Home heating season is almost here. Are you prepared? Attend Cornell Cooperative Extension’s free energy saving workshop and start taking steps to lower your energy use and save money. Free energy saving tool kits will be distributed.

When: Monday, Sept. 20 at 6 p.m.

Where: Johnstown Public Library, 38 S. Market St., Johnstown

Pre-registration is required. Call 762-3909 x. 104 to sign up.

Save Energy, Save Dollars is a free interactive workshop designed to help consumers cut home utility bills. The workshop covers home heating, air sealing, hot water, appliance use and lighting. Free energy saving tool kits are distributed to each participating household.

Nearly 80,000 books in the Cornell Library have been digitized and are now available online to anyone for free.

All the books are in the public domain and were mainly printed before 1923 in the United States. Subject areas include American history, English literature, astronomy, food and wine, general engineering, the history of science, home economics, hospitality and travel, human sexuality, labor relations, Native Americans, ornithology, veterinary medicine and women's studies.

A quick search turns up familiar titles such as the poems of Longfellow, Moby Dick and Mark Twain classics. Many books of local interest are also available such as The History of Montgomery and Fulton Counties, NY (1878), Horace Sprague’s Amsterdam: a poem, and a copy of the first edition of the Mohawk Valley Cookbook published by St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Canajoharie in 1889.

The Cornell Library books were digitized thanks to a partnership with Microsoft and Kirtas Technologies and made available online through the nonprofit Internet Archive.

To search for title you may be interested in visit the Cornell University Library page on InternetArchive.org.

The books are available for viewing online and in downloadable PDF formats and available for Kindles as well.

New York State Agriculture Commissioner Patrick Hooker has alerted consumers that Midland Farms, located in Menands, New York, is voluntarily recalling certain milk products due to the potential of improper pasteurization.  Proper pasteurization heats milk in order to effectively eliminate all pathogenic bacteria, such as Listeria and Salmonella.

The recalled milk products are all sold in plastic containers and are marketed under the brand names Midland Farms, Corrado’s Market, Jersey Dairy Farms and Trade Fair Premium.  They all possess the plant code 36-1661.  The products also possess a black ink date code near the top of the container.  The recalled products were sold in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. 

A Cornell University entomology professor and a former Cornell student discuss bed bugs in the below CornellCast video. This six minute video explains how to spot bed bug infestation and what to do if you discover you have them.

To learn more about bed bugs read Cornell’s Insect Diagnostic Laboratory’s fact sheet on bed bugs. The New York State Integrated Pest Management Program also has available Guidelines for Prevention and Management of Bed Bugs in Shelters and Group Living Facilities.

Today is "Step UP to Health Day" in the Cooperative Extension building at Fonda Fair. If you are headed to the fair to take advantage of this beautifully cool day, do stop by Cooperative Extension and learn something about whole grains. A demonstration at 2 p.m. will let you taste some whole grains and learn how to select, prepare and eat them! Remember to make half of your grains whole grains every day.

Today is "UP with YOUth Day" today in the Cooperative Extension building at Fonda Fair! Discovery Stations 12-3 pm are a great way for school age kids to discover how learning science can be fun. And, check out the science words posted all over the building! At 4pm 4-Hers will present a Fashion Revue. Face Painting from 12-6 pm. 4-H Snack Bar open 11 am-10 pm. Come join us. Lots to see, do & learn - all under cover.

CCEFM’s consumer and financial community educator Craig Clark was on the Coffee with Cudmore radio show last week discussing energy used by home appliances.

You can listen to Craig and Bob Cudmore talk about ways to save energy with common household devices such as TVs, computers, electric heaters and more on this WVTL 1570 AM/Lite 104.7 FM podcast.

Local Cornell Cooperative Extension educators and master gardeners are on the air every Wednesday morning at 8:35 a.m. on WVTL/ 104.7 FM.

Tune in this next Wednesday to hear Master Gardener Phyllis Minich discuss watering.

Rolling walkers -- which help senior citizens maintain mobility and an active lifestyle -- have become safer and easier to use.

Cornell biomedical engineering students working with Weill Cornell Medical College-affiliated psychiatrist Dr. Eli Einbinder have designed an electronic braking system for walkers, with buttons replacing bicycle-style squeeze brakes. Their walkers also have automatic braking that can prevent slips, slides and falls when a user grabs the handgrips.

