Eideard

If you bought a major appliance in the last three years, odds are it was “smart,” even if you didn’t know it. Meaning: it probably contains a wireless radio that can broadcast and transmit over a small personal area network, sending out information about a device’s status and energy use, as well as receiving commands that alter its behavior.

Many appliances that don’t even announce they have this capability are equipped with it, says Mike Beyerle, an engineer at GE whom I recently interviewed about GE’s coming Nucleus home energy management system. “We want to build up a base before we make a big deal out of it,” says Beyerle.

It’s an intriguing twist on the old business maxim “under-promise, over-deliver.” In this case, manufacturers aren’t even telling consumers what their devices are capable of because, in part, those abilities are useless without an energy management hub like GE’s Nucleus or a utility company’s smart meter…

Once a device is hooked up to an energy management system, things get interesting. Did you realize, for example, that your refrigerator’s ice maker’s defrost cycle can be shifted to another time of day by your utility in order to drive down power use during times of peak demand..?

GE’s Nucleus won’t roll out until 2012, and smart meter penetration is still no more than 25 percent in the U.S. But with the cost of new power plants rising by the day, putting smart meters into homes is more attractive than ever to utilities. Not only do they allow utilities to enroll customers in demand response programs, they also tend to lower electricity consumption overall, because they empower consumers to understand when and how they are using energy.

So do you have a sleeper cell in your kitchen or laundry room, waiting to be activated by the installation of a new smart meter or some other Zigbee-capable device? You may not know until you have the right kind of hub installed — but some already have a ZigBee label.

RTFA. I posted this especially for the paranoid among our readers. You know who you are.

And, maybe, your toaster does, too.

The world’s largest sperm bank has started turning down redheaded donors because there is too little demand for their sperm.

Ole Schou, Cryos’s director, said that there had been a surge in donations in recent years, allowing the facility to become much more picky about its donors.

“There are too many redheads in relation to demand,” he told told Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet. “I do not think you chose a redhead, unless the partner – for example, the sterile male – has red hair, or because the lone woman has a preference for redheads. And that’s perhaps not so many, especially in the latter case.”

Mr Schou said the only reliable demand for sperm from redheaded donors was from Ireland, where he said it sold “like hot cakes”…

Cryos pays donors up to $500, and sends its semen to over 65 countries worldwide.

All I can picture in my mind is hot cakes filled with little wiggling tails.

Frozen for storage

Hospitals and other organizations routinely urge people to give blood, bone marrow and even some organs, but Texas Children’s Hospital is launching a different kind of donor program: breast milk.

The Houston pediatric hospital is asking nursing mothers in the area to donate their excess milk, which has proved life-saving for prematurely born babies whose mothers are unable to produce enough to meet the infant’s needs.

“The evidence is overwhelming that these critically ill preemies do best on mother’s milk, the reason we only feed breast milk in our neonatal intensive care unit,” said Nancy Hurst, a Texas Children’s nurse and director of the new donor milk program. “Ideally, they get their own mother’s milk, but donor milk is the next best thing.”

Around the nation, the use of donor breast milk has grown dramatically in recent years. The nation’s nonprofit donor milk banks last year processed and dispensed 1.8 million ounces, up from about 325,000 in 1999. The increased demand has caused the banks to issue urgent appeals for donors.

That demand mostly relates to the nation’s roughly 51,000 very low birth weight babies who survive childbirth every year, babies who weigh 3.3 pounds or less. It would take nearly 9 million ounces of donor milk to provide all those babies what the mothers themselves can’t produce…

Since 2009, Texas Children’s had got its donor milk from the Mothers’ Milk Bank at Austin, one of 10 U.S. nonprofit banks, all of which screen the donor mothers’ blood and pasteurize the milk. Texas Children’s will now maintain its own bank, though the pasteurizing will be done at a for-profit plant in California…

In another form, donor milk dates to more than 2,000 years before Christ, when the Code of Hammurabi set forth the qualities for a good wet nurse, women who breast-fed others’ babies. Wet nurses fell out of favor in the developed world around the turn of the 20th century, after researchers found the milk could transfer diseases to newborns. Milk banks emerged not long after.

