Concentrates to Reduce Plastic Consumption

 

 

Using less and recycling more is a no brainer. Some companies have begun to offer concentrates for sale so that spray bottles and soap dispensers can be refilled without all the plastic waste and shipping emissions.

SC Johnson is doing its part to lead the “concentrate revolution.” They created Windex® Mini concentrated refill pouches which require 90 percent less plastic than a standard 26-ounce bottle (enough for 6.5 ballpoint pens). The Windex® Mini concentrates were sold online as a test. The Windex® Mini was recognized with a 2012 Better Homes and Gardens Best New Product Award in the All Purpose Cleaner category! Companies produce what we demand with our wallets and since this test was successful, SC Johnson was able to expand the concentrate option to many more products! They now offer five of SC Johnson’s trusted brands in concentrates: fantastik®, Pledge®, Scrubbing Bubbles®, Shout® and Windex®.

The concept of buying a concentrate and adding water yourself seems to be a little unfamiliar to many consumers. I think it has huge potential and it is already very successful at the industrial level. When I was in retail management, many of our cleaning supplies came concentrated and were mixed with water by the employees. It was quite easy and worked just as well.

I was able to try out the new SC Johnson concentrate options for myself and I have to say that they were super easy to use. All you do is just put water into the empty spray bottle, pour in the little bottle of concentrate and then screw on the sprayer and give it a gentle shake. I tested out the fantastik® and it cleans just as well as the original product. I dropped the little bottle into our recycling bin – it is made out of the same plastic as a milk jug and recycled easily in most communities. Each of these little concentrate bottles requires 79 percent less plastic than the standard sprayer and avoids unnecessary transportation of extra weight and space thereby reducing carbon emissions.

I think the biggest hurdle in making concentrates the standard is getting people to be aware of the new product option. When most people go to buy a bottle of Windex®, they find and grab the product that matches their mental image. I believe that if customers knew that they could look for the little concentrate refill bottles instead, and that it would save them money while being better for the environment, of course, they would do it! All of these concentrates are being sold online at http://www.scjgreenchoices.com/store.

Did you know that if just 20 percent of the sprayers purchased in America in one year were refilled rather than thrown away, we could avoid using 3.5 million pounds of virgin plastic? Impressive. Small changes in habits really can add up to big differences!

Have you tried the concentrates yet? Do you have any suggestions you want to share about the new concentrate options?

Article originally published on SCJohnson.com

6 Reasons to Delay Baby's First Bath

 

By Sharon Muza, CD(DONA), LCCE

Updated February 20, 2014

Written or reviewed by a board-certified physician. See About.com's Medical Review Board.

Delaying Your Baby's Bath Has Benefits

Cultura/JFCreatives/The Image Bank/Getty Images There are many reasons to consider not having your baby bathed in the first hours or even days after birth. Many hospitals seem to have an urgent need to have the baby bathed in the first hours after the newborn has been born, but as parents, you can make the decision on when to bathe your baby and who is the one to do it. There are several benefits to delaying baby's first bath and you may reconsider when you would like it to happen after learning about the advantages of waiting. (Much of the research on bathing newborns is related to the preterm or low birth weight baby.)

1. Babies are born with a natural skin protectant

   In utero, babies are protected from their watery environment by a special substance called vernix, found on their skin. You may notice some vernix on your just born baby, it looks a bit like a white, waxy cream cheese, and some babies seem to have a lot and others not so much. Babies tend to lose the vernix the longer the mother is pregnant, so those babies born at 42 weeks might not have a lot of it visible anymore, though usually there is still some hidden in the folds of their skin and under their arms. Babies born earlier often have a larger amount. Newer research indicates that vernix has immune properties and leaving it on your baby's skin provides a layer of protection while your new baby's immune system is getting stronger. I think this is a great benefit especially for babies who are born in the hospital, with lots of potential for exposure to hospital-acquired infections. Vernix also is the best moisturizer ever and helps to keep your baby's skin soft and supple. It's important to note that the research is on the properties of the vernix but as of now there is no clinical data to prove this connection.

   Amniotic fluid, which bathed the baby before birth has the ability to provide some extra resistance to infection as well, so the longer it remains on the skin, the better for baby.

2. Baby wants to be near mom

   After birth, your newborn baby wants to be as close to you and your breasts as he can get. Snuggling on your chest, close to the food source, where he can hear you, smell you and feel you against his skin is a source of comfort for your new little one. Being close to your breasts can help encourage breastfeeding and support the baby making a smooth transition to life on the outside. Taking your baby away from you soon after birth for the purpose of a bath can disrupt the process of your baby getting to know you, feeling safe and secure, and interfere with those very important first feedings.

