Tag Archives: Earth

Pukka Herbs Peppermint and LicoriceTea | Drink Review

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Peppermint and Licorice is one of those things that you don’t really expect to go together, but in the land of tea, they do. Made with peppermint & FairWild licorice 20p from every pack of this goes towards supporting WWF conservation projects. Tasty and good for the environment: Frost approves.

The blend of the two flavours really works. It tastes fresh and refreshing. The peppermint soothes the digestion and naturally sweet, soothing licorice calms and nourish. I don’t put sugar in herbal teas but this tea is great for people with a sweet tooth. It definitely doesn’t taste bland. If you love licorice you will love it. It is a good, delicious, healthy tea. Get someone to try it if they think herbal tea is boring, it will prove them wrong.

It is caffeine-free and ethically sourced with 100% organically grown ingredients.

A really great tea.


Pukka Herbs celebrates 10 years in business

This year marks the tenth birthday of herbal innovators, Pukka Herbs.

Founded in 2002 by Sebastian Pole and Tim Westwell based on their mutual passion for natural health and wellbeing and the principals of Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine), Pukka has grown into an international success story, employing 45 people in the UK and is sold in around 40 countries across the globe including the United States and throughout Europe.

Over the last decade, Pukka Herbs has used the finest organic herbs to optimise health and wellbeing. One of only a handful of totally organic businesses (certified by the Soil Association) Pukka inspires and educates people to live healthier, more sustainable lives. Their portfolio includes 23 premium herbal teas, a collection of skincare (11 products) and over 75 food supplements.

Everything that Pukka produces is inspired by Ayurveda – ‘the art of living wisely’. This ancient Indian wisdom empowers us to look after our health in harmony with nature and, as a result, all products have a functional benefit that is drawn from the high quality herbs used in each blend. Everything Pukka is free from synthetic flavour and colour.

As an ethical business, Pukka strives to be responsible for its actions. Their commitment to the environment ensures that they plant over 20 million plants and trees every year and invest in renewable and sustainable energy projects as well as reforestation programmes with Climate Care. Pukka works with farmers on long term regeneration projects and uses FSC certified and recyclable materials for marketing literature and product packaging.

NEW for 2012 – Revamped Original Ayurvedic blends

Pukka has rebranded their original teas – Relax, Refresh and Revitalise – that were launched when Pukka started in 2002. Retaining the vibrancy and iconic recognition of these incredible teas, we have updated the design and copy to reflect the importance of our heritage in Ayurveda and to educate consumers on the authenticity of the blends.

NEW selection pack

In response to consumer demand, Pukka launches a selection pack of award-winning teas as part of its 10th birthday celebrations.

Containing four sachets of five bestselling blends Three Mint, Three Ginger, Three Tulsi, Three Green and Three Fennel, Pukka’s selection pack offers first-time consumers an exciting introduction to Pukka’s tea portfolio.

This selection pack will be launched at a time in which the herbal and green tea categories have seen a lift in consumer spend (up 2% and 5% respectively in 2011 to £74m*). *Source: Mintel Feb 2012

Pukka Herbs and WWF UK ‘Create a beautiful World’ together in 2012

Throughout 2012, as part of their 10th Birthday celebrations, Pukka Herbs is working with world famous conservation charity WWF UK to help ‘Create a Beautiful World’ – one that is vibrant, integrated and healthy.

Every year Pukka creates hundreds of acres of organic land for growing herbs that creates jobs for farmers and collectors, but also brings beauty into our everyday lives. Every pack of Pukka tea makes the world – whether on the shelf in your kitchen, or farmland in rural India – a more beautiful place.

In supporting the work of WWF UK, Pukka aims to raise in excess of £50,000 for conservation projects across the world – initially through a 20p donation from each sale of their special Peppermint and Licorice tea, and then through a year-long fund raising campaign and viral public film competition to be premiered in November 2012.

Throughout the summer, Pukka will be inviting the public to upload photos and clips to their Facebook page of their own personal ‘beautiful world’ – anything from their children laughing, to a sunset, to a merry-go-round, to their pukka tea shelf – whatever they believe brings beauty into their world. Combined with footage from Pukka and WWF, the clips will be created into 5 minute short films by students and filmmakers. The most popular films as voted for by the public will be screened at an environmentally friendly premier in November.

To support sales of the organic Peppermint and Licorice tea (certified FairWild licorice) in the health food trade and retail industry where the brand has grown, Pukka will be providing support in the form of promotional materials to help create theatre in store and build momentum and awareness of the charitable aims of the partnership.

