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The Wild Ones: The Border  
The Wild Ones is a documentary series following the intersecting lives of men and horses at an Arizona prison.  
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Canary Wharf from Greenwich  

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20160630-IMG_9180.jpg  

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Rehab Hospitals May Harm A Third Of Patients, Report Finds  

Patients sent to rehabilitation facilities to recover from medical crises or surgery too often suffer additional harm from the care they get there, according to research by U.S. health officials.

 
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Former Attorney General Will Work With Airbnb To Address Discrimination  

The short-term rental platform has hired Eric Holder as outside counsel to help it craft a new anti-discrimination policy. Individuals and researchers have reported racial bias by the site's users.

 
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Twitter Bans 'Breitbart' Editor For Sending Offensive Tweets To Leslie Jones  

In an unusual move, Twitter has decided to ban a troll. The company suspended the account of a technology editor at the conservative news site Breitbart after he tweeted offensive posts to Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters actress.

 
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What Does It Take To Get Permanently Banned From Twitter?  

Twitter says it's reviewing its hateful-conduct policy. The suspension of conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos has prompted a new focus on the company's ongoing struggle to reign in abusive messages.

 
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Twitter Permanently Suspends Conservative Writer For Targeted Abuse  

The suspension of Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos comes amid a recent campaign in which users tweeted hundreds of racist and abusive messages at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

 
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Bookstore's Tweet Leads To Love, Then Marriage  

In 2012, the corporate Twitter account for a bookstore in London posted a joke about Pokemon. "I'm in love," a woman responded. More tweets followed, then a date. The wedding was last weekend.

 
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Black Robin  

Grantmasters posted a photo:

Old Blue - The saviour of the species.
The NZ Black Robin went through the most severe population bottleneck that you could imagine in the late late 70's. By 1980 she was the only breeding female left of the entire species! At one point the whole population consisted of just 5 individuals.
The fact that there are more than 200 Black Robins alive today is incredible.

If you don't already know about this species I recommend checking it out :)

 
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Without a Climate Plan, Republicans Struggle as Voters Shift  
The 2016 elections are heating up. And so is the planet. According to NASA, there is a 99 percent chance that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, surpassing the current record set in 2015.

And yet for the first time in the age of modern climate science, a presidential nominee believes climate change is a hoax. Donald Trump has said that global warming was "created by and for the Chinese" (he later said he was joking), and that he will rescind the Paris climate agreement and roll back the steps President Obama has taken to address the issue (definitely not joking).


Photo Credit: Jeremy Symons

Where does that leave Republicans who think the GOP should pay attention to climate change and support clean, renewable energy sources?

On their own.

GOP Stirrings in Congress

A week before the convention, 33 House Republicans joined Democrats to successfully defeat a proposal that would have stripped funding of climate change science at the Environmental Protection Agency.

It's not a vote that will set us on the path to doing something about climate, but the growing number of Republicans who are willing to vote independently on the issue is a notable shift. Just two years ago, only one House Republican, Rep. Chris Gibson of New York, voted against an amendment that would have prevented federal agencies from assessing the costs and risks posed by climate change.

This is the latest, but not the only, sign of heightened interest among Republicans in Congress. Fourteen House Republicans have now supported a resolution calling for action on climate change. When the resolution was introduced last September, Republican Carlos Curbelo explained the reality faced by his constituents in Florida.

"South Florida is the frontline of climate change, where we have seen its negative impact in the form of rising sea-levels and the erosion of our coastal communities. Our goal...is to shift the debate from whether climate change is real to what we can do to mitigate its effects."

In the Senate, a coalition of five Republicans and five Democrats, led by Senators Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, introduced an amendment calling for the United States to be a world leader on climate change and for Congress to act.

Many of these congressional voices on climate change took a pass on attending the GOP convention, according to Grist's Ben Adler.

