Noise Between Stations

Recycled paper products Even my tiny Manhattan food market now sports two different brands of recycled paper products.

Annie’s has grown from one product (organic macaroni and cheese) to 80, fueling a $34 million company. The Organic Trade Association estimates the $12.25 billion organic food market will double by 2008, assuming an 18.4% annual growth rate (WSJ, March 29, 2005). With a $20 million investment from Solera Capital, Annie’s (and others on the [...]

A recent edition of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition focused on the use of sustainable building products, hybrid cars, and efficient appliances.

Nike’s Considered line eliminates waste & toxics, uses less energy to produce, and reduces waste at the end of the product’s life.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – February 18, 2005 – Joining the ranks of celebrities choosing to bring an environmental conscience to the Oscars, Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron, Robin Williams, Orlando Bloom, Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins are among those arriving at the 2005 Academy Awards in high-mileage, low emission, Prius hybrids as [...]

GE pledges to invest billions in being green: “Ecomagination is GE’s commitment to address challenges such as the need for cleaner, more efficient sources of energy, reduced emissions and abundant sources of clean water,” Immelt said. “And we plan to make money doing it. Increasingly for business, ‘green’ is green.”

WSJ reports ($) that the effect of a gene depends on the environment it’s exposed to. Several studies have shown, for example, that water-fleas will only grow hard-skull defenses if they are in waters with fish, that oak-tree caterpillars grow to resemble the food they eat, and that men with the “violence gene” only act [...]

Actually, no. But not so far off when you learn a rat brain has been taught to fly a jet. Gibson extends: “…Thunderbolt IIs have Night Vision Imaging Systems (NVIS), rat brain compatible cockpits forward of their wings and a large bubble canopy which provides the rat brains all-around vision. The rat brains are encircled [...]

Atul Gawande’s The Bell Curve in last week’s New Yorker… It used to be assumed that differences among hospitals or doctors in a particular specialty were generally insignificant. If you plotted a graph showing the results of all the centers treating cystic fibrosis—or any other disease for that matter—people expected that the curve would look [...]

I recently read Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan, a writer for The Economist. He covers many of the more interesting ideas, highlights some underappreciated thinkers, and offers a sound perspective on a field that tries to stay within the boundaries of statistics while undeniably bleeding into politics and sociology. Also see [...]

I like that an online journal of nanotechnology has named itself Small Times.

Forty-nine countries have agreed to participate in a 10-year project to collect and share thousands of measurements of the Earth, ranging from weather to streamflow to ground tremors to air pollution with anticipated benefits ranging from weather forecasts to energy consumption estimates to predictions of disease outbreaks. As usual, it’s not the design of the [...]

Watson, half of the team that discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, interviewed in a recent issue of the New York Times magazine: …I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a [...]