscreen products offer inadequate protection from the sun, or contain ingredients with significant safety concerns. Leading brands were the worst offenders: None of market leader Coppertone’s 41 sunscreen products met EWG’s criteria for safety and effectiveness, and only 1 of 103 products from Banana Boat and Neutrogena, the second- and third-largest manufacturers, are recommended by EWG.
Many products on the market present obvious safety and effectiveness concerns, including one of every seven that does not protect from UVA radiation This problem is aggravated by the fact that FDA has not finalized comprehensive sunscreen safety standards they began drafting 30 years ago. Overall we identified 143 products that offer very good sun protection with ingredients that present minimal health risks to users. Find out which in our best and worst lists.
More Americans than ever are using sunscreen to protect from sunburn and guard against skin cancer. Top choices include products with high SPF ratings, and that are waterproof or that advertise “broad spectrum” protection. Most people trust that the claims on the bottle will ensure that the product truly protects their health and their families’. Nothing could be less certain.
EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Safer Sunscreens (PDF; 96 KB)
Source: Hesperian Foundation
Drawing the connections between people’s health and the environments in which we live, this groundbreaking book empowers health promoters, development workers, educators, activists, community leaders and ordinary people to take charge of their communities’ health.
…
Years in the making, this comprehensive guide has twenty-three chapters which break down the broad overview of environmental issues and concerns into specific examples of how they affect peoples’ health, and how communities have organized to improve their environment and thus their own lives. These chapters include: Promoting Environmental Health; Environmental Rights and Justice; Protecting Community Water; Building Toilets; Mining and Health; Solid Waste: Turning a Health Risk into a Resource; Preventing and Reducing Harm from Toxics; Sustainable Farming; Restoring Land and Planting Trees, The False Promise of Genetically-Engineered Foods; and Clean Energy.
Eighty-two specific stories from communities around the world enliven the chapters, showing the environmental challenges faced, and what people and grassroots organizations have done to empower themselves and transform their communities. The book also includes 22 activities and 40 easy-to-build “how-to” projects.
June 23, 2008
By By Robert A. Weinberg and Anthony L. Komaroff
Newsweek
New research explores the complex interactions that cause our most dreaded disease. A look into some of the steps you can take to reduce your risk.
We've known for a long time that a high-fat diet, obesity and lack of exercise can increase the risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes, two conditions that affect millions of Americans. What we are finding out now is that those same lifestyle factors also play an important role in cancer. That's the bad news. The good news is that you can do something about your lifestyle. If we grew thinner, exercised regularly, avoided diets rich in red meat (substituting poultry, fish or vegetable sources of protein) and ate diets rich in fruits and vegetables, and stopped using tobacco, we would prevent 70 percent of all cancers.
The strongest evidence of the importance of lifestyle in cancer is that most common cancers arise at dramatically different rates in different parts of the globe. Several cancers that are extremely common in the United States--colon, prostate and breast cancer--are relatively rare in other parts of the world, occurring only 1/10th or 1/20th as often. Equally striking, when people migrate from other parts of the world to the United States, within a generation their cancer rates approach those of us whose families have lived in this country for a long time. Even if people in other parts of the world stay put, but adopt a U.S. lifestyle, their risk of cancer rises; as Japanese have embraced Western habits, their rates of colon, breast and prostate cancer have skyrocketed.
What is it about our lifestyle that raises the risk of many types of cancer? The main culprits seem to be the Western diet, obesity and physical inactivity. While we've known about the importance of tobacco and cancer for more than 50 years, we are just beginning to understand how diet, a healthy body weight and regular exercise can protect us against cancer.
A striking example of the profound influence of diet was reported last summer in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Doctors determined the eating habits of patients with colon cancer in the years following surgical removal of the cancer. Over the next five years, those who ate a traditional Western diet had a threefold greater likelihood of developing a recurrence of the disease than did those who ate a "prudent" diet rich in fruits and vegetables and including only small amounts of red meat. How had diet affected these patients? The surgery clearly had not removed all their colon-cancer cells: prior to the surgery, some cells had already spread from the primary tumor. The Western diet had somehow stimulated the growth of these small deposits of residual cancer cells.
