First Platinum LEED-Certified, 100% Solar Powered, Affordable Housing in San Diego

Los Vecinos, the first LEED-Certified Platinum, 100% solar-powered affordable housing in San Diego, offer 42-units of state of the art in green housing. The $17.6 million USD project opened its doors today to visitors to welcome the new neighbors, who are already living in the building, to the neighborhood.

The complex is located in the Chula Vista section of San Diego, and provides 3 floors of 1, 2 and 3-bedroom housing units. The complex also has a 1,500 square foot recreation center complete with fitness equipment, and space for classes offered such as finance, computer literacy and how to “go green.” Eligible residents make between $16,600 and $58,800 USD per year (60% or less of the area’s median income). The solar array covering the entire roof was installed by First Solar Inc and is a 93 kW system. Each apartment gets a certain number of solar panels hard-wired directly so it and gets whatever credit the system produces; the bigger the apartment, the more panels.

The property was once a vacant motel that housed all sorts of riffraff, but is now a “recycled” property housing a community of 42 families. To achieve Platinum LEED status, the building was designed to minimize the size of both the carbon footprint and the utility bill of the building’s residents. Aside from the extensive solar array, which power almost the entire building, units were designed to rely mainly on ceiling fans and natural ventilation. Other environmental upgrades include tankless water heaters, Energy Star appliances, energy efficient lighting and low water-use fixtures. All landscaping on the property is designed to require minimal water. Pretty much everything you would expect from a green building. These upgrades all add up to what should be a Platinum certification under LEED.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/05/los-vecinos-first-platinum-leed-certified-solar-powered-affordable-housing-in-san-diego.php

Whale Shark’s Secret Hideout Finally Discovered

It seems like someone would of noticed a fish this size showing up.

After half a century of searching, scientists have finally discovered what happens to the world’s second largest shark every winter: It has a Caribbean hideout.

Basking sharks, which can grow up to 33 feet long and weigh more than a Hummer H1, spend the late spring, summer and early fall in the temperate regions of the world’s oceans. But then they pull their great disappearing act, eluding scientists throughout the winter months.

“It’s been a big mystery for the past fifty years,” said Greg Skomal, an aquatic biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and lead author of the study in Current Biology May 7. “For a while people thought they were hibernating on the sea floor, even though hibernating is not really something sharks do.”

Skomal tagged the giant fish off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts and tracked them by satellite, piecing together their mysterious winter wanderings. He discovered the beasts were absconding to the depths of the Caribbean, some voyaging as far as the Brazilian coast, though the attraction of these destinations poses yet another mystery. The findings have implications for conserving the sharks, whose fins are much-desired delicacies in Chinese cuisine.

The basking shark is a benign behemoth. It swims at about three miles per hour with its four-foot-wide mouth gaping open, filtering through almost 500,000 gallons of water every hour for its plankton sustenance.

Like most large fish, they’re difficult to keep track of because they rarely come to the surface, where tags need to be to transmit information to satellites. Skomal got around this hurdle by harpooning the fish with special tags that tracked and stored depth, temperature and light level, which then popped off at a pre-programmed date and rose to the surface. Once a tag hits the surface, it transmits the entire archive of the fish’s journey via satellite. Skomal used a novel analysis technique that could determine the sharks’ locations at every time point, allowing him to retrospectively track them to their secret hiding places.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/baskingshark/

Gene Key To Alzheimer’s-like Reversal Identified

Gene Key To Alzheimer’s-like Reversal Identified: Success In Restoring Memories In Mice Could Lead To Human Treatments

A team led by researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has now pinpointed the exact gene responsible for a 2007 breakthrough in which mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease regained long-term memories and the ability to learn.

In the latest development, reported in the May 7 issue of Nature, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and colleagues found that drugs that work on the gene HDAC2 reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s and boost cognitive function in mice.

“This gene and its protein are promising targets for treating memory impairment,” Tsai said. “HDAC2 regulates the expression of a plethora of genes implicated in plasticity — the brain’s ability to change in response to experience — and memory formation.

“It brings about long-lasting changes in how other genes are expressed, which is probably necessary to increase numbers of synapses and restructure neural circuits, thereby enhancing memory,” she said.

The researchers treated mice with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms using histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors. HDACs are a family of 11 enzymes that seem to act as master regulators of gene expression. Drugs that inhibit HDACs are in experimental stages and are not available by prescription for use for Alzheimer’s.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090506144309.htm

Personalized health care

By David Ewing Duncan

Recently, I discovered that my heart-attack risk is frighteningly high over the next 10 to 20 years. This alarming prognosis was achieved using technology that could potentially be good news for the health-care reform effort being attempted in Washington. Amid bailouts and numbing deficits, this kind of personalized medicine might even help save billions or possibly trillions of dollars over the next decade or two.

My heart, the nation’s economy, and health-care reform are connected through an experimental test that I took last year that delivered my dire forecast. Created by Entelos, a company that performs computer simulations to make predictions about a person’s health, the test gathered data on my cholesterol levels, a heart CT scan, a genetic profile, and more, and fed the results into a powerful computer.

What popped out is a prediction that the company claims is not only customized to my own genes and physiology, but also factors in far more variables than traditional heart-risk tests.

Entelos was on track to raise money to refine and launch its test commercially within a year or two. But in the current economic climate, sources of funding have become more difficult, delaying the final development and launch of the test.

What’s missing is a comprehensive plan to push these efforts to the next stage, not only in terms of science and medicine, but also in terms of patent law, regulation, ethics, and finance. What’s needed is a Human Genome Project level of focus on personalized and preventive medicine for major diseases. Let’s call it the Personalized Health Project.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22592/