Plastic is everywhere. You’re likely wearing it right now – polyester, fleece, sneakers – and will likely ingest some with your next meal.
While most of us recognize the problem of plastic waste polluting our oceans and harming marine life, we don’t realize that plastic and the toxins that leach from it accumulate in our bodies. Medical researchers are now examining levels of plastic-derived chemical compounds in humans to better understand the health effects.
You may think solar power is a 21st-century concept. But a Los Altos woman, born before the invention of the airplane, can still teach us a thing or two about it.
The late Margaret Hill Smith, whose husband planted the apricot orchard in 1901 that now surrounds Los Altos City Hall, loved apricot jam. But she didn’t like cooking it over a hot stove on warm summer days. Instead, she mixed her jam in a low pan and placed it outside on a table in direct sunlight, covering the pot with a piece of glass. The glass magnified the sun’s rays, which then cooked the jam. She placed four matchsticks at four different spots where the glass met the pot, to allow the air to circulate and cook the jam more evenly. Four days in the sun and the jam was done.
The Mountain View/Los Altos Service League of Boys (SLOBs) recently completed its fifth year of service to the community, devoting 3,200 hours of work.
With 175 boys attending 15 different middle and high schools, SLOBs is a philanthropic organization that initiates and promotes educational and charitable endeavors. The organization aims to foster community responsibility as well as strengthen the parent-son relationship.
Many have tried to capture the essence of the Silicon Valley in movies, TV shows and books.
However, author and former Los Altos resident Mary Feliz said these stories focus on the lives of the Silicon sultans and not the majority of those living here – average Americans. Feliz has set her series of Maggie McDonald murder mystery books in Silicon Valley – specifically in and around Los Altos – but the characters are “ordinary people here or who are extraordinary in their own way,” she said.
The Los Altos History Museum merges local history with the work of local artists in its upcoming exhibition, “Paint the Town II: Echoes of Our Past,” on display Thursday through Oct. 7.
The exhibition’s title is an homage to the first “Paint the Town” in 1999, an effort led by Town Crier publishers Paul and Liz Nyberg that featured paintings created by local artists of the shops and businesses of downtown Los Altos.
Playing vintage music as memory therapy has yielded results in reviving the memories of cognitively impaired seniors, according to Senior New Ways Executive Director John Lehman, who spoke at the June 14 Rotary Club of Los Altos meeting.
Lehman, who also serves as director of operations for Televisit Inc., said he has tested 50 older adults over more than five years using music therapy and found the results “amazing,” with seniors who could not remember their own names stimulated to sing along with songs they had heard as teenagers 60 or 70 years ago. Many remembered the lyrics and even the entertainers’ names, he noted.