The appeal of donor breast milk is particularly strong because it’s common for mothers of premature babies to struggle to produce milk…Also, premature infants often arrive at hospitals such as Texas Children’s well before the mother, transferred from remote locations.

All good news AFAIC. Real healthcare for children that need it the most.

I hope they’re not screwing around with too many plastic additives. Natural ain’t bad.

Prius V – American name for Toyota’s Prius station wagon

File this one under the category of unexpected. According to Integrity Exports, Toyota logged an outrageous 52,000 orders for its Prius Alpha hybrid over in Japan since the vehicle launched on May 13th. That’s astronomical considering that Toyota set a monthly sales target of just 3,000 units for the gas-electric MPV.

Toyota says that it will ramp up production of the Prius Alpha in response to soaring demand, but boosting output from 3,000 to 5,000 vehicles per month (Toyota’s modified production levels) by summer’s end still doesn’t seem like it’ll be enough.

Despite Toyota promising that the enormous demand for the Prius Alpha won’t affect the launch of the Prius V here in the States, Integrity Exports begs to differ…

Even my barely functional remembrance of things mathematical tells me this critter ain’t landing on time in the United States. Unless Toyota decides to [1] stop taking orders in Japan, right now, and [2] decides to screw some of the people with orders already in-house in Japan.

George Graber was unemployed for three months this year after the shutdown of a recreational- vehicle plant in Elkhart County, Indiana. Now, he’s building $15,000 travel trailers at startup Heritage One RV.

His job-hunting luck reflects a rebound in RV demand that may signal the end of the worst U.S. recession since World War II. In the last four domestic cycles, Winnebago Industries Inc. and other RV makers foreshadowed the economy’s decline and heralded its recovery, government and trade-group data show.

“The RV industry is always the first in and the first out, and there’s already been a noticeable beginning of it coming out of the current recession,” said Dave Hoefer, 66, an adviser to Earthbound Recreational Vehicles, which was founded this year on the site of another bankrupt maker in Middlebury, Indiana.

Elkhart County builds about half the RVs sold in the U.S., making it the center of a $14 billion domestic market. Evidence of a turnaround is showing up in new companies like Heritage One sprouting from the remains of failed manufacturers, and in no- vacancy signs at a motel favored by RV-hauling truckers…

Sales in July, the latest available, ran at the strongest annual rate since October, according to the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association. By year’s end, those shipments should show their first monthly gain since October 2007, predating the onset of the recession in December of that year…

Showroom visits and consumer-loan approvals now are rising for the first time in more than a year, said Steve Smith, a Heritage One partner who recently drove 5,000 miles through the Midwest and South as part of a company sales call…

Elkhart County needs that kind of news. Located along the Michigan border and home to about 200,000 people, the county has a jobless rate of about 17 percent, the worst in Indiana. President Barack Obama has visited the area three times to talk about economic hardship…

For Graber, 45, who had to sell his pickup for a cheaper model and take other belt-tightening steps after losing his purchasing job at Travel Supreme, the Elkhart recovery can’t come fast enough.

“People I know personally, a couple of them will get back every week now,” he said. “Three months ago, everyone was just down and they weren’t even taking applications.”

RV’s are part of everyday life among grayheads. So, whether you own one – and there are a few in our family – or damned near live full-time in one, you stay in touch with the marketplace and the health of design and sales.

I’m certain my father-in-law will tell me about it. When he gets back down here from Canada with his 5th-wheeler.

Spain’s wind farms briefly provided a record 43 percent of demand for electricity early on Monday.

Spain is the third-largest generator of wind power in the world, with about 16,000 MW of installed capacity and plants to have 20,000 MW by 2010.

The lobby further estimated that wind farms in 2007 saved Spain importing the equivalent of 6 million tonnes of crude oil, which would have cost 1.104 billion euros.