| Cheap, Clean Drinking Water Purified Through Nanotechnology
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2008) Tiny particles of pure silica coated with an active material could be used to remove toxic chemicals, bacteria, viruses, and other hazardous materials from water much more effectively and at lower cost than conventional water purification methods, according to researchers writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Nanotechnology. .
Erosion-control holdouts being sought for project
In the Lake Tahoe Basin, the letters "BMP" can bring about various reactions.
Short for "best management practices," BMPs are methods prescribed by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to help developed properties function more like natural, undisturbed forest and meadowland. The TRPA believes that water conveyed to a lake by an undisturbed watershed usually is quite pure, because the watershed's soils and plants act as a natural water-purification system.
BMPs prescribed for residential properties usually fall into the following categories: vegetating and mulching bare, disturbed soils; infiltrating stormwater runoff from impervious surfaces; paving dirt driveways and roads; and stabilizing or retaining steep slopes and loose soils.
But for some of the 38,000 property owners in the basin who have not retrofitted their land for BMPs, the requirements can be harsh and expensive.
No-cost solutions in the antispam ecosystem
Like the rising cost of postage stamps, increasing complexity in e-mail is inevitable. In the early, halcyon days of the Internet, SMTP connections flowed like a mountain spring and mail filters were used solely for mail organization. Now, the water is brackish, and mail filters are an absolute necessity. But whose filters? Given the extraordinary volume of e-mail that most organizations receive, care and feeding of e-mail whitelists and blacklists is sporadic at best, and it's usually done only to address an acute problem. Subscription services such as Postini can alleviate this problem from an inbound perspective, but that's only half the battle. Free DNS blacklists such as spamhaus.org and spamcop.net provide an interactive service to enable inbound mail servers to match the IP address of the server delivering mail against a list of known spamming servers via a simple DNS query.
Multinationals: Are They Good for America?
Multinationals have been the wild card in the economic deck for a decade. Back in 1997, four years after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington put out their biennial projections of job growth over the next 10 years. With a touching note of optimism, they assumed that exports, adjusted for inflation, would double over the next decade—a boom that would have produced a sizable number of good-paying American jobs. But like almost everyone else, the BLS economists missed an unexpected strategy shift at the handful of big companies that account for most of the exports. Instead of ramping up American operations to sell into global markets, giant U.S. companies such as General Electric (GE), IBM (IBM), and United Technologies (UTX) took their operations overseas, expanding in Asia and Europe and becoming global enterprises with international workforces.
Click here for more Australian Open news
Sharapova, who has struggled in the Melbourne conditions in the past, not only handled the 34-degree heat far better than her opponent but also the big-match atmosphere. Despite being just two points from losing the first set, when trailing 4-5 and 0-30, Sharapova's serve and steadiness under pressure proved the difference. Sharapova committed just 15 unforced errors to Ivanovic's 33 and was practically unbeatable on serve, winning 89% of points on her first serve and 70% on her second. Ivanovic, who broke Sharapova just once in the match and lost her own serve on four occasions, took heart from the fact she performed far better in her second grand slam final than in her first when she was humiliated 6-1 6-2 by Henin in last year's French Open final.
|
