2008: May 1st Good News (Singapore Gets Environmentally Friendlier Busses, Tropical Rainforests in Costa Rica Restored on Small Scale, more...)

Good Morning All,

Ever have one of those days where people around you just irritate the heck out of you, and you can't wait to get home? That was my day today. Fortunately, I got home, got to talk to my sweet heart, and relaxed into the good news of today. Good news always makes me feel better. :)

Before I get into the quick synopsys section, I wanted to let you all know I found a new good website. It's called Happy News. Here is the link, if you wish to check it out. I did not post any of the articles on this site, as I wished to share the site. :) http://www.happynews.com/index.htm

Today there are a full 10 stories. There isn't a real theme, so I'm just going to pick three stories to highlight for you. First, in Sweden, the government is becoming more gender neutral. They have adopted a walking woman cross walk sign, which will be available starting next year. Next, the government of Singapore reports that new environmentally friendly busses have been purchased. The busses surpass the Singapore emissions criteria by 40%! Third, in Costa Rica (one of the places I hope to visit some day), efforts to restore the rainforest have been successful on a small scale. This prompts scientists to believe that restoration on a larger scale is possible! :)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the news articles I have found for you today. I enjoyed relaxing as I found each one. See you tomorrow! Oh, and Happy May Day/International Labor Day.


Today's Top 5:
1. Sweden to Get Walking-women Sign (News24.com)
2. Dutch Robot Wins International LEGO Competition (New Kerala News India)
3. Singapore to Get Environmentally Kinder German-engineered Buses (Monsters and Critics)
4. Structure Billed as World's Longest Sea Bridge Opens in China (Earth Times)
5. Consumers May Get Benefits From a Fed Rate Pause (Yahoo News)



Honorable Mention:
1. Restoration of a Tropical Rain Forest Ecosystem Successful on Small-scale (Science Daily)
2. Woman, 84, Rescued After Spending Four Days Pinned Under Husband's Dead Body (Daily Mail UK)
3. Inexpensive Roof Vent Could Prevent Billions Of Dollars In Wind Damage (Science Daily)
4. David Blaine Breaks World Record for Holding One's Breath (San Francisco Chronicle)
5. North Las Vegas Girl Missing Since June 2006 May be in Wisconsin (Las Vegas Sun)



Today's Top 5:
1. Sweden to Get Walking-women Sign
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2315026,00.html
01/05/2008 09:16 - (SA)

Stockholm - Gender-conscious Sweden plans to make room for women on its crosswalk signs.
The government has ordered the National Road Administration to design a female alternative to the walking-man signs found at the Scandinavian nation's pedestrian crossings, a spokesperson said on Wednesday.
The new sign will show a woman instead of a man crossing the street, giving more gender balance to Swedish road signs, enterprise ministry spokesperson Kenneth Hultgren said.
The government was inspired by a campaign in the city of Mariestad, 300 kilometres southwest of Stockholm, to put up a walking woman sign created by a local artist, Hultgren said.
Unwilling to give Mariestad an exemption from the national standards on road signs, the government instead decided to introduce the new sign nationwide, he said.
The walking woman sign is expected to be introduced next year. It will be up to local authorities to decide whether to use the new symbol or the traditional walking man sign, which came into use in 1966, road administration spokesperson Anna Karin Bergstrom said.


2. Dutch Robot Wins International LEGO Competition
http://www.newkerala.com/one.php?action=fullnews&id=54985
1 May 2008

Amsterdam, May 1: A robot built entirely from LEGO bricks by Dutch students has won the LEGO robot championship held in Tokyo, the Dutch newswire ANP reported Thursday.
The robot, built by three students aged 11, 12 and 15 from Eindhoven in the southern Netherlands, was the best of a total of 56 teams originating from 23 countries.
Initially, some 10,000 teams registered for the international competition. All participating robots had to perform certain assignments, including placing a wind turbine or a solar panel or recycling a car.
The Dutch winning team icNRG ("I see energy") was supported by the Technical University of Eindhoven.




