16 March, 2020 Now that the coronavirus is all over the news, I’m hearing a lot about companies and employees setting up their telecommuting strategies. A lot of it sounds as though they are trying to reinvent the wheel. Here’s some unsolicited advice from a work-at-home veteran. In 2013, I …
By Nancy McGuire The hardiest plants and animals are those that adapt to changes in their environment, and the same applies to companies. Companies that survive in the long term are the ones that are the best prepared to weather gradual change and catastrophic upheavals. In the wake of mounting …
People used to talk about work-life balance as if they were two separate things. Now they talk about work-life integration, but what they mean is finding ways to infiltrate every hour of every day with this work that is not really your life. I choose to do things differently. Seems …
Originally posted (by me) on LinkedIn, December 9, 2014. “I just want to see the raw data! No interpretation, no massaging the numbers, just the raw data straight out of the instrument!” I sympathized with my non-scientist friend. She felt frustrated after reading a series of news items that began …
How in the world do you generate electricity from the slow-moving water in a river delta? Think about all the ways we have of generating electricity. You can turn a turbine using steam. You can place the turbine in a waterfall and have the falling water turn the blades, or …
Is there an immense ocean, far beneath the surface of the Earth, that replenishes the oceans above? Recent news items describe a deep reservoir containing as much as three-quarters of the Earth’s water supply. Most of these news stories are careful to note that this isn’t some great sloshing underground …
This afternoon, I joined the Earth Ethics Committee of the Washington Ethical Society and friends for a tour of the Camille Kendall Academic Center of the Universities at Shady Grove (Rockville, MD). When this building received a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification, it was the largest …
Cooking fresh ginger transforms one of its ingredients, gingerol, into a compound called zingerone, which is one of the key contributors to ginger’s distinctive aroma. Zingerone is chemically similar to vanillin (which gives vanilla its odor) and eugenol (clove oil).
The wombats didn’t start getting sick until after Australian ranchers moved their livestock off the plot of land that the livestock and wombats had shared, after the foul-tasting weeds took over, pushing aside the tasty native grasses. The older wombats knew that something had changed, but the younger generation ate …
Recently, a group of researchers in Dresden, Germany found a way to make one-atom-thick sheets of iron. It wasn’t what they had set out to do, but they were alert enough to see this as the intriguing discovery it was rather than an annoying byproduct to be cleaned up. Thin …