The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.
The Library will switch to the EBSCOHost version of Mental Measurements Yearbook on July 1, 2008 when our Ovid/Silverplatter Mental Measurements Yearbook database subscription expires.
From WhoFish.org - Local Events/Activities
Highlights for this weekend include:
-- Marshfield, New England Wild West Fest
-- Salisbury, Sand and Sea Festival
-- Wayland, BubbleMania!
-- Norton, Winslow Shire Faire
-- Mansfield, Air Race Classic & Family Festival
More...
New research commissioned by JISC and carried out by Ipsos MORI suggests that students are starting to mix their social networking sites with their academic studies and inviting tutors and lecturers into their virtual space.
The research builds upon on an initial study – Student Expectations - carried out last year when 500 students were asked to indicate their expectations of technology provision when entering into higher education.
This new data is based on students now that they are studying as first years at higher education institutions, compared to the previous study when they were still at school.
Key findings show that:
-- General use of social networking sites is still high (91% use them regularly or sometimes). Frequency of use has increased now that they are at university with a higher proportion claiming to be regular users (80%) – up from 65% when they were at school/college
-- 73% use social networking sites to discuss coursework with others; with 27% on at least a weekly basis
-- Of these, 75% think such sites as useful in enhancing their learning
-- Attitudes towards whether lecturers or tutors should use social networking sites for teaching purposes are mixed, with 38% thinking it a good idea and 28% not. Evidence shows that using these sites in education are more effective when the students set them up themselves; lecturer-led ones can feel overly formal
-- Despite students being able to recognise the value of using these sites in learning, only 25% feel they are encouraged to use Web 2.0 features by tutors or lecturers
-- 87% feel university life in general is as, or better than, expected especially in terms of their use of technology, with 34% coming from the Russell Group of universities saying their expectations were exceeded
-- 75% are able to use their own computer on all of their university’s systems with 64% of students from lower income households assuming that they are able to take their own equipment, perhaps due to lack of affordability and ownership.
To read more: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/studentexpectations.aspx
June 6, 2008
By Ben Arnoldy, The Christian Science Monitor
Quartz, the raw material for solar panels, is one of the most abundant minerals on earth. But for years, the solar industry has faced a bottleneck in processing quartz into polysilicon, a principal material used in most solar panels. The problem stalled a steady decline in prices for solar panels.
Now the silicon shortage may be coming to an end, predict some solar analysts, thanks to new factories coming online.
If true, the price for solar panel modules could start falling by as much as a third by 2010, says Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, Mass. That's good news for an industry that remains one of the most expensive power sources.
Global demand for solar panels is growing at about 50 percent per annum, says Mr. Bradford, but the polysilicon supply for solar will grow by 80 percent for each of the next couple of years.
The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.
June 6, 2008
By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
They like the cold, they don't need much oxygen, and you can fit 62 trillion of them into a teaspoon.
They're also 120,000 years old.
Those are the salient characteristics of a new species of ultrasmall bacteria discovered deep inside a glacier by researchers at Penn State University.
The Chryseobacterium greenlandensis were isolated from an ice core from 1.8 miles beneath the surface of a glacier in Greenland.
Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, the lead researcher on the Penn State team, said the new species adds one more sliver of enlightenment to the vast and mostly unexplored universe of microorganisms.
Microbes make up a third of all living material on Earth, Dr. Loveland-Curtze said, "yet fewer than 8,000 microbes have been described out of the approximately 3 million that are presumed to exist."
The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.
From WhoFish.org Local Events and Activities
Highlights for this weekend include:
. Boston, Chinatown Main Street Festival
. Woburn, 2nd Annual WorldFest!
. Beverly, 7th Annual Arts Fest
