This is some really great news! According to an article on the therecord.com Daniel Burd, a 16 year old student from Canada, has isolated some microbes that are able to decompose plastic bags in a matter of 3 months. He added yeast to water to make a good growth medium for microbes. Then he tried to isolate the microbes using agar dishes and he found out that a combination of two different microbes worked best for degrading plastic bags.
Plastic bags is a big problem for the environment so kudos to Daniel Burd for caring. My only worry is if the dissolved plastics bags contains harmful toxins making that a waste problem too.
Of course we could always stop using plastic bags and instead use bags made out of organic cotton or hemp.
I take a lot of photos since I always carry my DSLR camera with me. When I have been at a family gathering or something similar people always ask me if I can email them the pictures I have captured.
Just sending the pictures as they are is fine, but it can be fun to make the pictures into something else.
The Smilebox tool can help you making the photos a bit different. It can help you turn your photos into a scrapbook, a slide show, a greeting card and many more interesting designs to choose from.
You can also use videos, text and music when designing something special for your family and friends. When you are done designing Smilebox helps you email, blog and print the results. Next Christmas I might have to make an unique greeting card for the whole family using this neat tool.
The Smilebox tool is free to use, but you can also buy premium designs that does not contain any ads.
Found this news on the thestar.com about 200 cyclists blocking the traffic on a big expressway in Toronto, Canada. The cyclists was able to shut down the road for almost half an hour as they cycled about 7 km before the police arrived. 4 people were arrested due to refusing to leave the road. Solidarity to them!
Seems like the great organization Critical Mass was behind this action. Critical Mass is a leaderless event where cyclists gather to protest for example the traffic that is killing our planet.
I have been a part of similar actions where we blocked a street. It was a lot of fun, but also a bit scary when the rich people with expensive cars wanted to run us over.
Here is some pictures (source is Toronto Traffic Cameras) of the protest in Toronto.
Phelios games in an independent game developer that makes windows and mac games. They make lots of games in different categories including rpg games (role playing games).
There has been some complaints by mac users that there are very few games being made for this system, but Phelios games is making exactly that so head over there if you need to download a mac game.
Found an interesting article by nwf.org about the effort being made in USA to restore and save many of the endangered butterfly species on that continent. 23 species in threatened in the US due to habitat loss, pollution, global warming and invasive species. The butterflies are also facing other problems because of how specialized they are.
In addition to saving their natural habitats some conservationists are using captive-breeding program to try boost the population of some butterfly species.
In my opinion we need to stop the negative trend where we turn every little piece of land into places that “benefit” humans and start to little by little restore the nature so we don’t make all these species go extinct.
Paris is a city that I want to visit as France is a fascinating country and I have only been traveling through Paris to get to other places in France.
When I go there I would like to find some cheap accommodation. One website that lets you search for exactly that is bed and breakfast Paris. This site, bed breakfast Paris, also makes it easy to find hotels as it has a section for Hotel Paris too.
The Maui’s dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori maui) is the world’s smallest and rarest dolphin. They only live on the coast West Coast of New Zealand’s North Island and there are less than 110 dolphins remaining!
According to an article on telegraph.co.uk New Zealand will put new conservation measurements in effect to prevent the Maui’s dolphin to go extinct. As commercial and recreational fishing is blamed for most deaths to the dolphins measures will be taken to fisheries in the affected areas.
This will also help the Hector’s dolphins (Cephalorhynchus hectori) which also has declined a lot from 29,000 in the 1970s to just 7,000 today.
Both the fishers and conservationists are skeptical if the measures will help, but let us hope that these latest actions from the government in New Zealand are enough to stop the Maui’s dolphin from going extinct.
I love traveling around the world and have several times visited United Kingdom. In UK I have stayed in London most of the time because I love that city and it easy to travel from London to the rest of the country.
Before my trips to London I searched the internet to find a good hotel at a location I wanted to stay at and within a price range I could live with.
One website that lets you search for UK hotels is hotel-uk.com. They are the longest established internet based website for booking hotels in London. They now also offer searching and immediate booking confirmation for hotels in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.
When you search for hotels you choose which city you are staying, the time period and what kind of budget you have. You also get to see how many stars each hotel has so you get some knowledge about what kind of quality you can expect from the hotel.
