Right out of the mouths of snakes

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 2 Comments

Getty; iStock; Photo Illustration by Adam Cholewa

The venom of the temple viper, or Tropidolaemus wagleri, causes a mouse to stop breathing, its muscles paralyzed. It dies within minutes, and it is this phenomenon, or at least the paralytic quality, that made scientists realize its potential as a skin cream.

The Canadian cosmetics company Euoko, which launched the snake venom cream Y-30 Intense Lift Concentrate, claims it works in a similar way to Botox, which paralyzes the muscles that cause facial wrinkles. Unlike Botox, which is injected, Y-30 comes in cream form. Its serpentine qualities are part of what makes it so attractive, explains Alessandra Bordon, a Vancouverite in her mid-30s. She applies the cream nightly, just before she goes to bed. “When I heard they were using snake venom, I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Now I’ve got to try this.’ ”

Those who share Bordon’s sentiments might first want to consider the price. Costing $525, it works out to $17.50 per millilitre. But that doesn’t seem to have deterred the excitement over the cream. Described on fashion blogs and in the media as “Botox in a bottle,” a “miracle drug” or “better than Botox,” the cream produces serious results, says Daniella Durov, a sales representative at the Toronto upscale retailer Andrews, which carries the cream. “Our clients all come back and they love it. They can’t be without it, not even for a week.”

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They're drinking what?

By Alex Shimo - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 45 Comments

The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.

The alarming comment from the 15-year-old mirrors a growing number of news reports about teenagers and children drinking the antiseptic hand-cleaning products. Most hand sanitizers have an alcoholic content between 60 and 90 per cent, which means that even small amounts have led to a number of cases of alcohol poisoning in younger children. That percentage is much higher than even that of most hard liquors, giving it an appeal to kids looking for a quick high, explains Jane Wells, a drama teacher at Toronto’s after-school Care Program. Wells has come to know a lot about this subject: she discovered that a group of eight- and nine-year-olds drank hand sanitizer at school just before she took them on a school walk. When she noticed them acting strange and giggling, they first told her they had been drinking alcohol, but after some probing, confessed it was really the hand cleaner. They told her they’d been enticed by the promise of alcohol “right on the bottle,” she says. Continue…

Jill Greenberg, under fire again

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 2 Comments

Controversy flared up again this month over Canadian photographer Jill Greenberg. This time it was her Time magazine cover shot of Fox News host Glenn Beck. Filling the frame, the television commentator scowls at the camera, pulling a face and sticking out his tongue. Beck looks mean and angry, and the accompanying article suggests he really is: it criticizes, in the words of the Time magazine reporter, his emotional, “political rant racket,” right-wing style of commentary.

The photo fits the content to a T, and yet Greenberg’s assignment raised a few eyebrows: some wondered why the TV host had let himself be photographed by the Montreal-born photographer. “Why are Republicans still letting Jill Greenberg take their pictures?” asked John Cook at gawker.com. Good question. It’s not Greenberg’s credentials that are in doubt—she’s renowned for her intense, highly stylized shots of celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gwen Stefani, Jon Stewart, Clint Eastwood. It’s more her opinions: Greenberg has strong ones and isn’t afraid to make her photographs deliver them. Continue…

That's not funny!

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 47 Comments

In December 2007, Chris Forcand was arrested in his Toronto apartment and charged with luring an underage girl, possessing a dangerous weapon and other related offences. Forcand, then 53, had posted nude photos of himself in Internet chat rooms and tried to proposition young girls. After some of those lurid conversations were sent to members of his church, Toronto police’s Child Exploitation Section was called in. Forcand was later sentenced to 12 months. The cyber-vigilantes who uncovered his activities and brought about the arrest did not reveal their identities. But subsequent reports linked them to the Internet group Anonymous, which grew out of a message board site, 4chan.org, that is arguably one of the odder places you’ll find online.