3. Lowered body temperature

   New babies are still figuring out how to maintain their own body temperature. Taking a baby away from his mother for a bath, may result in the baby working harder to keep their body temperature in the normal range. I have seen babies who need to be placed under the heat lamp to bring up their temperature after their bath. Mom's chest is the perfect place to maintain baby's temperature. A mother's chest has the ability to heat up or cool down to help the baby stay at just the right temperature. Adding a bath into the mix just makes it harder for baby to maintain their body temperature.

4. Keep stress hormones low and blood sugar normal

   Being separated from her mother can add an additional layer of stress to a new baby just figuring out life on the outside. When your baby is taken from you to be bathed, she may cry, feel uncomfortable and upset. This causes her body to release stress hormones in response to this new situation. Her heart rate and blood pressure may go up, she may breathe a bit faster and become agitated. Working hard to respond to this stressful situation may also lower her blood sugar temporarily. If your baby's blood sugar is being monitored due to mother's gestational diabetes, or her size at birth, the baby's health care providers may be concerned and want to introduce formula to bring her blood sugar back up to the normal range. When she remains closes to you, she is better able to regulate all of her body systems and maintain her blood sugar where it should be.

5. A bath with mom or dad sounds nice

   Since your baby feels most secure when she is close to a parent, you might consider taking the first bath with your baby, when you are ready. Getting in the tub with your baby and holding her in your arms is a wonderful way to have that first bath. Your baby will feel secure and loved, when she does not have to be separated from you in the first days. She will enjoy the soothing water while being held, happily splashing and giving little kicks. It might feel so good that she may even fall asleep! Remember, little babies are very slippery when wet, so you will need someone to hold the baby while you get in and out of the tub. It creates special memories to take that first bath with your baby, rather than having staff do it, shortly after birth, when mom is still recovering herself and not really able to engage in the process.

6. Handle with gloves

   In many hospitals, it is policy for staff to handle all unbathed babies with gloves on their hands, so as to protect staff from coming into contact with any amniotic fluid, blood, or vernix that remain on your newborn. Considering that the transmission of hospital-acquired infections is on the rise, some consider it good practice to have all hospital staff wear gloves when handling a newborn baby, even if a bath has already occurred. Some studies show glove use in very low birth weight babies have fewer infections when staff handle the baby with gloves on, despite the bath status.

There are many benefits to delaying the bath of your newborn until both you and baby are stable and ready to participate in this special "first" moment. There is no medical reason that a newborn must be bathed in the first hours or days. I encourage you to learn more about the appropriate time to bathe your baby and make a choice to do so when you and your baby are ready. Sharing your wishes with hospital staff can be done respectfully and your wishes can be honored.

 

South Korea's autonomous robot gun turrets: deadly from kilometers away

 

 

DoDAMM's Super aEgis 2: South Korea's autonomous robot gun turret

If there's one place you don't want to be caught wandering around right now, it's the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. Especially since South Korean military hardware manufacturer DoDAMM used the recent Korea Robot World 2010 expo to display its new Super aEgis 2, an automated gun turret that can detect and lock onto human targets from kilometers away, day or night and in any weather conditions, and deliver some heavy firepower.

The border between North and South Korea is a pretty amazing strip of land. Around 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, it stretches the entire width of the Korean peninsula and it's recognized as the most heavily fortified border in the world. Over the last 60 years, as North and South Korea have faced off in an aggressive and frequently violated ceasefire, this Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) has been one of the deadliest places on Earth for humans. Step into the zone and there's hundreds of thousands of soldiers on either side ready to put a bullet in you just for being there.

As a fascinating aside, this has also made it one of the world's best-kept nature preserves - the complete absence of human interference leaving a more or less pristine habitat for all kinds of wildlife, endangered and otherwise.

The DMZ's history is full of incredible stories; the gigantic tunnels dug by North Korean incursion forces, the tragically doomed friendships between North and South Korean soldiers operating in the zone, the almost unbelievable defection of a South Korean farmer across the DMZ into North Korea. And perhaps this history will go on to include ice-cold robotic killers.

Through military eyes, the existence of a shoot-on-sight no-go zone several kilometers wide opens up options for some interesting high-tech hardware, like DoDaam's Super aEgis II, which we had a chance to look over in person at the Korea Robot World Expo 2010.

