With the news full of moon landings, former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez recalls a far-less-triumphant moment in the American space program. In this month’s Florida Trend, Martinez describes how he was on the campaign trail, hustling for votes in South Florida on the day in 1986 when the Space Shuttle…
If this study is true in claiming that there really is a relationship between a nation’s high temperatures and its lack of prosperity, then shouldn’t that apply to American states? If so, that bodes badly for this here peninsula.It’s “a huge effect,” Olken says. The difference between a country that’s…
Residents of Lake Worth, many of whom have made small but successful careers specializing in complaining about their high utility bills, might not know that the city actually gets the power to turn their fans and nuke their frozen dinners not from the beleaguered Lake Worth Power Plant but from…
Don’t kill yourself on Wednesday. Among other things, it’s a total cliche. A recent study finds that that day is the most popular one to kill yourself. Of those who do the deed, 24.6 percent do it on Wednesday. Saturday is a distant second at 14.4 percent, with Monday at…
Ever since West Palm Beach was designated the second most “technologically advanced” city of its size in the U.S. by a Digital Communities survey last year, we’ve been waiting to see if Mayor Lois Frankel was going to start jetting around to commission meetings in a flying saucer. It didn’t…
The permitting system also got a little easier for Florida’s gopher tortoises this week. Lauderdale-based AAJ Technologies has invented an on-line permit system for Florida Fish and Wildlife which allows developers to certify the site as either a short-term or long-term protected site and apply for faster approvals to move…
So. United Way has posted the “first ever web-based census and needs assessment” of Broward’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, ‘and questioning’ community.” They put a poll up at www.lgbtcensus.com on June 21 that they say takes about 15 minutes to answer, but I’ve completed the survey and I can tell…
Teri Gevinson thinks money grows on trees. That’s why she’s planted 9,500 jatropha trees in Delay Beach, on land where pepper and tomato farmers had long since packed up their hoes and gone home in disgust. The jatropha is the next big thing in agrofuel (switchgrass is so last year),…
A bunch of Palm Beach County employees may be slated to become antiquated relics: Palm Beach County commissioners voted to eliminate the jobs of 141 county workers Monday, hoping what they save on salaries will help offset $133 million in lost property-tax revenue. One of those jobs belonged to “County…
In an unabashed marketing ploy, the makers of Old Spice deodorant have ranked the Top 20 All-Time Sweatiest Cities. Phoenix took the top spot, Miami came in at number 7, and West Palm Beach placed at number 8. Old Spice number-crunchers say that “Phoenix’s average temperature was 94 degrees in…
The website for Publix supermarkets states, “There are plenty of fish in the sea, but not all of them are good enough for Publix.” According to the environmental organization Greenpeace, that statement is all sorts of wrong. First, there are NOT plenty of fish in the sea, as scientific report…
Courtrooms can be such staid places — so we love it when people treat judicial proceedings as interactive theater events. This January, an environmental activist named Stevie Lowe went to the site of the Barley Barber Swamp, an ancient cypress forest, and locked herself to a tree. The reason? Florida…
American consumers spend billions every year to learn what the American Medical Association just told the world yesterday, for free: that hormone therapy cannot halt the human aging process. Or at least that they’ve found no scientific evidence to prove it.This figures to be a setback for BodyLogicMD, the Boca…
That South Florida is among the plastic surgery capitals of the world can be depressing, so it bears mentioning when our local surgeons apply their skills for more than just a patient’s narcissism. Like in this month’s edition of Glamour magazine, which has a tear-jerking cover story about 20-something triplets…
Remember the Boca Raton couple who had their dead dog cloned? Well, it’s been five months, and the Otto family’s puppy is growing up in a freakily familiar fashion. Lancelot’s the original. And the clone is Lancelot Encore. The St. Pete Times talked to Nina Otto for an article in…
A week after Sen. Bill Nelson was credited with running off the Obama administration’s top pick for the nation’s space program, the former astronaut’s own favorite for the job, Charles Bolden, is expected to be named to the position.Bolden, who meets with Obama today, would be the first NASA administrator…
I don’t know if you guys have heard about this thing called the swine flu, but apparently it’s pretty serious business. So serious, that serious businesses around South Florida are getting serious (and delirious) about enacting plans to prevent their employees from coming down with the dreaded virus. Unfortunately, saying…
If you’ve got somethin’ to say about the fragrant prickly-apple or the pygmy fringe-tree, now is your time. The Fish and Wildlife Service is doing a five-year status review of these endangered species, as well as the Brooksville bellflower, snakeroot, Cooley’s water-willow, scrub blazingstar, Britton’s beargrass, Key tree-cactus, Lewton’s polygala,…
Sorry, folks in the South Florida convention-recruitment and -staging biz. Didn’t mean to let the secret out that people who come for these conferences don’t actually go to these conferences. For most, it’s little more than a chance to get shitfaced in a new state, on the company dime.And then…
Last fall, staph infections were going around the NFL like a bimbo on a broken Ferris wheel. Even Time magazine felt compelled to point out that “a microscopic foe can be much more imposing than a 300-pound lineman”; why, even the indomitable Peyton Manning, the flawless Tom Brady, and six…
Yes, as a matter of fact, it does. That’s according to a fun web site created by Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old CalTech grad student. He created the site (which has since gone down from too much traffic) to compare the kinds of music Facebook users list as their favorite with the…
