Not too long ago, if you wanted to know what type of seafood was best for the environment, your tools didn’t get any more high-tech than a wallet card or a fridge magnet. But the fridge magnet doesn’t help much when you’re at the grocery store, and wallet cards are easy to leave behind (just ask me how many times I’ve forgotten mine). Luckily, sustainable seafood watchdogs have kept pace with technology and now, like with almost everything else in our lives, there’s an app for that.
Read the rest at Green Guide

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If you live in a city, you might have a window box or a pot of tomatoes on your balcony. You might even be lucky enough to have a small backyard garden. But do you compost?

Probably not: composting in a small space is tough, not to mention smelly. You could get a worm bin or a bokashi system, but the truth is: for city dwellers, composting is more often an ideal than a reality.

Enter Compost Cab, a soon-to-launch concept for city-dwellers in Washington, D.C. For $8 a week, Compost Cab provides you with a trash bin which you fill with organic waste. Then the company picks it up each week and trucks it to a nearby urban farm, which turns your banana peels and coffee grounds into soil.
Read the rest at National Geographic Green Guide

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In the past 20 years we’ve traded pagers for smart phones and library cards for Kindles. But the joint federal-industry task force charged with responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is still using cleanup methods that haven’t changed much since the days of the Exxon Valdez.

Nearly four million gallons of oil have already spewed into the Gulf since the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank last month.

Amid efforts to cap the seafloor leak, cleanup workers have been using boat-based skimmers to pick up the oil, booms to gather the slick for burning, and chemical dispersants to break the crude into smaller droplets—all parts of the oil-fighting toolkit for decades.

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At this week’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival, a panel of scientists and advertising executives dissected the latest research on “neuromarketing”: measuring consumers’ brain activity to help develop ads and products.

The tactic is making headlines for big business. Frito-Lay studied women’s brains to help develop an ad campaign, and Campbell Soup (CPB, Fortune 500) just unveiled a packaging redesign based on consumers’ “neurological and bodily responses” to different mockups. By hooking customers up to EEG or MRI machines, a company can learn about what’s really going on inside a buyer’s brain — possibly even before the buyer knows it.

But Campbell’s and Frito-Lay have huge budgets; this technology isn’t cheap. What about smaller companies?

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Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books.

The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors’ laws in a single manuscript.

The Codex Gregorianus covered the laws of Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, to those of Diocletian, ruler from A.D. 284 to 305.

Later codices excerpted the laws that were still relevant and added new ones, so only parts of the first codex survived as passages in other editions. All copies of the original collection of laws were thought to have been lost.

Luckily, in the 16th century it was common to use scraps of paper to reinforce the bindings of new books.

Seventeen such fragments—each smaller than 2 square inches (13 square centimeters)—were recovered from a set of books decades ago. The scraps were eventually acquired by a private owner, who recently loaned them to Roman-law experts at University College London.

A preservation librarian who examined the scraps told the researchers that the shapes of the pieces and the patterns of wear suggest the ancient papers had been wrapped around cords that went over the books’ spines.

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If Dr. Horrible really did have a “freeze ray,” he might stop the world by zapping it with ultraviolet light, new research suggests.
After feeding a light-sensitive chemical to transparent, microscopic worms called nematodes, scientists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia were able to paralyze the tiny creatures by exposing them to UV light.

The paralysis works because UV light changes the structure of the ingested chemical, called dithienylethene.

Upon UV exposure, the normally clear chemical turns blue, and it shuts down the worms’ metabolism, said study co-author Neil R. Branda.

Read the rest at News.NationalGeographic.com

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Contrary to a recent TV cell phone ad, Dunkin’ Donuts isn’t likely to set up shop in space any time soon.

But if it did, the donut chain might like to build next to WASP-17b, a newfound planet that’s puffed up to be roughly as dense as a foam coffee cup.

WASP-17b orbits a star about a thousand light-years away. In addition to its exceptionally low density, the planet is one of the largest yet found.

“When I first saw that this thing might have a radius twice that of Jupiter, I was really astounded,” said David Anderson of Keele University, a member of the U.K.-based Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) consortium.

WASP-17b probably got so big because of its unusual orbit, Anderson and colleagues say in a new paper describing the find.

Read the rest at News.NationalGeographic.com

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“Bacon cereal.” “Bacon lollipop.” “Bacon spaghetti.” “Bacon bread.” “Bacon coffee.” “Bacon beer.”

In a sane world, none of these exact phrases would return any hits when plugged into Google. This is not a sane world.

A chocolate bar studded with bits of bacon sells better than any of the wines at Arlington’s Curious Grape. BLT Steak, just behind the White House, serves grilled double-cut bacon as an appetizer. For $9. There’s bacon-infused vodka. Bacon-flavored mints. Baconnaise, bacon salt, a bacon-print wallet, bacon Band-Aids.