If you’ve never heard of 4chan, you’re probably still aware of some of its actions. Its users have created some of today’s most popular Internet memes, such as Rickrolling, which blasts people’s computer screens with a link to the Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up, and lolcats, those photos of cutesy felines accompanied by broken English captions like “I can has Cheezburger?” (itself an irritating slang called lolspeak). Remember the buzz about the Chocolate Rain song, by Tay Zonday? Its popularity partly stemmed from a joke—channers decided to boost its ratings because of its absurd lyrics and melody; it was eventually covered by John Mayer and others. With more than 300 million page views per month, 4chan can create news simply on the basis of size. When something becomes a trend on the site, it will likely hit your computer screen soon, explains Tim Hwang, a research associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

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Not recommended if you have cats

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 3 Comments

Designers and celebrities have a new eco-sustainable, authentic material to champion: cardboard. Long derided as a “hobo’s IKEA,” it’s being used to make, among other things, furniture, handbags, pianos, even bridges. There are horse-print cardboard wall coverings in the changing rooms of Stella McCartney’s Paris store; English actor Colin Firth’s London-based furniture shop sells corrugated cardboard chairs, and the elite design firm Vitra offers Frank Gehry’s “Easy Edges” cardboard line.

In the upscale Toronto restaurant Mildred’s Temple Kitchen, cardboard stools complement leather sofas with suede and satin pillows. Designed by Vancouver-based Molo, these iconic “Softseating” pieces are now in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Installed in the restaurant last November, the stools no longer look new: cardboard tends to look “pretty beaten up” very quickly, says restaurant manager Jane McMahon, which is “apparently part of the appeal.”

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Fine art and howitzers

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 1 Comment

The heads of a rabbit and a rat, sculpted in bronze, have been at the centre of a diplomatic furor in recent weeks. The animal heads, about 250 years old, were about to be auctioned off as part of Yves Saint Laurent’s estate, a sale that was first condemned by the Chinese government, then sabotaged by a collector who made the winning bid but refused to pay, saying he had acted out of a sense of Chinese patriotism. Indeed, the sculptures symbolize a moment of humiliation in China’s history: they are part of a set of 12 taken from the emperor’s summer palace after Anglo-French forces burned and ransacked the building in 1860. Beijing has claimed the moral high ground, saying the bronzes are part of the birthright of the Chinese people and should be returned. But where are the others? Five are missing, two are owned privately, and the remaining five—despite Beijing’s high-minded indignation—are in the hands of a secretive Chinese state-owned munitions manufacturing company that has flouted U.S. laws on arms trafficking and has come under intense worldwide criticism for fuelling human rights abuses.

Founded by the Chinese army, and run by the elite in the Communist party, Poly Technologies—which has interests in real estate as well as manufacturing and mining—has arms trading offices in several unstable or despotic countries including Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan and Burma. It has faced worldwide criticism for its arms trading on several occasions, most recently for dealings with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. In April 2008, a 15,000-ton freighter loaded with Poly’s guns and ammunition was anchored in the port of Durban. Its final destination was Zimbabwe, and with many human rights experts worried that the cargo would be used against Mugabe’s opponents, South African dockworkers refused to unload the arms. The freighter left South Africa, but the fate of the weapons remains unclear. China promised that the ship had gone home. Other reports, however, say it headed to Angola, and the arms were then transported by air to Zimbabwe.

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A pint of bureaucracy, please

By Alex Shimo - Friday, March 13, 2009 at 6:59 PM - 27 Comments

The New Brunswick government is now in the beer business, this week introducing two light ales—Selection Lager and Selection Light.

It is the first beer produced by a government in Canada, and officials say the move is a way to support sagging sales, as many New Brunswickers cross into neighbouring Quebec to take advantage of their cheaper prices. So why does the government think people will drink its brand? The price helps. In New Brunswick, as part of an effort to prevent binge drinking, beers are not allowed to sell for less than $20.55 a dozen. Exceptions can be made that allow stores to sell at a lower sale price, which the government is using to sell Selection for $18.67 a 12-pack.

The new brew has angered many in the industry, who worry it will cut into their market share. “There are a lot of draconian laws about alcohol in New Brunswick,” says Jesse Vergen, executive chef of the Saint John Ale House in Fredericton. The market is overly regulated, Vergen says, and it is difficult to import beers from the rest of Canada, let alone other countries. “The government should be working on opening up the market rather than making a mass market beer.”

To make the beer, the government hired Moosehead Breweries. The result is a beer, sold in cans, that tastes almost identical to Moosehead Light, says Vergen.

To get a better taste for it, Macleans.ca asked a few local experts to review the brew: Continue…

Is the threat of climate change exaggerated?