Pukka will also be bringing out their first range of gorgeous, environmentally sensitive merchandise to showcase the campaign – once again helping people to ‘Create a Beautiful World’ in their every day lives. Profits from the sale of these exclusive items will go to WWF UK.

Sebastian Pole, co-founder and herbal director of Pukka Herbs, says: ‘When we started Pukka in 2002, we wanted to create a totally organic business that inspired people to live healthier, more sustainable lives. It seems only natural that as we celebrate ten years of bringing the power of plants into people’s lives, we also take the time to remember and celebrate the amazing planet that lets us do this.

Each year, we plant over 20 million plants and trees and invest in renewable energy, sustainable projects and reforestation programmes. We work with our growers, customers and consumers on a one to one basis to ensure that everyone profits from being involved with Pukka: sensually, healthily, ecologically and socially. Most importantly, we strive to leave nature in an ever richer, more glorious state than how we found her.

Partnering with WWF to promote our shared conservation values seemed the perfect next step. With a whole host of exciting activities going on over the next 12 months we hope to exceed our target of raising £50,000 to support their important international work.’

Commenting on the partnership, Rachel Bloodworth from WWF said: ‘We are delighted to be working with Pukka Herbs in their tenth birthday year – their dedication to supporting the natural environment and creating a beautiful world is perfectly aligned with our goals. Over the past 50 years, WWF has achieved countless successes from preserving existing species such as mountain gorillas, polar bears and giant pandas, to helping the development of international agreements for the protection of the planet – none of which would be possible without the continued support of dedicated individuals and companies like Pukka.’

“This is Pukka’s first ever consumer campaign and so they sought out the skills and expertise of communications agency Neo to help develop the campaign ideas. Neo only work with organisations that are changing the world for better and have worked with WWF UK on previous projects including their 2012 global ‘Earth Hour’ campaign. Account Director Nicole Bradfield comments on working with Pukka, “Creating an engaging platform for Pukka to bring their brand story to life and share their commitment to creating a beautiful world is a fantastic project. Their work to protect and enhance our natural world is a brilliant story and we’re delighted to be helping Pukka communicate it. We’re especially looking forward to seeing the public’s interpretation of their beautiful worlds weave together to become a stunning piece of filmmaking.”

You can find out more about these projects and how you can get involved at www.pukkaherbs.com/beautifulworld

NASA's iPad App Beams Science Straight to Users

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Software and media specialists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., today released a new iPad app — the NASA Visualization Explorer — that allows users to easily interact with extraordinary images, video, and information about NASA’s latest Earth science research.

Cutting-edge visualization has long been a staple of NASA Earth science and in particular the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) at Goddard Space Flight Center. The iPad presented NASA a new and easily accessible way to put stunning and beautiful Earth science visualizations directly in people’s hands.

The app’s science features will include high-resolution movies and stills and short written stories to put all the pieces in context. Most of the movies are simply real satellite data, visualized. Other features will include interviews with scientists or imagery from supercomputer modeling efforts. The app includes social networking interfaces, including links to Facebook and Twitter, for easy sharing of stories.

The application is free to the public and available from the App Store via iTunes.

The app editorial team plans to develop two new science features per week. After publishing an initial batch of six features with the launch, new features will publish to the app on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the future the app could include occasional stories about the Sun, the other planets in our Solar System, and exotic objects far out in the cosmos.

The Goddard team designed the application essentially as a mobile multimedia magazine. “Its one-of-a-kind content is geared to the general public, students, educators — “anyone interested in the natural world,” said Michael Starobin, a senior producer at Goddard Space Flight Center who spearheaded the app’s editorial direction. “The app will explore stories of climate change, Earth’s dynamic systems, plant life on land and in the oceans — all of the small and large stories captured in data by NASA satellites and then visualized.”

“Science should be accessible to everyone, and visualization reveals the meaning and value of the often intangible, but essential, data delivered by NASA’s research efforts,” Starobin said. “Data visualization makes information immediately visual and understandable when it otherwise might go unnoticed, and the app makes it easy to explore in an engaging, easy-to-consume, thoroughly modern style.”

“The NASA visualization app is the latest step in a rich tradition of content production and application development,” added Project Manager Helen-Nicole Kostis. “With its release, I’m inviting everyone on a journey of scientific knowledge and visual wonder.”

Work began on the NASA Visualization Explorer shortly after Apple released its electronic tablet in April 2010. “We just knew immediately that the iPad provided the perfect platform to showcase NASA science,” said Christopher Smith, the principal designer of the application’s user interface.

