EZLight has come out with a great innovation: House address numbers that light up, powered by tiny solar cells.

This would be great, especially if you have a home business (like my wife and I do) and you need clients to be able to find your house easily. Also, it makes a lot of sense for emergency purposes (police and ambulance). And even if you just have deliveries that happen at night or dusk (pizza?), it will just be easier for them to find your house.

The painting contractors stained the cedar on the outside of our home a few weeks ago, and had to take off our address numbers. Now I'm seriously thinking about buying these as replacements for us. At $43 (plus shipping) for three numbers, the price really isn't too bad. And I just love finding ways to use solar power in small ways until we eventually build our next house that will have every conceivable renewable energy innovation (and efficiency!) built right in.

Thanks Cool Hunter!

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Once you've been diagnosed with an allergy, your doctor will probably say "Oh well. Nothing you can do but treat it whenever the symptoms get too overwhelming." Conventional drugs do not remove the allergy, they just treat the symptoms.

But there's at least one doctor who would object to that analysis.

Dr. Devi Nambudripad of Buena Park, California says it's possible to get rid of allergies completely and permanently. This doctor, who is trained as a medical doctor, chiropractor and acupuncturist, has created a system called "Nambudripad Allergy Elimination Technique" or NAET.

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We've talked about antibiotics in meat in this blog before. A new study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Marshfield Clinic has made a strong link between the usage of antibiotics in chickens and the presence of "supergerms" in the humans who eat those chickens.

Antibiotics are used, quite reasonably, to help sick chickens get better. But they are also increasingly used as a growth stimulator. That is, antibiotics are fed to the all the chickens all the time on some farms.

The Marshfield researchers set out to find whether this obvious overuse of antibiotics led to the development of drug-resistant bacteria in the intestinal tract of the people who subsequently ate the meat. The connection was undeniable. They found the so-called "supergerms" much more often in the people who ate the antibiotic-laden chicken than in the vegetarians in the study or the others who ate organic chicken. This may seem obvious to a lot of us, but now that there is a government-sanctioned study pointing clearly to the link, hopefully something will change.

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An article in Fortune magazine puzzles over the role of placebos in modern medicine. A placebo is a supposedly worthless pill, like a sugar pill, given to some of the patients in a study to see if a "real drug" works better than "nothing."

But, as the article reports, a surprising thing is happening in study after study. Too many people are recovering from health problems given only placebos. Since this is supposed to be the "control" where we can assume no medicine is present, this is very puzzling to many, many scientists, researchers and physicians.

There is only a mystery, though, if you think that human beings are purely physical. As soon as you take a holistic view of a person -- that is, body-mind-spirit -- the mystery of the placebo disappears.

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You've seen all the knocks against sweeteners by now. Refined sugar is causing a diabetes epidemic. Aspartame is a toxic manmade chemical and people are finding it's better used as ant poison than as a sweetener. And Splenda is proving to be as problematic as other artificial sweeteners, because it contains chlorine.

So are we stuck? Must we go through our lives without anything sweet ever again? I certainly don't plan to.

I found a sweetener that is not only completely natural (comes from the leaf of a plant) but it also stabilizes blood sugar and acts as an antiviral agent, in that it can stop the onset of cold or flu. It's called stevia (pronounced STEE-vee-uh or STEH-vee-uh).

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Dr. Kristopher Keller, a chiropractor, author and researcher, recently released this booklet on solving the problem of heel spurs. The technical name for heel spurs is plantar fasciitis. It involves pain and sometimes swelling on the underside of the heel.

It is caused by tension in the tendon (plantar fascia) that runs underneath the foot and attaches to the heel bone. The causes can include weak arches, tight calf muscles or tight ankle joints.

For temporary relief from heel spur pain, Dr. Keller says you can use a "heel cup" (see photo), worn inside the shoe. Aspirin and Advil can also reduce the swelling and the pain temporarily. But for longer term healing, Dr. Keller suggests a few simple steps.

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I admit it. I'm totally hooked on the TV show "Dancing with the Stars" (ABC Tuesdays 8/7C). I watch it every week with my wife (she's thrilled), we vote on the Website, we provide armchair critiques of each dancer's performance and each judge's ratings. If you haven't seen it yet, this is a reality show where talk show hosts, athletes, third-rate actors and singers are paired up with ballroom dancing champions to compete in front of professional judges. The judges conclusions are combined with audience reactions (via telephone and Web voting) and each week one competitor goes home.

My wife and I are very interested in ballroom dancing ourselves. We started lessons a few years ago, but time schedules for both of us get out-of-hand and we haven't been back to it since.

But watching this great show has reignited our interest, and I think we'll be making the time to take some more lessons. And, as it turns out, ballroom dancing is great exercise, according to a study done by the National Institute of Cardiology in Mexico, presented at the World Congress of Cardiology last month.

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This is one of the most amazing things I've ever heard.

I found a health insurance company in Wisconsin that pays its member to eat organic food.

Here's the whole story.

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With cigarette sales slumping and entire cities declaring smoking bans, tobacco farmers have seen a drop in demand for their product. Add an influx of imported, cheaper grades of tobacco coming from China, Brazil and Zimbabwe, and the farmers started hitting hard times.

The federal government in Canada decided to provide help to this troubled industry. They offered an incentive to the farmers to switch to other types of crops.

Over the past few years, tobacco farmers have been taking them up on the offer. The $67-million aid package helped them move away from tobacco and to a range of healthier crops - ginseng, lavender, hemp, asparagus, sweet corn, strawberries and cucumbers.

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The magical Cirque du Soleil touring circuses require their performers to do more than 350 shows a year. The resident shows in Las Vegas ask even more - about 475 per year.

All that activity means a lot of tired muscles and injuries. So Cirque du Soleil has hired a legion of physical therapists and massage therapists to bring the life back to bodies contorted, twisted, crumpled and stretched for audience enjoyment. Massage Magazine reports in its October 2006 issue that the performers see massage therapy as a necessary means to make it through their grueling schedule of shows.

The gymnasts most often suffer shoulder-and-wrist inflammation. Jugglers have spinal issues and neck tension. Acrobats and dancers get low-back spasms and injuries in the pelvic region. Trampoline performers have a lot of problems, from sprained ankles to dislocations. Even the musicians suffer from tightness in the upper back. And contortionists? Do you even have to ask? They hurt everywhere.

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