The Super aEgis 2 is an automated gun tower that can find and lock on to a human-sized target in pitch darkness at a distance of up to 1.36 miles (2.2 kilometers). It uses a 35x zoom CCD camera with 'enhancement feature' for bad weather, in conjunction with a dual FOV, autofocus Infra-Red sensor, to pick out targets.

Then it brings the pain, either with a standard 12.7mm caliber machine-gun, a 40mm automatic grenade launcher upgrade, or whatever other weapons system you want to bolt on to it, including surface-to-air missiles. A laser range finder helps to calibrate aim, and a gyroscopic stabilizer unit helps correct both the video system's aim and the direction of the guns after recoil pushes them off-target.

Each 140 kg (308.6 lb.) unit can be rigidly mounted or put on a moving vehicle, where the gyro stabilization would be a huge asset. They can operate in fully autonomous mode, firing first and asking questions later, or they can be put into a manual mode for more human intervention. All machines communicate back to headquarters through a LAN cable or wireless network.

There's no word about whether the Super aEgis 2 has been deployed in the Korean DMZ in the wake of several recent incidents that threaten to push the peninsula into full-scale, potentially nuclear war, but Dodaam has been exporting units as far afield as the United Arab Emirates.

Two weeks traveling across Spain, from Basque Country, to Galicia, Andalucia and finally Barcelona. (Video)

 

A Spanish road trip - clik link

 

www.lifecool.com

What to wear to a wedding

 

Have you been invited to a wedding, but aren't quite sure what to wear?

 

The best .338 sniper rifle in the world

 

Image: MoD

November 26, 2008 The sniper is one of the most feared specialists of war and he is one workman who definitely relies on the right tools. There are a surprising number of sniper rifle manufacturers out there, so it’s a big call when one declares itself to be the best .338 in the world, though the raw specifications of the Accuracy International L115A3 sniper rifle suggest there is merit to the claim. The UKP23,000 (USD$34,000) rifle was designed incorporating performance-enhancing features gleaned from international target shooting and fires an 8.59mm bullet which is heavier than the 7.62mm round of the previous L96 and hence less likely to be deflected over extremely long ranges. Put the 6.8kg rifle in the right hands and it can hit a human-sized target from 1400 metres. Even at that range, it hits harder than a .44 Magnum does in the same room.

The muzzle velocity of the L115A3 is 936 metres per second (up from 838m/s) giving it an effective range of 1400 metres compared to the L96’s 800m, and not surprisingly, the Schmidt & Bender day sights now magnify up to 25 times, compared with the L96’s 12 times.

The L115A3s are part of the British Ministry of Defence’s Sniper System Improvement Programme (SSIP), which includes new night sights, spotting scopes, laser range finders and tripods.

The first batch of SSIP systems was deployed to Afghanistan with members of 16 Air Assault Brigade earlier this year and reports suggest the claim of "the best .338 sniper rifle in the world"

Portsmouth-based Accuracy International was established in 1978 by two-times Olympic shooting Gold medallist Malcolm Cooper, and its high-accuracy sniper rifles are in use with military and police forces worldwide including many elite military units (the British SAS and reportedly the US Delta Force too).

In terms of the best .5o sniper rifle in the world, that mantle almost certainly goes to the McMillan Bros Tac-50 used by Canadian Special Forces in Afghanistan that holds the all time record kill at 2430 meters.

The skill of Canadian snipers combined with the fire power of the “Big Mac” made it very dangerous for the Taliban fighters to expose themselves if only for a few seconds. There are many accounts of the 2430 meter kill shot on the net. That's two and a half kilometres!

Can Alcohol Really Be Good For Your Heart?

 

Is alcohol good for your heart? - click link

Q -Warrior brings head-up displays to the battlefield

 

The Q-Warrior is designed provide foot soldiers with comprehensive situational awareness

"Great battles are won with artillery" – Napoleon Bonaparte. In the 21st century, he’d probably change that to information. The trick is to get that information to soldiers on the front line quickly and in a manner that won’t distract them from the job at hand. To this end, BAE Systems’ Electronic Systems in the UK has developed the Q-Warrior – a head-up display for foot soldiers that’s designed to provide a full-color, high resolution 3D display of the battlefield situation and assets.