3. Singapore to Get Environmentally Kinder German-engineered Buses
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/business/news/article_1402910.php
May 1, 2008, 9:00 GMT

Singapore - Singapore is to become the first country in South-East Asia to obtain German-engineered buses designed to be kind to the environment and accessible to disabled passengers, a public transport firm said Thursday.
The first of the Mercedes-Benz buses is to hit the road in mid-May and another 66 are to be rolled out between August and December, the SMRT Corp said.
The vehicles, which cost about 300,000 Singapore dollars (223,000 US dollars), release fewer greenhouse gases than regular buses and can be lowered, making it easier for the elderly and wheelchair-bound passengers to board, SMRT chief executive Saw Phaik Hwa said.
The buses exceed the Land Transport Authority's current standards that require 40 per cent of all buses to be less polluting by 2010. The new bus beats the guidelines on greenhouse gas emissions by more than 40 per cent.
Harmful emissions from the buses are converted to nitrogen and water vapour, SMRT said.



4. Structure Billed as World's Longest Sea Bridge Opens in China
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/202576,structure-billed-as-worlds-longest-sea-bridge-opens-in-china.html
Posted : Thu, 01 May 2008 09:56:02 GMT
Author : DPA
Category : Technology

Beijing - China on Thursday opened what it touted as the world's longest sea bridge, establishing a new link to bustling Shanghai. The 36-kilometre-long structure spans Hangzhou Bay and connects Shanghai with Ningbo.
The 11.8-billion-yuan (1.7-billion-dollar) bridge cuts the driving distance between the two key cities of the Yangtze River Delta by 120 kilometres, the official news agency Xinhua said.
After a four-and-a-half-year construction, the six-lane bridge was inaugurated Thursday and was to open on a trial basis at midnight, Xinhua said.
It surpassed another Shanghai structure for the title of the longest sea bridge, beating out the 32.5-kilometre Donghai Bridge, which links China's largest city to the Yangshan deep-water port.
It also ranks among the longest bridges overall in the world, falling just short of what is considered the longest, the 38.4-kilometre Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Bridge in the southern US state of Louisiana.
Thirty per cent of the financing for the Hangzhou Bay project came from private investors, a first for such a large Chinese infrastructure project, Xinhua said.


