Three businesses were honoured by New London's Connecticut College recently for their ability to combine envirnmental stewardship with jobs, productivity and profits. Green Village of Cambridge, Massachusetts, won the 7th annual Connecticut College Inherit the Earth Award gold medal for business for meeting housing needs while advancing environmental sustainability. Green Village is the business arm of The Hickory Consortium, a project of the US Department of Energy's Building America programme.

GreenVillage offers alternatives to the negative environmental and human impacts of conventional housing. Building projects are evaluated by 15 benchmarks it has established including emissions and waste during

manufacture and occupancy, water use, energy use and marketability.Its Cambridge Cohousing project was the residential development chosen by the American Association of Architects to attend the International Green building Challenge in 1998. Pavitch Family Farms inBakersfield, California, won the silver medal for its certified organic farming practices on its 4,000 acre farm and ranch. Pavitch Family Farms began organic farming practices after the eldest son Stephen was overcome by pesticide fumes. ShoreBank Pacific, the first regulated financial institution dedicated to ecosystem restoration, won the bronze medal.

Fresh aid from UNDP

THE United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) will provide a fresh assistance to the tune of $5.5 million (nearly Rs 23 crore) for community health initiatives in India, including for persons with disabilities and HIV/AIDS.

The projects are being formulated under the country cooperation framework (CCF) for the Ninth Plan period agreed between the government of India and UNDP.

The community health initiative expects to develop and demonstrate three inter-related model interventions in the areas of multi-sectoral approaches to health, school healthcare and community healthcare financing. Safe motherhood and early childcarewill be the main focus.

The disabilities component of the proposed UNDP support will attempt to integrate mentally retarded children into their families and communities and expand the scope to address all kinds of disabilities with a similar approach.

The HIV/AIDS component proposes to focus on two target communities -- commercial sex workers and people living with HIV/AIDS at workplace. The project hopes to work closely with the state AIDS societies, NGOs and the corporate sector.

Birdlike robot spy soon

US Defence Department is working on a small, silent birdlike robot which would flap its wings and can be remote-controlled to move around and transmit TV pictures of battlefield areas to the troops.

The programme is being developed by the Defence Department's advanced research projects agency (DARPA) at an estimated cost of $35 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

DARPA is spending $7 million on the flapping wing part of the robot at three different research sites,including Vanderbilt University and the California Institute of Technology, it said.

One of the components of the robot is an experimental ``artificial muscle'' which uses electrical current and a rubberlike substance which would perform the task of cogs and pulleys and mechanical gears, says the Journal.

Radioactive material spreads

Radioactive material from an accident at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant two years ago has spread as far as Tokyo, Kyodo news agency has reported.Researchers using wind direction and speed data from the day of the accident created a computer model which showed that cesium-137 was probably carried over a wide area, including parts of greater metropolitan Tokyo. They stressed that the finding should serve as a guide for evacuation operations, noting that changing climatic conditions could diffuse radiation more quickly, the report said.

The study was prompted by Japan's worst nuclear accident ever. At least 37 workers were exposed to low doses of radiation duringthe fire and explosion on March 11, 1997 at the plant in Ibaraki prefecture, about 100 km northeast of Tokyo.