Call it military intelligence, situational awareness, or just knowing what’s going on in the next foxhole, but information has always been a vital military asset. Today, modern warriors have access to lasers, satellites, GPS, high-speed digital communications, and all the rest, but for the soldier on the ground it still tends to boil down to gestures and shouting that Julius Caesar would recognize. It is, in other words, a classic bottleneck.

For the engineer, the tricky bit is coming up with something that can keep a soldier in the know without distraction. Head up displays have been available to fighter pilots since at least the Second World War, and today everyone from helicopter jockeys to Iron Man has one. But a squaddy lives in a different, dirtier, and more chaotic world than that of a pilot. It requires a peculiar mix of awareness and concentration that doesn't take well to needless distraction or irrelevant data, so coming up with information systems for the infantry is less a matter of adapting technology and more one of almost building from scratch.

The Q-Warrior is the latest version of BAE's helmet-mounted display technology based on its Q-Sight range of display systems. Now undergoing field testing by the US military, it looks a bit like something an Apache helicopter pilot might wear, but that’s about as far as the similarity goes. Instead of controlling FLIR cameras and look-and-shoot weapon pods, Q-Sight is intended to give foot soldiers and special forces “heads-up, eyes out, finger on the trigger” situational awareness, friend-or-foe identification, and the ability to coordinate a small unit even when away from their vehicles.

Consisting of a large eye projector screen that is low power demand, low fatigue and has fast day/night transition, yet delivers high transmission, high-resolution color in a collimated, high-luminance, high-resolution see-through display, the Q-Warrior is also designed to allow for large movements of the helmet while maintaining the overlay of the display on the real world.

BAE says that the Q-Warrior will provide soldiers with their own portable command, control, and communications system in 3D with exact target designation and charting. With the Q-Warrior, a soldier will be able to see the location of friendly warplanes, including their speed, altitude, and payload, as well as being able to designate targets. The display will also track friendly and enemy forces with symbols overlaid on the real-world view, navigational waypoints and related data, and visual feeds from drones and other platforms.

According to BAE, the Q-Warrior will initially be used by the section commander level and with special forces, but that the technology will eventually spread to become standard frontline kit.

“The biggest demand, in the short term at least, will be in roles where the early adoption of situational awareness technology offers a defined advantage,” says Paul Wright, Soldier Systems’ Business Development Lead at BAE Systems’ Electronic Systems. “This is likely to be within non-traditional military units with reconnaissance roles, such as Forward Air Controllers/Joint Tactical Aircraft Controllers (JTACS) or with Special Forces during counter terrorist tasks. The next level of adoption could be light role troops such as airborne forces or marines, where technical systems and aggression help to overcome their lighter equipment.”

 

Source: BAE Systems

6 studies that offer fascinating conclusions about human sexuality

 

 

At TED2013, Christopher Ryan explains the evidence that, before the dawn of agriculture, humans had overlapping sexual relationships. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In today’s talk, Christopher Ryan, the co-author of Sex at Dawnwith Cacilda Jethá, takes a deeper look at the standard narrative of human sexual evolution we’ve long upheld: men provide women with goods and services in exchange for women’s sexual fidelity. According to this model, Ryan points out, the war between the sexes is built into our DNA.

But based on their research, Ryan and Jethá have quite a few bones to pick with this narrative. Ryan explains that our sexual patterns are an outgrowth of agricultural models—which accounts for only about five percent of human history. For the other 95 percent, human sexuality was “a way of establishing and maintaining the complex flexible social systems, networks, that our ancestors were very good at.” In hunter-gatherer societies, there were overlapping sexual relationships between members of a community—a more fluid system than the Victorian model we’re wedded to today. In fact, several contemporary societies around the world argue against the sexual myth we’ve built up, too.

“My hope is that a more accurate updated understanding of human sexuality will lead us to have greater tolerance for ourselves, for each other, greater respect for unconventional relationship configurations like same-sex marriage or polyamorous unions, and that we’ll finally put to rest the idea that men have some innate instinctive right to monitor and control women’s sexual behavior,” Ryan says. “And we’ll see that it’s not only gay people that have to come out of the closet: we all have closets we have to come out of.”

Below, read up on some more lines of research that suggest out-of-the-box ideas about our sexuality.

