An hour ago, at 3 AM Eastern, I rolled out of bed to check out the lunar eclipse. The moon was almost completely in the shadow of the earth. Only a sliver on the right side was still brighter than the rest of the moon. I bundled up and went outside and took a good […]

Tonight, inspired by a recent post on BoingBoing, we braved the chilly 27F/-3C night and I handed the kids my trusty old binoculars and told them to take a look at Jupiter. As cold as it was, the sky was really clear and visibility was great. None of us had trouble spotting the four biggest  […]

Polystyrene, better known by its trade name Styrofoam, is a huge environmental burden to our planet.  This petroleum-based plastic is found everywhere, from disposable coffee cups to packaging to insulation. Styrofoam cannot be recycled  and it takes a thousand years to decompose. Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups each year and many, many products are […]

It’s fall and the snakes are on the move. A while ago, Laura and I saw a (we think) Northern Watersnake by the pond and recently, I had to kill a big Copperhead near the horses shelter (and hay storage). A few days ago, I caught a juvenile Ratsnake inside the hay storage, and today […]

Yesterday was the second day at over 100 deg. F here in Durham. At RDU airport a heat record for that day was recorded at 102 °F / 38 °C. Great week for building a pasture fence …

Today was the hottest day this year, so far: 96 Deg. F / 35 Deg. C and max humidity at 90%. Summer has begun in Durham!

If you have ever traveled or lived in a tropical country, you can appreciate the value of a fridge there – especially in rural areas with no access to the electrical grid. There is nothing quite like getting a cold drink from the only refrigerator within miles on a scorching hot day. However, beyond cold […]

This evening, Laura tried out her new waders in the pond, and as she was poking around the edge of the pond she met the pond’s resident turtle: a 10-inch yellow-belly slider. The poor turtle protested some, but did not seem too worried overall. At her size (10 inches/24cm) she is pretty much as big […]

Yesterday I saw a hummingbird on the home security camera, so we set up the feeder last night. Sure enough, this morning, as I enjoyed my first cup of coffee, I saw a hummingbird and it went straight for the feeder. Welcome back, little helicopters!

Every year the earth’s rotation slows a bit and so we have to add a second to our time keeping once in a while to keep it in sync with the old rock. Large earthquakes like the devastating tremor last week in Chile, or the Sumatran quake that triggered the massive tsunami 0f 2004 can […]

Not sure if this is good news or bad news: Trafigura, the company responsible for the Probo Koala toxic waste scandal 3 years ago, settled with the lawyers representing the Ivorian victims for $46 Million – that’s a little over $1,500 per person. Yes, that’s real money for most folks in Cote d’Ivoire – a […]

Mark Mardell is the BBC’s Europe Editor and he wrote in his Euroblog about Freiburg, Germany – the town where I was born, and where I went to college. Mardell seems very impressed by how green and clean Freiburg is. It’s possibly my imagination, but the air here seems to taste cleaner. This pretty city […]

The German upstart car maker Loremo did a first test of its EV prototype on public roads. Eventually, this vehicle is supposed to be available in three flavors: gasoline (petrol), diesel or electric. The YT video below shows the electric version. Sadly – no sound, just ambient music bubbling along …

Not to dwell on the weather, but this is pretty intense, even for North Carolina. Last week, the official low temp. was 18 Deg. F (-7 ° C) and today the high was 81 F (27 °C). In the 50 hours from Wed AM to Friday PM temperatures went up by 50 Deg. F. Right […]

Sunday night central North Carolina was blanketed in 2-4 inches (5-10 cm) of snow. This is our third snowfall this winter, which makes this a pretty “wintry” winter for NC. Last year the temperatures hardly dipped below freezing. Last night it was 14 Deg. F (minus 11 Celsius). The kids enjoyed building their first snow-person. […]

Corn-based ethanol fuel may not be a “crime against humanity” after all. New research (pdf) shows that newer plants can produce a fuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent and replaces a lot of fossil fuel: The ethanol industry currently is producing a fuel that is 48 to 59 percent lower in direct-effect […]

The German start-up car maker Loremo says it is still on track with production in 2010 and they announced a couple of weeks ago that they will offer the Loremo in three flavors: Electric (EV), Gasoline (GT) and Diesel (LS). While I understand the idea of adding diversity to their product lineup, I hope they […]

Right now I am in Atlantic Beach, on the North Carolina coast. I am sitting on the deck of a friend’s beach house with a drink, waiting for the last load of laundry and the dish washer to get done, so I can pack our stuff and head back to Durham. I can hear the […]

My current batch of biodiesel is my greenest yet because I used homemade, bio-electricity to cook it (instead of Duke Power’s dirty coal-based electricity). A couple of weeks ago I bought a little 5KW diesel generator at Costco, plus a 10-circuit power switch. Last weekend I wired the generator to the circuits. Now I have […]

The big splash about Tata Motor’s ultra-cheap Nano ($2,500) all but buried another announcement from the Indian automaker at the Delhi auto show: they signed a $20M deal with MDI, a European start-up car maker working on commercializing cars that run on compressed air. Of course, the cars don’t “run on air,” rather they use […]