NFL Draft hits prime time

The NFL is changing how its fans watch the NFL draft. From a 4 p.m. Saturday start last year to a 7:30 Thursday evening start tonight, the league is making it what NBC sports reporter Ethan J. Skolnick calls “must-see TV.”

“We all thought, way back when, how can this become the most watched non-movement sporting event in professional sports?” former NFL executive Carl Peterson says.

In the draft’s 75^th year, it is watched by almost 40 million people. The seven round draft will take three days to complete, but only the first round will happen tonight. The second and third rounds will begin at 6 p.m. on Friday

Buffalo Bills Coach Chan Gainley says he will benefit from the extended time between the first and second rounds. “To me, we are going to do a much better job now of being able to plan between the first round and second round,” he said.

The draft is covered live from Radio City Music Hall in New York City tonight on ESPN.

World faces different obstacles on 40^th anniversary of Earth Day

It’s been forty years since the Earth Day made its debut as a day of global environmental awareness, but is the Earth forty years cleaner?

According MSNBC, it looks cleaner, but the problems have shifted from in-your-face to invisible.

"To suggest that we've made progress is not to say the problem is over," William Ruckelshaus, the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said. "What we've done is shift from the very visible kinds of issues to those that are a lot more subtle today."

Thick smog in the skies of large cities, an oil spill polluting many miles of California beaches, and fire in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River are no more.  Lead levels in the air are down more than 90 percent nationwide, and smog levels have dropped by about a quarter. The Cuyahoga is now even open to swimmers.

But today’s environmental challenges have manifested themselves invisible, which Ruckelshaus says is much harder to combat. Since the first Earth Day 40 years ago, carbon dioxide levels have increased by 19 percent.

The debate on the cause of global warming is ongoing, but Deke Arndt of the NOAA's National Climate Data Center says the past 40 years have been the hottest ever recorded.  And this week, German scientists published an analysis that the agreement many international leaders formed in Copenhagen last December would lead to a 10 to 20 percent increase in carbon dioxide levels in 2020.

Syracuse University gets “green” honor

According to the University's website, The university’s Green Data Center has earned it a spot on the list of the 2010 Green 15.  The Green 15 award recognizes the most innovative IT initiatives of organizations around the world that have developed sustainable practices.

The Green Data Center consumes about half of the energy that would normally be used to power a data center of that size. It doubles as a research center for green energy and sustainability practices. It can be found on Skytop at the University’s South Campus.

Other recipients of this year’s Green 15 award are companies like Aflac, for its paperless practices, Dell, for retiring 7,000 useless apps, and Ericsson, for its greener supply chain model.