Cycling Rx Doctors Order Up a Bike for Patients


The Prescribe-a-Bike program (Tinyurl.com/Prescription Bikes) allows doctors at Boston Medical Center, in Massa- chusetts, to write low-income patients prescriptions for a one-year membership to Hubway, the city’s bike-sharing system, for $5, which is $80 less than the regular charge. A free helmet is part of the deal. According to The Boston Globe, one in four Boston residents is obese, and Kate Walsh, chief executive of Boston Medical Center, believes the program can help. “Regular ex- ercise is key to combating this [obesity] trend, and Prescribe- a-Bike,” she says, “is one important way our caregivers can help patients get the exercise they need to be healthy.”


Source: The Atlantic Monthly


Flight Zone Airports Establish Bee-Friendly Acres


The Common Acre is a nonprofit partnering with the airport serving Seattle, Washington, and the Urban Bee Company (UrbanBee.com) to reclaim 50 acres of vacant land to plant native wildflowers as pollinator habitat for hummingbirds, butterflies and disease-resistant bee colonies. A GMO-free (no genet- ic modification) wildflower seed farm is also in the works. Bees present no threat to air traffic and the hives discourage birds that do pose a danger to planes. Beekeeper Jim Robins, of Robins Apiaries, in St. Louis, Missouri, rents an area with a plentiful supply of white Dutch clover, and Lambert Airport views his enter- prise as part of its sustainability program. O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, the first in the U.S. to install hives, is rebuilding to its full complement of 50 hives after losing about half of them to 2014’s extreme winter. It’s a project that could be a model for airports everywhere—using inaccessible scrubland to do something revolution- ary, like supporting a local food system. One hundred foods make up 90 percent of a human diet, and bees pollinate 71 of them.


Learn more at CommonAcre.org.


Harvesting Fog Simple Device Provides Safe Water in Africa


The WarkaWater tower is providing an innovative new way to harvest safe drinking water, normally an onerous task in Ethiopia and many other parts of Africa. Obtaining water via repeated trips to the nearest source is extremely time-consuming and what’s collected is often highly contaminated and harmful to drink. Also, this task is commonly


carried out by females, putting them in danger of sexual harassment or worse enroute. The towers, inspired by the native warka tree, are a vertical bamboo system


that harvests potable, clean water from the air through condensation, using a fog-harvesting fabric that can collect up to 25 gallons of safe drinking water per day. Each tower costs about $550, and can be built in a few days by village residents using locally available materials.


Source: Inhabitat.com


True Grit Why Persistence Counts


Some educators believe that improve- ments in instruction, curriculum and school environments are not enough to raise the achievement levels of all stu- dents, especially disadvantaged children. Also necessary is a quality called “grit”, loosely defined as persistence over time to overcome challenges and accomplish big goals. Grit comprises a suite of traits and behaviors that include goal-direct- edness (knowing where to go and how to get there); motivation (having a strong will to achieve identified goals); self-con- trol (avoiding distractions and focusing on the task at hand); and a positive mind- set (embracing challenges and viewing failure as a learning opportunity). A meta-study of 25 years of


research by John Hattie and Helen Timperley, professors at the University of Aukland, New Zealand, has shown that giving students challenging goals encourages greater effort and per- sistence than providing vague or no direction. Students aren’t hardwired for these qualities, but grit can be devel- oped through an emerging battery of evidence-based techniques that give educators a powerful new set of tools to support student success. A famous example of the power of self-regulation was observed when pre- schoolers that were able to withstand the temptation of eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes to receive a second one were more successful in high school and scored about 210 points higher on their SATs later in life than those with less willpower (Tinyurl.com/Stanford MarshallowStudy).


Source: ascd.org. natural awakenings August 2014 11


photo: ArchitectureAndVision.com


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