The Frisbee has served as a flying summer favorite for man and his best friend. In 1958, Wham-O, the company that brought us the hula-hoop, first marketed the airborne toy. According to legend, the craze of tossing to canines began in 1974, when a man illegally threw his dog a disc during a break in a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game. Since that stunt, which landed the owner in handcuffs, canine competitions have leapt up around the world.

When’s the last time you popped open a coconut after a hard session at the gym? While it may seem unlikely, (not to mention bulky); the liquid found inside a young green coconut is nature’s version of a sports drink. For years heath enthusiasts have revered coconut water as a wellness elixir.

Zico has packaged young green coconut water into convenient 11-ounce containers that can be easily chugged after a vigorous yoga practice, mountain climb, or marathon. This water is not the stuff of big, brown tropical coconuts. Young greens are prized for their highly nutritious liquid. Zico’s 11-ounces are infused with more potassium than 15 sports drinks with no fat or added sugar.

It might not always seem true, but most of us do care about the environment and want more sustainable choices as consumers. At the same time, we've become more design-obsessed, with Michael Graves and Todd Oldham making sleek toasters and chairs for the big-box retailers, while style-purveyors like IKEA and West Elm continue to proliferate. It's only natural that as interest in and access to contemporary design increases, earth-conscious consumers now demand modern style as well. The "crunchy" aesthetic, once the standard among green shoppers, no longer suits us all.

My dear sweet mother, bless her heart, a product of the 1950s and 60s school of cooking, used to boil green vegetables until they were well past lifeless, taste and nutrition be darned. I belong to the newer school of cooking, which, thankfully, relies on blanching and parboiling – briefly dunking vegetables in boiling water to soften them up just enough without draining them of crispness or flavor. But rather than drop a pot of water on my gas stove for the 10 or 12 minutes it takes to get boiling, I fill up my Braun AquaExpress kettle.

Whenever I have winter parties, I pop in the fireplace. Actually I pop in a video of a fireplace, which comes complete with crackling sound. It gives the same mesmerizing, relaxing, Zen experience of a real fire without all the messy black soot. Though my guests know it’s kitschy and fake, they end up gathering around it anyway, as if it were emitting actual heat.

Culinary giant Julia Child transformed the way we cook in America with her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961.With her emphasis on gourmet ingredients and French cooking techniques, Child was ahead of her time, and it's a good thing, too: would the Food Network have room on its roster for a 6' 2” fifty year-old Francophile?

Back when I lived in an apartment, I used to cringe during the food-prep phase of every dinner party I threw. With each soufflé or pistou or rellenos con crema, I was throwing away entire garbage bags full of carrot butts, peanut shells and grapefruit rinds.

Sure, you can turn a lot of that stuff into stock — but even after all the simmering, that's still a lot of biomass headed for the landfill. (According to the EPA, over 27 million tons of food waste was generated in 2003.) Alas, if only someone had told me about in-kitchen vermicomposting.

Flexible thin-film solar panels have been quickly making their way onto everyday garb in recent years, adding on-the-go charging systems for cellphones, iPods, PDAs, cameras and gaming devices to your wearables. Here's a quick roundup of the hottest planet-positive gizmos: Voltaic Systems has a super-snazzy solar backpack and messenger bag with battery storage capacity that allows it to function as a power reservoir even at night or on a cloudy day. Silver, orange or green panels add a dash of style.