By Alex Shimo - Friday, March 13, 2009 at 6:25 PM - 27 Comments

A growing number of people think the risk of climate change is exaggerated, according to a Gallop poll. About 4 out of 10 Americans think the media overestimate the threat, the highest in a decade of polling. Although the majority still believe the media get it right or underestimate the problem, this number has been falling, while those who think its overblown is rising.

What’s ironic about these stats is that they almost directly precede a statement by hundreds scientists that climate change is actually worse than we originally thought. Meeting in Copenhagen on Thursday, nearly 2,000 researchers issued a statement that global warming is not only “accelerating” beyond the worse predictions, but the changes were threatening to trigger “irreversible” climate shifts on the planet.” These statements, which update the the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, offer stark forecasts. The panel previously predicted a sea level rise of 18 to 59 centimetres by the end of the century. Those figures have now been revised upwards, to between 50 centimetres to one metre. When a consensus of international scientists warns that the problem is worse than predicted, the media doesn’t need to exaggerate: accepting the facts is hard enough.

Making fun of Canadian history

By Alex Shimo - Friday, March 13, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 13 Comments

Was Lester B. Pearson too nice to be prime minister? Was John Diefenbaker a mad, bug-eyed egotist? And was Pierre and Margaret Trudeau’s marital relationship a little like that of father and daughter? These are the sorts of questions 25-year-old Kate Beaton gently probes in her series of comics on Canadian history, which are unusual enough to have sparked the sort of praise most writers spend a lifetime cultivating.

Originally from Cape Breton, Beaton is a Toronto-based cartoonist who has fans ranging from award-winning graphic novelists to geeky comic nerds. In the little over a year she’s been doing the comics, her work has been talked about on the website Wonkette and in Bitch magazine; a reviewer for Wired magazine called Beaton’s the “funniest comic that I’ve read in awhile.” Recently Daily Show writer Sam Means approached her to illustrate a children’s book he is writing. About 10 other agents and publishers have asked her to write a book, but so far she’s refused. Still finding her feet, Beaton wants to find out more about the industry so she doesn’t get shortchanged. Also, since she hasn’t yet drawn enough to fill a book, she doesn’t want to become “overwhelmed.”

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Cash for Clunkers

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 8:12 PM - 12 Comments

Ford Motor Co. has asked the Canadian government to provide a $3,500 incentive to consumers who buy a new car in 2009. The initiative is supposed to stimulate the flagging auto-industry, and get older vehicles off the road. Ford CEO David Mondragon said they would be replaced by cleaner and safer vehicles.

The scheme has been sold as a win-win: good for the environment and economy. Based on the German model, it will likely stimulate the car industry – in Germany, car sales are up 22 per cent from the year before, and are at their highest level in 10 years. The scheme is so successful that many other countries are thinking of implementing something similar - Britain says a cash incentive scheme is on the horizon, and France, Italy and Spain all offer a similar cash for clunkers program. In the US, a similar proposal didn’t make it into the stimulus package, but has strong support from many in Congress.

The European experience suggests the program is good for job creation. Whether it’s good for the environment is another matter. While emissions of newer cars are lower than older cars – they aren’t that much lower. Between 1987 – 2005, fuel efficiency improved by 24 per cent. Which adds up to an approximate improvement of 1.3 per cent per year, depending on the age of your car. When you factor in the carbon cost of producing a new car, you can see that it’s only going to make a real difference to your vehicle emissions if you have a very old clunker and you buy a very clean, green car. The problem is the people who own clunkers are generally not about to buy a brand new vehicle, even with the incentive. If you have a rust bucket, it’s most likely because you are cash-constrained, and government cash will only take you so far. Considering all these factors, many greenies say this isn’t really going to help the environment much at all. One worked out the cost of the incentive, and said you’d get as much value for money by reclassifying dollar bills as biomass and burning them in power stations. Would that be green power? One can only guess.

To China for a cure

By Alex Shimo - Monday, March 9, 2009 at 12:25 PM - 5 Comments

China is not normally considered a world leader in surgical advances, but according to a number of its doctors (and the Canadian patients they’ve treated), it has leapfrogged ahead in stem cell treatments. A growing number of people are travelling to China for a $30,000 experimental treatment: stem cell injections. Most, like New Brunswicker Jean Christophe Haas, 40, decide to go because they have a debilitating illness and there isn’t much that Western medicine can do for them.

