Student ideas for green roof make school a teaching lab – At Boston Latin, sustainability is goal
By June Q. Wu – Globe Correspondent / July 26, 2010

Take Boston Latin School, and pack on top of its building a weather station, a greenhouse, two outdoor classrooms, a cafeteria, and a garden. Then add solar panels, wind turbines, and the outdoor elevator.

It’s a 70,000-square-foot, $6.2 million green roof dreamed up by Boston Latin students, and it’s becoming a reality.

“It started out as a simple request for how the school can reduce its carbon footprint,’’ said Gail Sullivan, the architect who has been working with the students free of charge. “But then the students said yes, yes, and yes to all the different features.’’

Unfazed by the hefty price tag, students from the school’s Youth Climate Action Network have been raising money and applying for grants over the past year to make their green wonderland a reality, piece by piece.

A 28-solar panel array and 350 trays of sedum, a flowering succulent plant, have been installed on the school’s roof.

Up next are the outdoor classrooms and elevator, a $2.7 million project to be completed in fall 2011, according to Sullivan, who works for Studio G Architects.

Sullivan said she expects to finish the project in five years, but said the timeframe depends on when the students can raise the money.

But the vision does not stop there.

Accessibility compliance still an issue for disabled – 20 years after law, new Hub panel seeking more progress
By David Abel – Globe Staff / July 26, 2010

Thousands of pedestrian ramps across Boston remain impassable to people using wheelchairs, their slopes too steep or their curbs improperly hewn.

City Hall, which sits in a minefield of uneven bricks and broad steps, and other public buildings in the city have long posed hazards for the blind or those who have trouble walking.

And many schools, parks, and polling places remain inaccessible or difficult to enter for the city’s tens of thousands of disabled residents.

Twenty years after the Americans with Disabilities Act became a landmark law of the land, prohibiting discrimination against the disabled and mandating a raft of renovations to make public and private buildings more accessible, advocates for those with physical and mental challenges insist that the city and state have often failed to comply with the law.

It’s something officials do not dispute but say is changing, with considerable progress made recently.

“Until the city started paying attention recently, its performance was poor in regard to including people with disabilities in civic life, whether it was providing access to the parks, the streets, or all the historic buildings,’’ said John Kelly, a quadriplegic who serves as chairman of the Commission of Persons With Disabilities, a group of volunteers the city organized last October in response to increasingly vocal complaints about the lack of attention to the disabled. “We’re looking forward to a dramatic turnaround.’’

See also:  Amid milestone, disabled say more ‘progress’ needed
By Christine McConville / Boston Herald – July 26, 2010

As college text prices soar, students get a rental option
By Tracy Jan – Globe Staff / July 26, 2010

College students will have new, cheaper alternatives this fall to shelling out hundreds of dollars each semester for textbooks they may never use again.

In an effort to curb escalating book prices amid sky-high college costs, bookstores at more than a dozen campuses across the state and hundreds more around the country will begin renting textbooks at about half the cost of buying them.
At other schools, professors looking to save students even more money are solely assigning reading materials accessible over the Internet — for free.

The move toward more affordable options comes as federal legislation to control runaway textbook costs kicked in this month.

Textbook prices have risen 14 percent in the past year, according to a major book retailer, growing at four times the rate of inflation for many years.

A typical undergraduate today spends $900 to $1,200 a year on textbooks, compared with $400 to $600 a decade ago, said Joseph Mercurio, executive vice president of Boston University.

Biologist cites progress on Alzheimer’s – Age-slowing protein seems to benefit mice
By Karen Weintraub – Globe Correspondent / July 26, 2010

A leading antiaging researcher, Leonard Guarente, believes he has found a potential new approach for treating Alzheimer’s disease.

For more than 15 years, the MIT biology professor has been researching proteins called sirtuins, which slow an animal’s aging clock during times of scarcity — stalling the animal at a younger and more fertile stage until food becomes more plentiful and reproductive success is more likely.

Drug companies, including Cambridge-based Sirtris Pharmaceuticals Inc., a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline PLC, have been developing medications for diabetes and metabolic disorders based on this idea.

In a paper published in the current issue of the journal Cell, Guarente and several students have shown that amping up one of the sirtuins, known as SIRT1, appears to treat Alzheimer’s in mice.

Guarente, who cochairs Sirtris’s scientific advisory board, said his paper suggests that companies like Sirtris should be investigating whether sirtuins could be used against Alzheimer’s in people.

Red Sox wives to hold fundraiser for food bank
SouthCoastToday.com – July 26, 2010

BOSTON — The Red Sox Wives will take over Fenway Park on Friday and Saturday during the 17th Annual Can & Cash Drive, a fundraiser for The Greater Boston Food Bank.

For two hours prior to game time through the first inning, volunteers from the Food Bank, which also benefits SouthCoast, will collect 10 non-perishable food items or a $10 donation in exchange for an autographed photo of a Red Sox player, handed out by one of the Red Sox Wives.

The Food Bank volunteers and the Sox Wives will be stationed outside the gates, so fans do not need a ticket to the game to participate in the fundraiser.

During the games, the Fenway Park Jumbotron will broadcast facts about hunger in Massachusetts, provided by The Greater Boston Food Bank. In addition to the Red Sox Wives’ autographed photo tables, volunteers will be on hand outside the park to collect donations.

In 2009, The Food Bank collected nearly $26,000 (53,741 meals) and 5,550 pounds of food from Red Sox fans in a two-day period. Since its inception, the Can & Cash Drive has raised approximately $196,000 in cash donations and collected more than 150,000 pounds of food.

1775 – The birth of what would later become the United States Post Office Department is established by the Second Continental Congress.  More anniversaries.