I remember earlier this year reporting back from the homebuilding show that many people found greening their buildings didn’t add any value to them. Well, it seems they were wrong. A study lead by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors has found that low energy buildings had added value for their owners.

RICS chief executive Louis Armstrong said: “This research shows that the interests of business and the environment can converge. The property and construction industries have a leading role to play in tackling climate change. This work shows that achieving real environmental benefits can also be profitable.”

via Sustainablog

Technorati tag: EcoHouse, Property values

Pictures from the 2005 Illegal Soapbox Derby in Bengal Heights, San Francisco.

Where do I find a hill road I can close?

There are very few people around who remember the First World War. In the run up to Remembrance Day, the Guardian tracked down three and interviewed them.

We got as far as their second line and four Germans stood up. They didn’t get up to run away, they got up to fight. One of them came running towards me. He couldn’t have had any ammunition or he would have shot me, but he came towards me with his bayonet pointing at my chest. I fired and hit him in the shoulder. He dropped his rifle, but still came stumbling on. I can only suppose that he wanted to kick our Lewis gun into the mud, which would have made it useless. I had three live rounds left in my revolver and could have killed him with the first. What should I do? I had seconds to make my mind up. I gave him his life. I didn’t kill him. I shot him above the ankle and above the knee and brought him down. I knew he would be picked up, passed back to a PoW camp, and at the end of the war he would rejoin his family.

Technorati tag: First World War

Originally developed as therapy tools, balance boards have evolved into training and play items for serious boarders. When I’m feeling flush enough I’m going to get myself one and freestyle in the kitchen.

It has been discovered that male mice sing, almost certainly to serenade the laydee mice.

Some bats are known to sing in courtship, and whale song is well-documented, but singing is otherwise unknown in non-human mammals. That it has turned up in one of the most well-studied of animals – the lab mouse – is all the more surprising.

Tim Holy and Zhongsheng Guo, of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, US, recorded the vocalisations made by male mice in the presence of female pheromones. They then digitally modified them to drop the pitch by several octaves into the range of human hearing.

Technorati tag: Mice, Song