“I was a vegetarian for a year,” says Michelle Harriott, 26, of Rosslyn, “and I had bacon dreams.”

Read it at WashingtonCityPaper.com

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BRANDON GREEN RESOLVED to try his hand at real estate after watching a late-night infomercial in 2000. Bored with his job in sales as an IT recruiter in Silver Spring, Green paid $19.95 for Carlton Sheets’s “No Down Payment” video, and applied himself. “My first project was a complete overhaul of a house, 727 11th Street, NE,” he recalls.

He financed his first purchase with a federal renovation loan. He flipped the Capitol Hill house for a tidy profit. He was 22, and he was hooked.

Brandon Green is now the principal broker at Brandon Green & Associates (Brandongreenandassociates.com; 2410 17th St. NW, Suite 200; 202-318-1623), a real estate firm affiliated with Keller Williams Realty in trendy Adams Morgan. Like the rest of the BGA staff, he’s young (31; the median age of real estate agents nationwide is 52) — and he Twitters. He counts his age and his tech saavy as an advantage.

“Many of my competitors are still strugging with e-mail.”

Brandon Green”We’re using Facebook very heavily,” Green says, “[and] LinkedIn. … Statistics show that the consumer expects a response [to an online question] within minutes. Not within hours, but within minutes.”

Clearly, the man is hustling to keep clients’ satisfied despite the recession. People are panicking, throwing property on the market and watching it sit for months. A sale takes 75 days on average, according to an estimate in November 2008, the most recent month for which statistics were available from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

But this guy is still selling condos, many in Adams Morgan and Logan Circle.

“We’re actually up about 25 percent from where we were last year,” Green says. Part of his firm’s success comes from the team’s aggressive marketing approach — Green spends up to four hours per day calling prospective buyers and sellers.

Recruiting is only half the battle, however. At the end of the day, to make a buck, he still must actually sell the property.

Green sees his role as a seller’s teacher and advocate, “educating the seller on what is to be done to be successful. A lot of Realtors have not been upfront with people about how the market really is,” he says. “So, they list their house at a very high markup, and it doesn’t sell.”

Luckily, Green says, if your one-bedroom condo’s feeling a little too tight to hold you and Fido, you’re not trapped until 2010 or later — when some say the markets will finally turn around. It’s just going to be a little more challenging to sell.

We asked Green to spill some of the advice he gives to clients eager to help him sell their home.

» You don’t need a huge budget
“The biggest thing we see is people have to do a lot of de-cluttering,” Green says. So, rent a storage unit, beg the in-laws for garage space, or give away whatever you can to make your place look empty. Clearing up need not cost a thing.

“You want to bring your house to the point where buyers walk in [and] they ask themselves, ‘Gosh, does anybody still live here?’” Green says. Cramming stuff into your closet doesn’t count. Besides, Green adds, “Do you want to pay to store and move all this stuff? Maybe now it’s time to get rid of it.”

» Make small, inexpensive fixes
“One of the big rules is three items per surface — at most,” Green says. And look at small details: Make sure light-switch cover plates are consistent throughout; and check for light bulbs that don’t work, leaky faucets, off-kilter drawers and so on.

“De-personalize,” urges Realtor Magazine, the official magazine of the National Association of Realtors. Clear off the fridge, take down personal photos, and think twice about displaying your stamp/action figure/antique gas lamp collection in the open.

» Clean thoroughly — then think about cleaning even more
“Complete that to-do list that’s been sitting on your kitchen counter for the last year and a half,” Green says. Consider new paint, new carpet and new light fixtures. Clean everything. And, Green adds, make sure the unit is easy for buyers to see.

“No appointments necessary — or [be available at] extremely short notice,” Green says. “No babies napping. If you have a pet, it’s best to move the pet out. In many cases, that’s best for the pet, too.”

» Devote time (and maybe money) to the project
How long does all this work take? “A week minimum in most cases, and that’s working pretty aggressively,” says Green.

And — wait, don’t gasp — “It could easily cost $10,000 to bring the property up to sellable condition.” Staging and repairs add up. But if your condo’s going for $400,000, it might be worthwhile to invest 2 percent of the asking price back into the place.

“You used to be able to put a house on the market in any condition, and, gosh, that is not the case now. When there are so many selections,” Green says, “[a buyer] needs to come into a place and think, ‘I could feel good here.’”

Read it at ExpressNightOut.com

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A mile east of downtown, the mostly residential neighborhood now has a few cafes and coffee shops sprinkled among its brick Greek Revival, Federal and Italianate homes.

Much of the area’s history involves gruesome topics, such as Civil War medicine (never a pleasant subject) and a murderous grandnephew who offed Virginia’s first signer of the Declaration of Independence. Add to this Edgar Allan Poe’s association with the neighborhood (the writer spent much of his youth in Richmond and entertained a forbidden courtship with a Church Hill girl), and you have the makings of a creepily entertaining stroll.
See the rest at WashingtonPost.com

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