I love a New England winter. With snow falling and wind raging outside, I'm inside with hot chocolate in hand, curled up in my puffy chair, and snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug. What's that? Is a bug actually snug in a rug? Better not be in my rugs! Bugs and other creatures are outside in the elements, not in my rugs I hope.

So how do cold-blooded creatures cope with this season, anyway? First of all, let's be clear on what, "cold-blooded" means.

Ben Franklin, perhaps with tongue planted firmly in cheek, once argued against the bald eagle as our national symbol. When he wrote to his daughter to discuss the notion he said, "For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly, he is generally poor, and often very lousy.

That said, there are three things you can start doing today to begin the process of ending your reliance on commercial energy products.

Solar Cooking in the Parking Lot

If you have a little bit of patience, and choose your locations carefully, you will not need your stove, microwave, coffee maker, or toaster for the entire summer. Among other things, consider the heat generated inside cars and parking lots.

For more than 200 years inventors worldwide have filed patents for wave-power technology of a dazzling variety of designs-bobbing objects ("ducks"), buoys, articulated rafts, floating bags, overspills, and many others. There has been no shortage of ideas. Many of these ideas are in fact technically feasible, so it seems a shame that this renewable energy resource has not been much used.

Zilker Metropolitan Park is perhaps the brightest jewel in Austin's golden crown of parks and other outdoor venues. It is 351 acres of endless amusements for all ages and interests. There is something for every season of the year, from the Trail of Lights at Christmas to a dip in the cool waters of the spring-fed pool on a steamy summer day.

It can be hard to pick a spot to begin exploring, but Barton Springs Pool is probably the best known attraction in the park.

With oil prices increasing and signs of climate change becoming ever more noticeable, there is much interest these days in alternative fuel sources. On example of such an alternative fuel is hydrogen.

What Experts Know About Hydrogen Power

You may think of hydrogen as a fuel source, like gasoline, but it is actually more of an energy storage solution, like a battery.

Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture.

Hybrid Solar Materials

Ohio State University chemists and their colleagues combined electrically conductive plastic with metals including molybdenum and titanium to create the hybrid material.

Spider exists everywhere from the tropics to Antarctica. They are not insects. Unlike insects they are made of two different parts that are connected to each other with a small stalk. The two parts are the head part and the abdomen part. On the head part there is eight eyes and four appendages. On the first two appendages are there is a fang that is linked to the poison gland.

While it shouldn't be, it's often hard for people to wrap their minds around the concept of biodiversity. This is in part because the concept of biodiversity is a complex one, and partly because so many agencies have vested interests in people seeing anything that conserves resources as a threat to their lifestyles.

The first steps toward defining the concept of biodiversity were undertaken by E.

These days a stroll through the Zilker Botanical Gardens could lead to an encounter with a small herd of Bambiraptors, dinosaurs with feathered wings similar to a turkey. The word "raptor" means thief and these little creatures, named after the Disney character, were known to steal the babies of other dinosaurs. The usually sedate gardens are full of all kinds of life-size dinosaurs, like the ferocious cousin to T- Rex, a Daspletosaur, standing at 33 feet tall.