Endemic

Boring, bland, lifeless offices don’t benefit anyone:

Research has shown that a healthy office space with plants and open windows is more conducive to productivity.

I love my home office. It’s filled with plants, books, a fish tank, antiques and interesting objects My office at work is pretty bland and boring, but I’m going to try my best to make it good. If only I worked at Pixar.

Nothing destroys the credibility of a site quicker than corporate shillery:

Should ScienceBlogs.com have agreed to host a controversial blog on nutrition, written by PepsiCo? No, say the site’s readers, as some of its star bloggers stop their blogs in protest.

It’s an idea so bad that you swear that The Washington Post and Publisher Katharine Weymouth were behind it.

Despite the risk, urban cycling is a healthier option

The authors found that for the individuals who shift from car to bicycle, the benefits gained by increased physical activity were substantially larger (3 – 14 months of life gained) than the drawbacks of inhaled air pollution (0.8 – 40 days lost) and the increase in traffic accidents (5 – 9 days lost).

“Societal benefits are even larger due to a modest reduction in air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and traffic accidents,” the paper said.

We need to do a better job at encouraging cycling. It just makes more sense in urban areas and has clear health benefits. More bike lanes and training drivers to share the road would make adoption pick up considerably.

‘Gate Fever Breaks – Dot Earth Blog – NYTimes.com:

The  Independent Climate Change Email Review is finished and, within its constrained mandate, has cleared climate scientists and administrators at the University of East Anglia of claims of malfeasance rising out of the contents of folders of e-mail messages and files extracted from computers there and posted around the Web last November. Two other inquiries with slightly different focal points also cleared the scientists and school. (As I wrote last night, there is still a glaring unanswered question:  Was a crime was committed in releasing or extracting the files?)