Connecticut Green Living

"We always have to be on the lookout for a variant that might ... seriously evade protection from prior infection." - Dr. Fauci Dr. Anthony Fauci , the nation's preeminent infectious disease expert, just spoke remotely for an hour with the National Press Club in Washington. He discussed issues such as his decision to forgo attending the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, the speed of a toddler-friendly vaccine and how the insidious nature of SARS-CoV-2 variants is making herd immunity all but impossible. "How we think of herd immunity is likely unattainable in Covid-19," Fauci said, in response to a question posed by Club President Jen Judson. "So I think we have to realize that. It was what we did with measles, what we did with polio. You had enough immunity in the population with a stable virus. That’s classical herd immunity. It makes it very problematic to get herd immunity, though, [with Covid] - meaning there is enough protection in a c...

HARTFORD-APRIL 22, 2022: Last year there was enough solar power produced by Hartford's converted 4,000-acre closed landfill to power a thousand phones at full capacity. If you want to get geeky, it equated to 1 megawatt of electricity. This is one of many reasons that the city has ranked #18 per capita nationwide in a new report , Shining Cities 2022: The Top U.S. Cities for Solar Energy , when it comes to solar adoption. This is divided between both business and residential users. Johanna Neumann , senior director for renewable energy with Environment America, explained the methodology in their rankings. While Hartford is #18 for per capita solar use, it does not rank in the top 20 for overall solar output, an award that goes to Los Angeles. There is value, she explains, in both measurements. "So there are a lot of ways to slice and dice. How much solar per capita and overall [solar use]." She adds that it's equally important to look at small cities that are do...

Update: Feb. 1, 2023. My hero, Tom Brady, has announced his retirement "for good". I wrote the following after his last "retirement", though this time I know it is true. Couldn't love you more, Tom. Thanks for showing millions of us how the game should be played, for providing a beacon during hard times, for being you. I will miss you. February 5, 2017 I had been watching Superbowl LI in my mom's man cave. She was, of course, back in her room. She wasn't a football fan, but told me she loved my enthusiasm for Tom Brady and (at the time, before he left them) the Pats. So when they pulled out a victory and I ran screaming into her room, seeing her face light up with sheer joy was its own kind of success. I had made my late mother happy just by being happy myself. The end of that game sticks with me because I was worried about Tom's mother Galynn - whom he was hugging, and who was suffering from breast cancer at the time. I worried she might pass away,...

As a native Californian, I was proud when I saw WalletHub’s latest press release, but as a longtime New Englander felt far less satisfied. In 2021, the greenest city in the Union is San Diego, CA according to WalletHub data, which takes into account transportation, the environment, energy sources and lifestyle and policy. Other West Coast states also fared well - Portland, OR at number three; Irvine, CA at four and Fremont, CA at six. Not surprisingly, Honolulu enjoys ranking fifth of 100 cities studied for the survey. In order to determine the greenest cities in the U.S., WalletHub compared the ten dozen most populated. They then evaluated those dimensions using 28 metrics. However, decisions had to be made and some issues and practices had to be excluded. WalletHub states that "although recycling is vital to the sustainability efforts of each city, the types and sizes of recycling facilities vary widely by city. We therefore were unable to include - due to the lack of co...

Pantagonia is one of the natural world’s most resplendent treasures, teeming with life on the one hand, mourning its wildlife and glacial losses on the other. Its massive size - 402,700 square miles, shared by Argentina on the east and Chile on the west coast - means it is hard to pin down. The tragic climate change-enduced ramifications on its glaciers in the west will break your heart; the Andean cat’s brilliant hunting techniques in the steppe region of the east stir other emotions, like fear and lust. The new BBC Earth film-cum-documentary explodes with Episode 5, “Pantagonia: The Ends of the Earth” August 21, following an episode on the Galapagos (see here for a list of all episodes). If you think you know anything about this part of the world, you are wrong. The photographers, camerawomen and men spent a year traipsing around impossible-to-reach fjords and desert steppes, searching for flamingo babes or tiny monkeys. They risked their lives and were constantly exhausted, but...

Like other coronaviruses, SARS CoV-2 evolves and threatens to become endemic. Even the “common cold” is debilitating at times but - at least pre-masking - most of us had learned to live with it. Renowned virologist Dr. William Hazeltine in his book “Variants! The Shape-Shifting Challenge of COVID-19” teaches that obstacles to freeing ourselves of Covid begin with the virus itself. The more opportunity it has to mutate, the wilier it can become. He published this at the beginning of this year before the Delta variant proved the veracity of that prognostication. Although the “living e-book” concept doesn't quite work in paperback form, it is important reading. And unless you are a virologist or immunologist you too may struggle with terms like “ deletion ” - but skip past what you do not understand. Hazeltine has a prestigious background as a professor at Harvard and in AIDS research, and knows whereof he speaks. In the back he includes several articles he wrote for Scientific Ameri...

North Carolina State University researchers say they have created insecticide-free, mosquito-resistant clothing using textile materials. In a press release issued last week, North Carolina said this was proven in experiments with live mosquitoes after developing materials from a computational model of their own design. Researchers modeled for the behavior of Aedes aegypti , the mosquito that carries viruses that cause human diseases like Dengue fever, yellow fever and Zeka, prompting the experiments detailed in the journal Insects . In encounters with the pesky insects, they prevented 100 percent of bites when a volunteer wore their special clothing - a base layer undergarment and a combat shirt initially designed for the military - in a cage with 200 live, disease-free mosquitoes. Researchers think their computational model could be used more widely to develop clothing to reduce transmission of disease. "The fabric is proven to work - that's the great thing we discovered,...