Earth Day fever reaches businesses WASHINGTON (AP) - Hoping to turn the nation's annual environmental celebration to their advantage, corporations are sponsoring children's poster contests, newspaper ads and recycling programs around the theme "Thank business on Earth Day." Environmentalists ridicule the campaign as "greenscamming." But corporate officials, tired of being on the defensive each Earth Day, say that U.S. businesses have spent $1 trillion over three decades to clean up the land, water and air. "If the other side is going to tell its story this week, this is the opportunity for us to go on offense and tell our story," said J.T. Taylor, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's vice president for corporate communications. Earth Day is Thursday. See full story <http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2559256948-206> *** Also: Businesses celebrating Earth Day, see full story <http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2559257406-92d> Rubber fish may help salmon survive WASHINGTON (AP) - Heard of crash test dummies? Now there's a crash test salmon. Engineers unveiled Flubber, a six-inch rubbery replica of a young salmon packed with wires and sensors. The fake fish will spurt through the churning, 10-foot-long blades of the McNary hydropower dam on the Washington-Oregon border next month to measure how salmon are jostled, scraped and even killed on their treacherous journey downstream. "The idea is to document with data what fish experience," said George Hecker, president of Alden Research Laboratory Inc. in Holden, Mass. The synthetic salmon was developed at the Department of Energy's Richland, Wash., lab as part of a five-year, $8 million government effort to make hydropower dams more fish friendly. See full story <http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2559257288-040>