1. Question: Is bisexuality a sexual orientation, something that’s temporary or an outgrowth of the sexual fluidity we all exhibit?
   .
   Research: In a 2008 study, Lisa M. Diamond of the University of Utah presented the results of a decade-long assessment of nearly 70 women who identified as lesbian, bisexual, or sexually unlabelable. Five times over the course of the study, the women detailed their sexual identities, attractions, behaviors, and their social and familial relationships.
   .
   Results: Based on Diamond’s findings, bisexuality is not a “transitional stage that women adopt ‘on the way’ to lesbian identification” or an “experimental phase” for heterosexuals. Her results, instead, supported that, “Bisexuality may best be interpreted as a stable pattern of attraction to both sexes in which the specific balance of same-sex to other-sex desires necessarily varies according to interpersonal and situational factors,” she writes.
   .
2. Question: Which comes first—desire or arousal?
   .
   Research: In a study from 2004, described in this New York Times article, Ellen Laan, Stephanie Both and Mark Spiering of the University of Amsterdam examined participants’ physical responses to sexual images.
   .
   Results: The research indicates that we respond physically to highly sexual visuals before our mind even engages with them. In other words, desire doesn’t precede arousal—it’s the other way around. And we aren’t even aware it’s happening.
   .
3. Question: Do men and women respond differently to sexual images?
   .
   Research: The same New York Times article describes an Emory University study that tracked participants’ eye movements and brain activity while they looked at sexually explicit photos.
   .
   Results: Men and women didn’t have the same reactions, but they might not be the ones you’d expect. Men looked at the faces in the photographs much more than women did, and everyone quickly flipped past close-ups of genitalia. Brain activity was gender-dependent: in particular, men had a lot more activity in the amygdala than women did.
   .
4. Question: Does geography influence the body types we idealize and are attracted to?
   .
   Research: There’s a lot written about the effects of culture and media on the bodily standards we uphold. But the International Body Project, a survey of 7,434 people worldwide, aimed to investigate whether there were more base-level factors motivating our ideal body types, too.
   .
   Results: The researchers found that places with low socioeconomic status tended to value heavier female body types, while places with high socioeconomic status tended to favor thinner bodies—possibly because body fat acts as an indicator of status when resources are scarce. And the effect of media shouldn’t be underestimated: “Our results show that body dissatisfaction and desire for thinness is commonplace in high-SES settings across world regions, highlighting the need for international attention to this problem,” the researchers write.
   .
5. Question: Do men and women have different sex drives?
   .
   Research: A recent New York Times Magazine article describes a University of Wisconsin, Madison “meta-analysis” of more than 800 studies of our sexual habits conducted over 15 years.
   .
   Results: The researchers found that “the evidence for an inborn disparity in sexual motivation is debatable,” the Times Magazine piece reports. The study “suggests that the very statistics evolutionary psychologists use to prove innate difference — like number of sexual partners or rates of masturbation — are heavily influenced by culture. All scientists really know is that the disparity in desire exists, at least after a relationship has lasted a while.” Women’s desire does decrease, but not as a matter of course—as a result of monogamy in particular.

New Highly Radioactive Leak at Japan's Fukushima Plant

 

Feb 19, 2014

By Mari Saito

TOKYO (Reuters) - The operator of Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant said on Thursday that 100 metric tons of highly contaminated water had leaked out of a tank, the worst incident since last August, when a series of radioactive water leaks sparked international alarm.

Tokyo Electric Power Co told reporters the latest leak was unlikely to have reached the ocean. But news of the leak at the site, devastated by a 2011 earthquake and tsunami, further undercut public trust in a utility rocked by a string of mishaps and disclosure issues.

"We are taking various measures, but we apologize for worrying the public with such a leak," said Masayuki Ono, a spokesman for the utility, also known as Tepco.

"Water is unlikely to have reached the ocean as there is no drainage in that tank area."

Tepco said water overflowed from a large storage tank at the site late on Wednesday after a valve had remained open by mistake and sent too much contaminated water into a separate holding area.

A worker patrolling the area, around 700 meters from the ocean, spotted drips of water leaking through a drain attached to the side of the tank.

The utility has been harshly criticized for its response to the three nuclear meltdowns following the quake and tsunami at the plant, 220 km (130 miles) north of Tokyo.

A nuclear regulatory official last week said Tepco delayed release of record-high measurements of strontium-90 in groundwater despite repeated requests by the regulator.

Initial measurements of the latest incident showed the leaked water had a reading of 230 million becquerels per liter of beta-emitting radioactive isotopes, including strontium 90.

That level is almost equal to that recorded in last year's leak of 300 metric tons of contaminated water, deemed a "serious incident", or level three, on the seven-point international scale for radiological releases.

The legal limit for releasing strontium 90 into the ocean is 30 becquerels per liter.