Administrators of Goddard’s Inclusive Innovation Program agreed. The pilot program, which Goddard management rolled out last year to support ideas that would advance non-science and non-engineering functions and services, awarded seed funding to the team to develop the concept. “Our evaluation process was rigorous,” said Goddard Chief Technologist Peter Hughes, who administered the program for the center. “This proposal stood out for its immediate utility and potential impact.”

With the one-year funding in hand, the three principal creators assembled a multidisciplinary team of experts from the center’s SVS, one of the nation’s premiere data visualization labs, and the center’s Television and Multimedia Department, which has earned a reputation as one of the federal government’s best media-production departments. “Through our team’s unique talents, I believe we’ve created an application that is worthy of the NASA badge,” Starobin said.

“The heart of NASA data visualization beats at SVS,” Kostis added. “This is where science, data, and storytelling come together.”

To download the app, go to:

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/nasaviz/index.html

Outcasts – A New Sci-Fi Series {TV}

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A new sci-fi series, Outcasts, begins soon on BBC1. Created by Ben Richards who also created Spooks, it’s about a group of courageous pioneers facing a unique opportunity: the chance to build a new and better future on another planet.

A diverse group of individuals – led by President Tate (Liam Cunningham) with his core team of Stella (Hermione Norris), Cass (Daniel Mays) and Fleur (Amy Manson) – left their old lives behind in extraordinary circumstances. Promised a second chance at life, they created a society far away from their home, friends and family … and their pasts. They took charge and settled here first alongside expeditionaries Mitchell (Jamie Bamber) and Jack (Ashley Walters).

Settled in the town of Forthaven on the planet Carpathia, they are passionate about their jobs, confident of their ideals and optimistic about the future. They work hard to preserve what they’ve built on this planet they now call home, having embraced all the challenges that come with forging a new beginning. The planet offers the possibility for both corruption and redemption; whilst they try to avoid the mistakes made on Earth, inevitably our heroes cannot escape the human pitfalls of love, greed, lust, loss, and a longing for those they’ve left behind.

As they continue to work and live together they come to realise this is no ordinary planet. Mystery lurks around them and threatens to risk the fragile peace of Forthaven.

We meet the characters at a moment of incredible anticipation. They’ve lost all contact with Earth but the arrival of the last known transporter signals fresh hopes and dreams. Will Stella’s husband and daughter, who she heartbreakingly left behind, be on board? Why does Tate seem anxious about one particular passenger, Julius Berger (Eric Mabius)? Most nerve-wracking of all, will it land safely and bring a fresh perspective on the new world with it?

Creator and writer Ben Richards explains where the idea for Outcasts came from and what the series has in store:

“Part of my motivation in the drama was to counter the view that humans are doomed to failure, that we are born bad, that chaos and disharmony will always prevail. Outcasts is fundamentally about second chances – whether human beings are capable of living together in peace and building a better place for their children.”

“All of the principal characters are driven during the series by their belief that they can make Carpathia work in spite of considerable obstacles.”

The BBC’s just released a trailer of Episodes 1&2 today and we’re looking forward to seeing what this series will bring.

Outcasts starts on Mon 7th Feb at 9pm on BBC1


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TV Preview: Aftermath – When the Earth stops spinning

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Fox and the National Geographic channel are having an apocalypse week. Nothing says optimism like the end of the world and death on a devastating scale and this is no exception. Our planet is spinning at 1,600 km per hour but this programme predicts what would happen if that spinning stopped. Imagining an Earth that ground to a halt within 5 years we’re told of terrifying scenarios and visions of death, destruction and suffering.

To begin with the differences wouldn’t seem so large, eventually they become so escalated that there seems no corner of the Earth left unscathed. We’re shown graphic death scene after another, corpses floating in an underwater London, ficticious news reports of the unfolding horror. After more terrifying visuals and descriptions of an “earth tearing itself inside out” those who havnt suffocated, drowned, frozen, burned, starved or died of insomnia related accidents either stay in safe places or set sail for new lands.

A boat full of oceanographer/models set sail on an arc to new land. And so begins a new race of beautiful model “settlers”, fishing, farming, watering pot plants, harnessing the power of the wind, only wearing beige and shivering because they never had the need of a jumper. Only the people who previously owned floor length puffer jackets are craggy looking.

Eventually the Earth grinds to a complete stop and the remaining humans are left huddling together like penguins as they spend six months of the year in darkness. I’m not sure why the Earth stopped spinning, this is never explained, but the result is entertaining.

Watch Aftermath – When the Earth stops spinning on the National Geographic and HD channel on 7th June at 9pm