Queensland has recorded the largest fall in new home sales across the country in June, according to the latest Housing Industry Association report.
The New Homes Sales Report showed sales across that nation increased moderately in June but were effectively flat over the first half of 2008.
“Australia is seeing strong demand for housing fuelled by record [...]
Take the chill off the cost of home heating this winter by using pellet-fueled heat to warm your house. As fuel costs soar, homeowners in-the-know are switching to a pellet-fueled heater to cut their home heating costs, in some cases, over 50%.
Unlike homeowners bound to the rising costs of natural gas, propane, and heating oil [...]
An economist might deem the opportunity cost of building versus buying a house right now to be unacceptably high. And judging from emails I have received, so do some of my readers.
With the U.S. in a housing slump there’s an ever growing array of homes for sale at lower prices. Meanwhile, prices for supplies like [...]
Ajay Naqvi of Shark Designs works from home three days a week. Not because his office has space constraints, but, as he puts it, because of the comfort he feels at his ‘home office’. He has converted the first floor of his duplex home into an office that gives him best of both worlds.
As working [...]
ICI Paints and The Home Depot will launch the first, truly comprehensive and environmentally friendly paint nationwide in April 2008. The Freshaire Choice? Paint offers exceptional quality, free of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and is backed by a lifetime guarantee and GREENGUARD certification. Featuring a custom color palette of 66 beautiful colors available through an [...]
When Hollywood next comes to remake Bedazzled, the film that put posters of 60s screen siren Raquel Welch on every teenage boys bedroom wall, it will have to find a way to depict not just pride, envy, gluttony, lust (the glorious Ms Welch), anger, greed and sloth, but the excessive accumulation of wealth and six [...]
The method involves introducing Gonatocerus ashmeadi, a microscopic parasitic wasp, into an ecosystem under siege from the glassy-winged sharpshooter. The tiny stingless wasp attacks glassy-winged sharpshooter eggs by drilling a tiny hole in the egg through which the parasite lays its own egg. The wasp larva that hatches from the egg then eats the [...]
Sylvia Cremer is from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Regensburg in Germany. Working with colleagues from these institutes and the University of Keele in the UK, she looked at colonies of ants in 14 locations around Europe. Using a combination of genetic, chemical and behavioural analyses, the researchers investigated the [...]
A team of K-State researchers found that by using technology to silence a gene in the salivary glands of pea aphids, the insect%26rsquo;s lifespan was cut by more than 50 percent.
%26ldquo;What we found is that when we silenced the most abundant transcript (gene), the aphids died in a few days,%26rdquo; said K-State professor of entomology [...]
The traditional method has been to release multiple agents into the environment and overwhelm the pest, said Davis. But with multiple introductions comes an increased likelihood that one of the agents will become invasive as well. So, what we’re trying to do is to figure out which one is the most likely to actually have [...]