Abstaining from alcohol significantly shortens life
New research shows that those who imbibe are less likely to die than those who stay dry.
India: At a time when many States are facing a power crisis, a group of electrical engineering students have taken up an initiative to light up study centres in remote villages in Tamil Nadu with solar power.
A batch of students of Lakshya, the E Cell initiative of Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering went to a few remote villages in Tiruthani recently where they installed solar lamps at homes of a few children that also double up as study centres.
Taken up as part of the E-Week (Entrepreneurship Week) celebrations in colleges organised by the National Entrepreneurship Network across cities between February 11 and 18, the team had planned to cover a few other villages that reeled under constant power cuts.
“We have been planning to take this initiative for the last couple of weeks, where we raised sponsorship of Rs.30,000 to buy the lamps and panels that we configured to suit the needs of these villages,” explains Vidarth Jaikrishnan, third-year student of the college and the team leader.
To make it more cost-effective, the electrical engineering students bought a panel that could charge two lanterns. Each lamp can light up a 300 sq. ft. room. Their next task was contacting NGOs who could connect them to remote villages where infrastructure facilities were poor, especially places where the need for electricity was more felt. AIDIndia identified three villages that were in dire need of power.
According to Chitra K., project manager, AIDIndia, Tiruttani, students use the Rs.10 torch light battery in some of these homes to study as it is usually in the evening that there are regular power cuts. There are three such study centres in the village where children up to Class VIII gather to study.
Nine configured solar lamps are ready with the team of 17. “We also explain students how solar lamps work and about its advantages. If this is successful, we plan to procure more lamps and set out to a few identified villages in Lathur and Thiruporur,” says Vinay Kumar, another team member.
The team plans to scale up this social venture beyond the E-Week. “We plan to rope in our juniors so that they can take it forward. We are also confident of getting in more sponsorship so that we can buy more lamps,” adds Vidarth.
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10 ways to save money on gasoline
These fuel-saving ideas can help you from feeling the heat of rising gas prices.
Afghan academy seeks to ease pain of war with music
A cacophony ranging from Asian string instruments to the delicate cadences of classical piano pours out of a two-story building in central Kabul.Here, at Afghanistan’s sole music academy, students are taught music with the hope it will bring comfort in the face of war and poverty, bringing back cellos and violins to revive a rich musical legacy disrupted by decades of violence and suppression.
“We are committed to build ruined lives through music, given its healing power,” Ahmad Sarmast, head of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, told Reuters.
Fungi discovered in the Amazon will eat your plastic
Polyurethane seemed like it couldn’t interact with the earth’s normal processes of breaking down and recycling material. That’s just because it hadn’t met the right mushroom yet.
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A Bronx Tale: After the congregants of an Orthodox synagogue could no longer afford their rent, they found help in the local mosque.
Near the corner of Westchester Avenue and Pugsley Street in Parkchester, just off the elevated tracks of the No. 6 train, Yaakov Wayne Baumann stood outside a graffiti-covered storefront on a chilly Saturday morning. Suited up in a black overcoat with a matching wide-brimmed black fedora, the thickly bearded 42-year-old chatted with elderly congregants as they entered the building for Shabbat service.
The only unusual detail: This synagogue is a mosque.
Or rather, it’s housed inside a mosque. That’s right: Members of the Chabad of East Bronx, an ultra-Orthodox synagogue, worship in the Islamic Cultural Center of North America, which is home to the Al-Iman mosque.
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Man-made environmental catastrophes come in varying degrees of tragic, but none is as awful as when human action renders once-pristine land uninhabitable.
10 places abandoned because of man-made environmental catastrophes
The Highest Resolution Image of Earth Ever
This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012.
Click the photo for the 8000x8000 image
Do it! The detail in this photo is incredible.
The radiant glow around the Earth is freaking me out. WE’RE ALL GLOWING, MAN. WITH BLUE LIGHT.
Germany’s promotion of renewable energy rightly gets singled out for its effectiveness, most often by me as an example of how to do things well versus the fits and starts method of promotion common in the US. Over at Wind-Works, Paul Gipe points out another interesting facet of the German renewable energy saga: 51% of all renewable energy in Germany is owned by individual citizens or farms, totaling $100 billion worth of private investment in clean energy.
(Source: post-carbon)