5. Consumers May Get Benefits From a Fed Rate Pause http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080501/ap_on_bi_ge/fed_interest_rates
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
13 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - While the Federal Reserve's aggressive drive to lower interest rates appears to be over, there could be benefits for consumers in other places — like some relief from soaring gasoline and food costs.
ADVERTISEMENT "With the Fed on hold and the dollar firming, oil and gasoline and food prices may all top out some time in the next few months," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.
On Wednesday, the Fed cut interest rates for a seventh straight time. But the reduction was a much smaller quarter-point move — not the half-point and three-fourths-point moves of earlier this year. It pushed the federal funds rate down to 2 percent.
Commercial banks immediately followed suit by cutting the prime lending rate, the benchmark for millions of consumer and business loans, to 5 percent, the lowest level since late 2004.
That may be as low as consumer rates go during this Fed easing cycle because the central bank sent a number of signals that it believed it may have done enough to keep the economic slowdown from deepening into a severe recession.
Several analysts said the central bank was recognizing the realities of the situation that it may have done all it should do to try to boost growth through rate cuts, given growing threats from inflation.
"The Fed may have gotten to the point where it could start hurting economic prospects in terms of the value of the dollar and oil prices and grain prices," said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University. "It think it was time for the Fed to slow down and take a pause."
Lower U.S. interest rates tend to make the dollar's value against other currencies weaker because investors dump their U.S. holdings in favor of investments in other countries where they can earn a higher interest rate.
As the dollar falls, that tends to drive the cost of oil higher because oil is priced in dollars and producers start demanding higher prices to compensate for a weaker dollar. Those forces are also at work in terms of driving up other globally trade commodities such as metals and food including wheat and other grains.
With the Fed lowering the prospects for further rate cuts, the dollar can be expected to stabilize and perhaps rebound from the record lows it had hit in recent weeks against the euro and other currencies. That should help various commodities including oil and food to backtrack from their recent record highs, a process that may have already started.
Oil closed on Wednesday at $113.46 per barrel, its lowest point in more than two weeks and down significantly from the record near $120 per barrel set two days earlier. Analysts attributed part of the drop to Fed's signals Wednesday that it was pausing in its rate cuts.
Analysts said it will take time, however, for motorists to see the benefits in lower gasoline costs, which hit a record nationwide average of nearly $3.62 per gallon on Wednesday, according to a survey of stations by AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Analysts said gasoline is likely to keep heading higher for a time because refiners have not been able to raise their prices fast enough to recoup the crude oil surge that has already occurred.
But private economists believe that if the dollar does stabilize and oil and other commodities begin to fall in a sustained way, consumers will start seeing benefits in two to three months.
Of course, part of that forecast depends on the Fed deciding to stay on the sidelines and not cut rates further, an expectation that is heavily dependent on the course of the overall economy. There was some good news Wednesday in that the gross domestic product did expand at a tiny 0.6 percent rate in the first quarter rather than contracting.
But analysts say the country is not out of the woods in terms of avoiding a recession and many believe that GDP growth could turn negative in the current quarter. As long as the downturn is mild, analysts believe the Fed will be content to keep rates unchanged because of their worries that further rate cuts could fuel a rise in inflation that could be very hard to deal with, risking a repeat of the stagflation nightmare of the 1970s.
"The Fed lost control of inflation in the 1970s by pushing interest rates too low and boosting inflation expectations," said David Jones, chief economist at DMJ Advisors. "The Fed more than anything else wants to avoid a repeat of that episode."




Honorable Mentions:

1. Restoration of a Tropical Rain Forest Ecosystem Successful on Small-scale
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428133928.htm
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2008)

Half a century after most of Costa Rica's rain forests were cut down, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences (BTI) on the Cornell campus are attempting what many thought was impossible -- restoring a tropical rain forest ecosystem.
When the researchers planted worn-out cattle pastures in Costa Rica with a sampling of local trees in the early 1990s, native species of plants began to move in and flourish, raising the hope that destroyed rain forests could one day be replaced.
Ten years after the tree plantings, Cornell graduate student Jackeline Salazar counted the species of plants that took up residence in the shade of the new planted areas. She found remarkably high numbers of species -- more than 100 in each plot. And many of the new arrivals were also to be found in nearby remnants of the original forests.
"By restoring forests we hope not only to be improving the native forests, but we are helping to control erosion and helping the quality of life of the local people," said Carl Leopold, the William H. Crocker Scientist Emeritus at BTI. He pointed out that drinking water becomes more readily available when forests thrive because tree roots act as a sort of sponge, favoring rainwater seepage and preventing water running off hills and draining away.
Fully rescuing a rain forest may take hundreds of years, but Leopold, whose findings are published with Salazar in the March 2008 issue of Ecological Restoration, said the study's results are promising. "I'm surprised," he said. "We're getting impressive growth rates in the new forest trees."
The project started when Leopold partnered with colleagues at the Ithaca-based Tropical Forestry Initiative; in 1993 they began by planting mixtures of trees on worn-out pasture land. For 50 years the soil had been compacted under countless hooves, and its nutrients washed away. When it rained, Leopold said, the red soil appeared to bleed from the hillsides.
The group chose local rain forest trees for planting, collecting seeds from native trees in the community. "You can't buy [these] seeds," Leopold said. "So we passed the word around among our farmer neighbors." When a farmer reported a tree producing seeds, Leopold and his wife would ride out on horses to collect the seeds before hungry monkeys beat them to it.
The group planted mixtures of local tree species, trimming away the pasture grasses until the trees could take hold. This was the opposite of what commercial companies have done for decades, planting entire fields with a single type of tree to harvest for wood or paper pulp.
The trees the group planted were fast-growing, sun-loving species. After just five years, those first trees formed a canopy of leaves that shaded out the grasses underneath.
"One of the really amazing things is that our fast-growing tree species are averaging 2 meters of growth per year," Leopold said. He believes that microscopic soil fungi called mycorrhizae can take much of the credit. They have apparently survived in the soil and form a symbiosis with tree roots. Research at Cornell and BTI, he said, has shown that without mycorrhizae, many plants can't grow well.
The promising results of the project mean that mixed-species plantings can help jump-start a complex rain forest. Local farmers who use the same approach will reduce erosion of their land, while creating a forest that can be harvested sustainably, a few trees at a time.