Haas has Machado-Joseph disease (MJD), a terminal neuromuscular disease that affects the body in a similar way to Parkinson’s, paralyzing it gradually. Although he was diagnosed 20 years ago, it took some years for the symptoms to become noticeable. At first, only his sense of balance and his coordination were affected. Then his speech began to suffer and he started slurring his words. In 2004, he had to stop work as an army mechanic because his motor skills were no longer up to par and, in the past couple of years, he started seeing double. His family felt an overwhelming sense of panic, especially because Haas’s mother had the same disease, and his grandmother died of it. His desperation was compounded by the sense that Canadian doctors had given up on him completely; one told him there was nothing to do but to accept his fate of an early death, says his wife, Cherie Haas. “It’s awful for a young man with a family to go in and hear that. It’s heartbreaking.”

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Rino Ray Johnson 1932-2009

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 3 Comments

Rino Ray Johnson was born on Jan. 8, 1932, in Lindale, Alta., the son of two livestock farmers. As a boy, he liked to help out on the family farm, but he left home at 17 to work as a logger in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. At about five foot eight, he didn’t have a large build for a forestry worker, but he was extremely strong, energetic and good with his hands, especially at fixing things and carpentry, which he taught himself by taking things apart and tinkering.

At 21, Ray met his wife, Marion, when both were working at the Babine Lake logging camp in northwest B.C. She was the camp cook, and he felled trees and drove the skidder. They both loved the ruggedness of the West Coast, camping, and going to garage sales. Moving to Lavington, B.C., Ray and Marion had six children: Marlene, Colleen, Barbara, Patrick, Laurie and Bonnie. He continued to log, and built a wooden house for his growing family. It was a four-bedroom home with a shed out back to house Ray’s prized collection of tools. The whole family dug the foundation and hammered in floorboards together.

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Is Clean Coal Actually Clean? The Coen Brothers Weigh In

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 12:32 PM - 4 Comments

The Oscar-winning Coen Brothers recently produced this ad, ridiculing the term “clean coal.” It’s amusing, but doesn’t give much substantive critique. In reality, the coal industry has done much to clean up its nitrogen and sulphur emissions, which our big acid rain problem in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Emissions of these pollutants are down 70 per cent, which is what the coal industry means when it says the fuel is “70 per cent cleaner.” The industry hasn’t done much to lessen its carbon emissions to date, mostly because the technology isn’t there yet. Perhaps in the future, the excess CO2 will be separated into carbon and oxygen, or piped underground (both options currently being researched), but the technology is going to need decades of research and massive investment. Plans to build the US’s first CO2 storage coal-fired plant were abandoned last year, as the $1.8 billion FutureGen project in eastern Illinois ran into serious cost overruns. Coal is considered so bad for global warming that even nuclear power, once derided by the greenies, is now considered cleaner than the fossil fuel. Nuclear energy has its problems, with storage of waste and security issues, according to Steven Chu, the Nobel-prize winning new energy secretary. Yet “the safety is better and will continue to get better, and nuclear power is far better for climate than coal.”

The Nuclear Age

By Alex Shimo - Friday, February 27, 2009 at 2:35 PM - 8 Comments

The weekly announcements of yet another new nuclear plant in the works suggest an industry gaining credibility after years of environmental backlash and NIMBYism. The province of Ontario says it will build two nuclear reactors at the Darlington generating station east of Toronto. Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall says his province will be “the Saudi Arabia of uranium for the world”, hopefully without that country’s security concerns. In Manitoba, the town of Pinawa, Man., 180 km northeast of Winnipeg, is in discussions with Atomic Energy of Canada to put a nuclear lab in the town. The site used to have a functioning plant in the 1960s, but it was closed in 1998.

Many Canadian environmental groups, from the Pembina Institute to Greenpeace Canada, has firmly come out against this rise in nuclear power. And while the problems of nuclear power are well known – managing the waste, contamination and the inevitable accidents, there has been a shift in public perception, especially in countries with much stricter carbon dioxide targets than Canada. Indeed, many prominent greens have come out in favour of nuclear energy as an unfortunate, but necessary evil. Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace UK, says he has had an about face, almost like a religious conversion, and now embraces nuclear energy as the only way to solve climate change. George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, has also had a change of heart, and now says that nuclear power is “less threatening” than climate change.