For three years, a team of graduate students from the Department of Biomedical Engineering and undergraduate seniors from several departments in the College of Engineering worked with David Lipson, Cornell professor of engineering, as well as with Einbinder on a prickly problem: how to prevent elderly users with limited mobility from inadvertently falling when they use a braking walker.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on August 4th that the 2010 National Farmers Market Directory lists 6,132 operational farmers markets, representing 16 percent growth over 2009 when the agency reported 5,274.

"Seeing such continued strong growth in the number of U.S. farmers markets indicates that regional food systems can provide great economic, social and health benefits to communities across the country," said Vilsack. "Farmers markets provide fresh, local products to communities across the country while offering economic opportunities for many producers of all sizes."

Other findings from the 2010 USDA National Farmers Market Directory include:

STATE STATISTICS - NEW YORK IS NUMBER 2 IN THE NATION FOR THE NUMBER OF MARKETS:

• Top 10 states with the most farmers markets: California (580), New York (461), Illinois (286), Michigan (271), Iowa (229), Massachusetts (227), Ohio (213), Wisconsin (204), Pennsylvania (203) and North Carolina (182); and
• Top 10 states, by percentage, with market growth from 2009-2010: Missouri (77), Minnesota (61), Idaho (60), Michigan (60), Indiana (47), South Dakota (46), Arkansas (41), Washington (37), Ohio (36) and Oklahoma (31).

OFF SEASON OPERATIONS - INCLUDES THE MOHAWK VALLEY MARKETS PRODUCED BY THE MONTGOMERY COUNTY AG ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PROJECT AND CORNELL COOPERATIVE EXTENSION IN FULTON & MONTGOMERY COUNTIES.

• 886 farmers markets are open for operation in the off-season (between November-March); and
• Off-season farmers markets operate in 47 states and the District of Columbia.

The USDA National Farmers Market Directory can be found at http://farmersmarkets.usda.gov. Farmers markets can be searched by state, county, zip code and participation in federal nutrition assistance programs.

Results from the USDA National Farmers Market Directory are based on voluntary reporting from farmer’s market managers. In 2010, USDA collected electronic reporting for the first time; USDA has been tallying farmers markets since 1994.

Pat Leonard, staff writer at the Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology, published this story on July 12th on the Cornell News Service.

Out of sight, whales cruise the Gulf of Mexico depths -- their hidden world threatened by huge clots of drifting oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well. At the same time, there is almost no data available to measure changes to the Gulf's ecosystem -- including whale populations -- caused by the massive leak. "You wonder 'What can we do? What's the impact of this?' In the case of marine mammals, we don't know because we don't even know what's there" said Christopher Clark, head of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Clark and his team are collaborating with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in a multipronged effort to discover the numbers and locations of whales and assess the potential impact of oil clouds drifting below the surface -- a by-product of the oil spill and the dispersants used to break up the oil slick. The team will anchor 22 marine autonomous recording units (MARUs) to the sea floor in an arc stretching from Texas to western Florida, along the edge of the continental shelf. These units will record underwater sounds for three months before they receive a signal to let go of their tethers and pop to the surface for retrieval. After analyzing the data, the team will deliver a report to NOAA and other agencies involved in the oil leak response.

The MARUs will listen for endangered sperm whales and a small population of Bryde's (BRU-des) whales. They will also pick up sounds of fish and ship traffic. Some devices will be placed in areas apparently unaffected by the oil to collect "control" site information; others will be close to the gushing well. The goal is to document the state of the sounds in the ecosystem over an extended period of time and compare them with known information of the oil spill.

"This will be the first large-scale, long-term, acoustic monitoring survey in the Gulf of Mexico," Clark said. "We can provide one more layer of understanding about this ecosystem, using sound to measure animal occurrences, distributions and communication, as well as background noise levels from shipping and weather, and perhaps visualize how these features are being influenced by the oil. The whales are like oversized canaries in the coal mine -- they reflect the health of the environment they live in."

Clark says sperm whales are ideal subjects to monitor. They are big, and they hunt for squid at great depths (about 1,000 meters down) using echolocation. Once they detect prey, they emit a very rapid sequence of clicks. By measuring the number of clicks in a given time period, scientists learn about the whales' hunting success and may estimate how many animals are nearby.

Clark is also seeking funding to use free-floating recording units to record the ocean's electrical conductivity -- a measurement directly related to how much oil is in the water. Such a device could also continuously record ocean sounds and help researchers confirm how many animals inhabit oiled parts of the gulf. Clark feels strongly that even after the current set of recording devices is removed in early October, others should be deployed to continue monitoring throughout the year.