2. Woman, 84, Rescued After Spending Four Days Pinned Under Husband's Dead Body
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=562992&in_page_id=1811
Last updated at 12:34pm on 30th April 2008

An elderly woman spent nearly four days pinned underneath her husband's body after he died of a heart attack.
Blanche Roberts was only found when the man who delivers the couple's newspapers became suspicious on seeing copies of newspapers piling up outside.
Bruce Pitts and his wife returned to the address just outside Marion, Illinois, a few hours after his round on Sunday, but got no answer when they repeatedly rang the doorbell.
Mr Pitts then eased open an unlocked side door and saw the couple about two feet inside.
Rescuer: Delivery man Bruce Pitt, who had qualms after copies of his paper piled up
Mrs Roberts, a frail and petite 84-year-old, looked helplessly back at him as she lay with her right leg pinned beneath the body of her 77-year-old husband Fred.
He had died last Wednesday evening of a heart attack after mowing the lawn.
Mr Pitts described Mr Roberts as a "good-sized man".
"She was not scared, wasn't panicking," Mr Pitts said. "She was conscious, talking. Just peaceful. It was remarkable."
Her only request was for water – and she described her husband as "sleeping", he said.
Mrs Roberts was taken to a hospital nearby and is reported to be recovering well after her ordeal.


3. Inexpensive Roof Vent Could Prevent Billions Of Dollars In Wind Damage
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428141822.htm
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2008)