Of course, neither solution sounds particularly welcoming – it’s hard to say whether frying later is preferable to living on top of a contaminated nuclear site. However, if nuclear power really is the only way to stop the planet’s meltdown, perhaps this nuclear renaissance should be embraced.

My Manolos have something to say

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 1 Comment

Is it better to be egged or pied? Neither, according to a growing number who have ditched the food and now throw their shoes, and even make art about the rebellious act.

This creative outpouring was set off by the infamous pair tossed at former president George W. Bush by an Iraqi journalist. Footwear has long been a visceral symbol of disrespect in the Middle East, says Arsalan Iftikhar, a contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington. Simply showing someone the soles of your shoes, let alone aiming them at them, is a sign of brazen contempt, which explains why the statue of Saddam Hussein was pummelled with shoes and sandals when it was toppled in April 2003.

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Tough critique or hate speech?

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 70 Comments

It’s not often a barroom-calibre brawl breaks out in the life of a political scientist. But a serious battle has erupted over a presentation given last June by professor Frances Widdowson, and it could jeopardize her career and help define the limits of free speech in Canadian academia.

Speaking at the 2008 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA), Widdowson, a policy studies professor at Mount Royal College in Calgary, argued our Aboriginal reserve system isn’t working. It encourages unemployment and alcoholism, since there are few jobs on reserves, she said. Policies that encourage First Nations to live separate lives merely prop up a broken system; the best way to help natives achieve health and prosperity is assimilation. Her paper also criticized Aboriginal traditional knowledge, arguing that some claims didn’t hold up to scientific analysis, and discussed a “development gap” between natives and settlers, implying the Europeans were more advanced.

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The 'Economist' criticizes Canada's climate record

By Alex Shimo - Monday, February 23, 2009 at 5:12 PM - 22 Comments

A biting article from the Economist magazine on Canada’s green policies, published here. The author highlights several ways that we have been lax on the environment, saying Canada is one of the two top “profligate energy users on the planet,” yet it has spent “little time over the last eight years” discussing what we might do “to combat climate change and the environment.”

On a discussion of our “dirty oil”, it discusses how we have been fighting for an exemption from a 2007 rule that bars the American government from buying fuels that produce too much carbon dioxide, or at least more than produced by conventional sources. The Energy Independence and Security Act, was signed into law in December 2008 by President Bush, and it puts the oil ssands at a disadvantage compared to easy-to-harvest oil from the wellhead. Continue…

Living with Oedipus for 15 years

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Many great writers from Sophocles to Voltaire have tackled the Oedipus myth. More contemporary interpretations include a film with Christopher Plummer, an opera by Stravinsky, even a pop song by New York singer Regina Spektor. None has the ambition of a new version by Kingston, Ont.-based playwright Ned Dickens, who is currently staging the family history of Oedipus, which takes place over 150 years.

Dickens’s production is a logistical challenge (some might say nightmare). The epic involves seven plays, each based on a character in the story. The seven plays have been divided up and are being staged locally by Canadian theatre students at Memorial, York, Concordia and Simon Fraser universities, George Brown and Humber colleges in Toronto, and Langara College in Vancouver. The student actors will then fly to Toronto to put on the whole series, called City of Wine. The shows will be staged over three days and the complete cycle will run twice, back to back, from May 5 to May 9.

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The case for carbon sequestration

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 5:58 PM - 16 Comments

An excellent article here from Business Week on carbon sequestration. Many consider the technology essential, if not a much-needed saviour for our warming planet. According to Emerging Energy Research (EER), it could offset our carbon dioxide emissions by 15 per cent by 2030. Indeed Alberta’s plans – a 14 per cent cut of emissions levels by 2050 from their 2005 levels – relies on this technology to be up and working quickly – in the next 5-10 years.

What’s needed to kick start the technology is a massive investment of funds, according to the EER. At the moment, the biggest investors are the EU, with $11.6 billion in research, then the US at $6 billion, then Canada at $2.7 billion. Much of the investment has been done by the oil companies themselves, but governments are also heavy investors. Last July, Stelmach announced a $2 billion fund for the new technology. And this week, Obama signed onto $3.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration projects.

Still, for carbon sequestration to really deliver, it’s going to take massive investments – $30 to $70 billion per year by 2030, according to the EER. Of course, oil and gas companies are already heavily committed and are the key players in this developing industry. There are huge profits to be made in carbon sequestration, especially if there is a market on carbon dioxide gas, when companies will be able to trade the right to pollute. What’s needed now is a cap and trade system so companies know that any investments they make will have definite payoffs, beyond helping the planet. Obama has pledged to make this a reality in his presidency, and it cannot come quickly enough.

