What would you do to save the world if you had 50 billion dollars?

Our Priorities for Saving the World:
Yet another great TED video. Bjorn Lomborg takes a very interesting approach to improving our world. There are many, many very large problems that our world faces today; However we cannot help everyone with everything and must prioritize and focus on the problems where we can make the biggest difference. He and his team look at the big problems we face today in our current environment and prioritize them into categories (bad ideas, fair ideas, good ideas, and great ideas)to establish which ones we should avoid for now and which ones we should try to act on immediately. Starting at minute 6:30 Bjorn Lomborg lists these categories starting with the bad ideas. While all the problems that are brought are still very big ones, there is issues about how much costs must be made to get what benefits. With bad ideas it costs a very large amount of investments to get very little benefit. Great ideas on the other hand have incur huge benefits from very little costs. At minute 10:20 Bjorn mentions the number one priority we should focus on, Aids, $27billion will prevent 27 million new cases over the next few years. It is apparent that disease and malnutrition are our top priorities while climate change is at the bottom of the list in our current environment.

Bellingham's push for "Green" Businesses

The Northwest is known for being on the cutting edge of introducing and promoting sustainable practices. This is especially true with cities such as Bellingham where more and more environmentally responsible businesses are entering the market. Businesses such as the hempest are focused on providing customers apparel and other hemp related products made from renewable materials that are much better for the environment compare to what is readily available.

Barbo Furniture is another Bellingham Business that supports sustainable practices in every action of their operations.

“The Barbo Furniture store is where you will find some of the world's finest, well-made pieces of furniture. Many pieces are designed and artfully crafted in our own shop, bearing the well- deserved title "custom," since no two are ever alike."..."Our custom pieces are "Green/Sustainable," using FSC certified woods and time-honored construction practices. The manufactured furniture in our store is "Green" or "Emerging Green," because we believe we don't have the right to waste our natural resources or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. We are also founding members of the Sustainable Furnishings Council.
-Holly Barbo

After walking through her store and speaking with Holly Barbo, co-owners of Barbo Furniture, I could not agree more, that her furniture is amazingly well crafted and unique. It is unique not just for its style and craftsmanship, but also for the ecologically friendly processed used during its production. The craftsmenship and qulity that goes into each piece of furnitue increase its longevity, and promotes it being past down from generation to generation rather than disposed of after a few years.

Rethreads is a used apparel store that both buys and sells clothing of all types. Increasing the life of clothing that would have been previously thrown out, and helping the community support itself by buying and selling to eachother, locally.

Food Co-op ues banners on the side of their building to display how the business differentiates itself vs. competeing grocery stores. They are making more pushes towards a community based on getting food that is organic, fresh, and harvested sustainably.

Also on the tour of sustainable businesses in Bellingham i stumbled across a family who had been getting around using a electric car. They mentioned to not notice a difference in their electrical bill after using the car, which in turn makes the car free eco-friendly transportation.

Volvo believes that “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Brundtland (Our Common Future, 2007)

http://www.volvocars.com/intl/corporation/Sustainability/sustainable/Pages/Default.aspx

After looking at numerous car companies i see that Volvo is on the fore front of pushing for more ecologically friendly practice in their vehicle manufacteuring, parts, and drive. Not only are they stepping up by using better materials for their interiors such as substitutes for leather but they're also offering customers new value with their cars. Volvo has continued to pursue their brand trademark of being the safest car company around by adapting technology to their cars that helps prevent collisions before they happen.

Tardigrades for flame resistant materials

Flame retardant materials are not just used for Firefighters and stuntmen although they also certainly appreciate the fire resistant capabilities of modern textiles. The business has expanded, and chemicals used as flame retardants are to be found practically everywhere in our lives. Most structural wood elements such as paneling are treated with products and chemicals to make them more fire resistant. Plastic is also flammable and is the dominant material replacing traditional materials like wood and metal. So it too is often sprayed with chemical products to become more fire resistant.
The main chemical families of flame retardants are inorganic chemicals (including antimony, aluminum and tin compounds); primarily the products used are bromine, phosphorus, nitrogen, and chlorine based retardants. The use of some of these chemicals in flame retardants has come under increased scrutiny due to their suspected negative health and environmental impacts, especially the use of brominated flame retardants in polymer formulations. Firefighters, for example, are at risk from potentially toxic chemicals that are created when products containing flame retardant burn. These same chemicals are also potentially dangerous even to children who are at risk from many plastic toys they play with, also covered with similar flame retardant chemicals. 

Tardigrades, commonly known as “water bears” because of the way they walk with their stubby legs and claws, are water dwelling, very small microscopic animals (adults are between 0.1 mm to 1.5 mm long), and found everywhere, from hot springs at the Himalayas to more than two miles beneath the sea. They are polyextremophiles, meaning the can survive in harsh environments that would kill most animals, and can survive temperatures from above 300 degrees Fahrenheit to nearly absolute zero, making them the toughest animal on Earth. More than 1000 species of tardigrades have been discovered and they date back thousands of years.
Recently these "water bears" became the first species to survive in space’s harsh environment, flying aboard the European Space Agency's FOTON-M3 spacecraft in September, 2007. As part of the flight the animals were exposed to the vacuum of space as well as unfiltered solar radiation 1,000 times greater than that at the Earth's surface. Amazingly the little animals survived. Scientists were able to find that the tardigrades even retained the ability to reproduce after the spaceflight. Perhaps, the scientists speculate, the tardigrades did this by somehow repairing their DNA, but also evidence about the species skin, behavior, and composition gives suggestions to how this is possible. This also is amazing because it shows that life could have been created somewhere else in the universe and traveled through space to Earth.
Using microscopic images to a study the many different species of tardigrades that live in harsh hot temperatures and becoming more knowledgeable about the ways the species survives in such environments can help lead to the design and creation of a more organic product that acts as a non-toxic flame retardant. The animals salty cells are able to better retain water even when exposed to high concentrations of salt water, special enzymes, dubbed extremozymes, resemble regular enzymes but have a much stronger bond, and special sugars, called trehalose’s are rapidly produced when faced with dry conditions acting as substitutes for water molecules. These Tarnigrade attributes, as well as others, found from studies provide useful knowledge that would be very helpful in developing this product.
The product would be used as an alternative to the commonly used flame retardant chemicals we presently are stuck with using. It would help eliminate many of the harsh toxins currently found in available products and would lead us to advance in keeping not only our fire fighters more safe, but also our society as whole, who is constantly in contact with materials treated with flame retardant chemicals.