Hurricanes often lift the roofs off buildings and expose them to havoc and damaging conditions, even after the worst of the wind has passed. A local roofer, Virginia Tech faculty members from architecture and engineering, and a graduate student have devised an inexpensive vent that can reduce roof uplift on buildings during high winds, even a hurricane. Low-sloped roof buildings around Wytheville, Va., where Virginia Tech alumnus Chuck Johnson and his brother, Pat Johnson, operate a roofing business, have sprouted foot-high plastic structures that look vaguely like alien technology – a flying saucer connected by three narrow columns to a dome.
Chuck Johnson, an irresistible pitchman, has also persuaded Travel Centers of America in South Carolina, the Gaston County government complex in North Carolina, a Nestlé’s distribution center in Tel Aviv, and VTKnowledgeWorks in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center to use the revolutionary Venturi Vent Technology (V2T™), designed for membrane roofing systems.
Hurricane Andrew (August 24, 1992) resulted in $26 billion worth of damage. It was the first big event that created changes in the roofing industry, said Johnson. “Now, so many fasteners are required that roofing is very expensive and the integrity of the deck is compromised,” he said. “Plus, if you ever have to take the roof off, you have to take it off in pieces and recycling the material is impossible. It’s all very labor intensive.”
But the V2T system could revolutionize the way roofing is done, Johnson said. “We are using physics instead of mechanical fasteners or adhesives. The harder the wind blows, the better it works.”
The physics is the Venturi effect. You know – wind forced through an opening speeds up. Covered porches create a breeze. Winds blow harder through mountain passes and between city buildings. Cars at any speed split the air, so when you crack the car window to get rid of cigarette smoke, the lower pressure outside sucks the smoke out the window.
Sitting at their kitchen table about six years ago, the Johnson brothers asked, “What if we could split the wind blowing over a roof and create a vacuum to suck the roof down instead of up?”
The result was V2T.
V2T splits the airflow, speeding up the wind that is forced through the vent (between the upper saucer and the lower dome), which drops the pressure and creates a vacuum. The saucer has a hole on the bottom and the columns are tubes from the saucer to the dome and the underside of the roof membrane. The wind pressure draws the air out of the saucer and from under the membrane, pulling the membrane down tight against the substrate. “The pressure being created under the membrane is lower than the uplifting pressure of the wind over the roof. The result is a low pressure condition that prevents the uplift and detachment of the roof membrane,” said Jim Jones, associate professor of architecture at Virginia Tech.
The Johnsons took their idea to Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), which referred them to Jones. “Their concept was a tube shaped vent that would rotate to catch the wind,” Jones said.
He saw that keeping up with changing wind direction could be a problem and decided to investigate whether the Venturi concept could be applied to an omni-directional design “so it wouldn’t matter which way the wind came from.”
Jones and his graduate student, Elizabeth Grant, started exploring the geometry of a pyramidal base with an inverted pyramid on top – like an hour-glass with a space in the middle for the wind to pass through. They presented that idea to Demetri Telionis, the Frank Maher Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, an aerodynamics expert, who suggested a similar but rounded shape – the dome and saucer. “Once we decided on the geometry, the fine tuning became Grant’s thesis. She created a model with an adjustable distance between the dome and bowl and began wind-tunnel tests.”
Grant was already an experienced architect and designer whose credentials included affiliation with the Roof Consultants Institute. She made the project her master’s degree research with the other members of the design team as her thesis advisors.
With funding from the CIT and the Johnsons’ company, Acrylife, the team designed and built several prototypes – with different shapes, distances, and connecting columns, with the goal of enhancing the vacuum -- and tested them in Virginia Tech’s stability wind tunnel, where winds can reach 150 miles an hour, and in the NASA full scale wind tunnel at Langley Air Force Base. These tests demonstrated the ability of the vent to generate low pressure that could be used to counter the uplifting forces from high winds.
The team figured out how to take a force of nature and harness it, using geometry and physics, “So the very force that could destroy a building is used to save it,” Grant said.
The height of the dome was partially dictated by consideration of rain and snow levels on a roof, Jones said. “The hole was placed in the bottom of the bowl to avoid admitting water. So with the hole in the top unit, the columns had to be hollow.”
Jones said at least two questions remain to be answered. One is concerned with the spacing of the units. Although Johnson has a degree of confidence in the current spacing, he agrees. “It is important to verify this with testing in order to take out the guess work. We need to establish a set of rules that define where the units should be placed for each different roof type.”
Jones suggests, “To maximize the economic benefits of the V2T, spacing should depend on a variety of factors, such as building geometry, parapet wall height, and infiltration rate through the roof deck; and therefore some further study is needed.”
The second question, Jones said, is “What happens to the vacuum that holds the membrane down if there are cracks in the substrate or sub roof? We have scheduled a series of wind tunnel tests to better understand this situation as we begin to develop design guidelines for the system,” Jones said.
UL testing is also scheduled for June.
Meanwhile, also with an introduction and funding from the CIT, Acrysoft is developing hardware and software to provide real-time monitoring of the vent. A sensor board developed in conjunction with the Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program will measure the pressures created in the vent and the forces on and under the roof membrane, said Mark Howard, a partner at Acrysoft. “This information has not been available.”
He said such data is critical to engineers. “They want this data before their company invests in a roof system,” said Howard. The sensor, along with cameras, will substantiate initial performance and provide long-term monitoring, “for example, in case there is a tear during an AC repair or some other activity on the roof,” Howard said.
Although the Johnson brothers have been putting their systems on roofs, it would be better if it were provided to roofers by the manufacturers of the roof membrane materials as part of a complete roof assembly, said Chuck Johnson.
Adapted from materials provided by Virginia Tech.