Environmentalists blamed for Australia's Bush Fires

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 5:58 PM - 3 Comments

The blame over the tragic bush fires in Australia has a new target: environmentalists and green policies. Some experts say more prohibitions on logging and burning worsened the fires that have claimed the lives of at least 200 people. Prescribed burning creates a natural break that stops the flames from spreading, yet in recent years, it has sharply decreased in favour of greening the natural urban environments. With the exception of Western Australia, all of the nation’s six state governments have reduced heir forest burning programs since the 1980s, according to Phil Cheney, a retired chief scientist from the Bushfire Research Unit of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. In some areas, there are strict laws on cutting down trees around one’s property, and residents now say this put their houses at risk. In a heated exchange, a Victoria resident, Warwick Spooner, blamed local councilors for the deaths of his mother and brother, who had died in the home in the blaze.

Obama's Green Stimulus and how it breaks down

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 5:05 PM - 0 Comments

Obama just signed his $767 billion dollar stimulus, and whether it helps the US economy or multiplies its financial woes, it’s hard to find an environmentalist who doesn’t sing its praises. In total, $60 billion, or about 8 per cent, is devoted to causes like energy efficiency and clean tech. A total of $8 billion is going towards high-speed rail links. [And according to Politico.com, Obama will outline another billion for high-speed rail in his budget next week.] The Department of Defense is supposed to get $3.6 billion to pay for energy efficiency projects and facilities upgrades.

Here’s how the green stimulus breaks down, (courtesy of the Natural Resources Defense Council)

$6 billion for clean and safe water
$4.5 billion for greening federal buildings
$2.5 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy Research and Development
$5 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program
$6 billion in loan guarantees for renewables, transmission and leading edge biofuels
$2 billion for advanced batteries
$9.3 billion for intercity rail, including high-speed rail
$27.5 billion for highways (this large pot of money is not exclusively for highways, and states and cities must use this flexibility to invest in fuel-efficient public transportation)
$8.4 billion for transit
$1.5 billion in competitive grants for transportation investments (which could be used for public transportation)

The full conference report is available here.

Google Analyzes Our Power

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 7:04 PM - 0 Comments

Google is developing a web tracking service that would analyze our power consumption in real time. It would break down electricity use by individual appliances, and tell customers the most efficient time to use them. The software is in the early stages of development – Google is in talks with industry leaders. A program manager at Google.org, Kirsten Olsen Cahill, told the New York Times that the project is too big to go it alone, and needs the co-operation from utility and manufacturing companies to get the personal information on energy use.

Studies have shown that when people are given detailed information about their power use, they reduce their electricity by 5-15 percent. At the moment, Google is testing the software on its employees.

Australia's Forest Fires Linked to Climate Change, scientists say

By Alex Shimo - Monday, February 9, 2009 at 7:14 PM - 14 Comments

Australia may be the most fire-prone continent on earth, but scientists say the ferocity of the recent forest fires is likely linked to climate change. The temperature has been rising steadily since the 1950s, and is expected to increase by 3 degrees Celcius by 2050. Scientists say the hot, dry conditions will worsen the intensity and frequency of wildfires. This week’s blazes occurred after a record heatwave and hot, dry winds in southern Victoria state. The fires have swept nearly 200,000 hectares. At least 170 people have been killed in the disaster, and more than 3,000 people have been displaced. Continue…

Brain rewiring

By Alex Shimo - Monday, February 9, 2009 at 12:52 PM - 9 Comments

Lying back in a spacious, pleather armchair, Barbara Kwasniewski seems relaxed, especially given the nature of the medical treatment she’s just received. The 53-year-old has undergone repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which essentially rearranges the pathways of the brain by using magnets.

The therapy was approved by Health Canada in 1997, and by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2008. It’s used to treat everything from strokes to depression, anorexia, migraines, obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic pain and Parkinson’s. It’s one of a handful of therapies gaining popularity that use electricity to help rewire the brain. Deep brain stimulation is another, where wires are surgically implanted into a patient’s grey matter to excite the neurons with electronic pulses. Electro-shock therapy has also made a comeback.

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