4. David Blaine Breaks World Record for Holding One's Breath
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/04/29/entertainment/e165221D65.DTL
By TARA BURGHART, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, April 30, 200815:09 PDT Chicago (AP) --

David Blaine took on a Zen-like appearance in the water tank as the minutes ticked by during his attempt to set a new breath-holding record. Oprah Winfrey, however, was anything but calm.
She fidgeted in her chair, pursed her lips, placed her head in her hands, and kept seeking reassurance from the doctor at her side about the 35-year-old magician's persistently high heart rate.
"I'll be glad when it's over. I don't like suspense," she told the audience during a commercial break.
Soon enough, Winfrey — and Blaine — could breathe a lot easier.
Submerged in a water-filled sphere on the stage of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" during a live broadcast, Blaine held his breath for 17 minutes and 4 seconds. That bested the previous record of 16 minutes and 32 seconds, set Feb. 10 by Switzerland's Peter Colat, according to Guinness World Records.
Blaine had a smile on his face soon after his head rose above the water and he took several deep gulps of air. Within about a minute, he was able to hold a microphone and tell Winfrey, "I feel great," later adding that breaking the record was a fulfillment of "a lifelong dream."
Before his attempt, Blaine was allowed to inhale pure oxygen for up to 30 minutes, although he inhaled for only 23 minutes. A Guinness World Records judge was on hand to certify the feat.
In May 2006 as a finale to a week spent in an aquarium with an air mask at New York's Lincoln Center, Blaine tried to set another type of breath-holding record. Without breathing pure oxygen beforehand, he tried to break the existing record of 8 minutes, 58 seconds for an attempt of that type.
But he had to be rescued shortly after 7 minutes when he was unconscious and having convulsions.
Blaine was in much better shape after Wednesday's attempt. He walked unassisted down a set of stairs to join Winfrey for an interview. He told her he had doubted while in the water whether he'd be able to break the record because of his high heart rate.
The lower the heart rate, the less oxygen is consumed.
Blaine had expected his heart rate to drop perhaps as low as under 20 beats per minute while he was in the water. But for most of the attempt, it was over 100 beats per minute, then started dropping and fluctuating rapidly during the last 2 1/2 minutes.
While training, Blaine said he would meditate to lower his heart rate. But amid the hubbub of a live studio audience, and with a record at stake, Blaine admitted he had trouble forgetting his surroundings.
Earlier in the show, Winfrey noted that her boyfriend, Stedman Graham, was making a rare appearance in the audience because he's such a fan of Blaine's work.
For Winfrey, however, the endurance feat was "nerve-racking to witness," she told Blaine.
Blaine joked about coming back on her show again and again to get used to the surroundings, lower his heart rate and set new breath-holding records.
But first, Blaine said he plans to try to break the world record for staying awake. The current record is 11 1/2 days, he said. However, Guinness said it no longer acknowledges such attempts because of health concerns.



5. North Las Vegas Girl Missing Since June 2006 May be in Wisconsin
http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/news/2008/apr/30/north-las-vegas-girl-missing-june-206-may-be-wisco/
By Mary Manning · April 30, 2008 · 6:26 PM

A girl found in a Green Bay, Wis., house resembles Everlyse Cabrera, the North Las Vegas toddler who has been missing for almost two years, authorities said.
North Las Vegas Police are waiting for DNA test results to determine whether the child is Everlyse, who was 2 1/2 years old when she disappeared from a North Las Vegas foster home on June 10, 2006. Her foster parents told police that she must have unlocked the door and walked away into the night.
Local authorities were notified after Green Bay detectives found the parentless child during drug bust and someone in the house told police the girl had come from Nevada, North Las Vegas Police spokesman Mark Hoyt said. Authorities in Wisconsin saw that the child fit Everlyse’s profile.
The photos of the Wisconsin girl show some similarities to an old photo of Everlyse, but they are not an obvious match, Hoyt said.