Voters Heading in Different Direction

The GOP's slide into climate denial with Trump should alarm strategists who put together the Republican National Committee's post-mortem analysis of Mitt Romney's 2012 defeat. Their conclusion: the GOP lost the hearts, minds and votes of young voters, swamping the GOP's edge among older voters.

Democrats came to the same conclusion. Jim Messina, who ran President Obama's re-election campaign, revealed after the election one of the secrets to their success: climate change.

"In the 2012 election we did focus groups with young voters...and we asked them to describe a Republican, and their #1 word was 'dinosaur., We asked them why, and their biggest example was 'climate change.'"

The shift is also pushing against the trend of public opinion, and in particular a complex and evolving set of views among Republican voters.

Notably, there has been a 19 percent increase over the past two years in the share of conservative Republican voters who think global warming is happening. That's a larger jump than any other group of voters. Altogether, 73% of voters think global warming is happening.

And when it comes to addressing the problem, a May poll also found that 67 percent of Republicans support a Clean Energy Commitment and believe that "moving rapidly to clean energy is a big step toward reducing the damaging impacts of climate change."

Organizing Around a Moral Cause

Against this backdrop, a number of grassroots leaders convened in Cleveland during the Convention to discuss ways to spring the GOP from the box it has trapped itself in and re-connect with voters to offer a way forward. According to Rachel Lamb of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action:

"First and foremost, it's a moral issue." Climate change is "negatively impacting people, as well as the environment, which we're called to take care of by God."

A Road Back from the Abyss?

As Politico reports, Republican businessman and philanthropist Jay Faison laid out the challenge at a GOP convention event:

"If we have an environmental policy, I don't know what it is....we're virtually defenseless on this issue. Any purple state, we are at risk and we don't know it. Period."

The GOP's road back from the abyss of denial is anything but clear.

Perhaps mayors will lead the way. After all, mayors from both parties have to deal with the real climate damages to their communities.

Or perhaps the growing unrest among Republican rank-and-file in Congress offers a glimpse of a more hopeful path beyond the elections. If more republicans are ready to bring their ideas on climate solutions to the table, who knows what can happen?

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Jeremy Symons: Without a Climate Plan, Republicans Struggle as Voters Shift  
The 2016 elections are heating up. And so is the planet. According to NASA, there is a 99 percent chance that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, surpassing the current record set in 2015.

Read more: Politics, Climate Change, Green, Congress, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Gop, Republicans, Clean Energy, Donald Trump, Green News

 
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Sunset  

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40 years ago today the US govt sent a taxpayer-funded robot to invade an alien hostile world  

Phenomenal photographic proof of planet plundering

Pics The surviving members of the Viking Mars probe team have been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first probe to make it down onto the surface of the Red Planet, send back pictures, and perform scientific experiments.…

 
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Raving mad: Glow sticks are secret weapon in Facebook's 2.1Gbps laser internet drones  

Umm-tsch umm-tsch umm-tsch umm-tsch

At Facebook's F8 Developer Conference this year, Mark Zuckerberg revealed more details about his laser-firing drones that will encircle the world and relay Facebook, sorry, the internet to far-flung places, reaching potentially all seven billion of us.…

 
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Water-bottle bees cool the hive after their overheated mates beg  
After a hot day, some honeybees become living water tanks they store water in their gut in anticipation of demand from their sisters  
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Peckham  

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Waterloo Sunset  

aridleyphotography.com posted a photo:

London, England.
Olympus OM-D E-M10.

Website I Facebook I VSCO I Instagram

 
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Dusk at Hyde park  

joepeskett posted a photo:

Dusk at Hyde park.

 
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The queens house  

joepeskett posted a photo:

 
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3D display exploits twisted light  
Images are encoded in orbital angular momentum of photons  
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Tiny microbe turns tropical butterfly into male killer, scientists discover  
A male-killing microbe has now been identified in a tropical butterfly called the African Queen, which leads to the death of all sons when a mother is infected.  
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Bracing For Fire  
By Rodman Linn


A photo from space of the Las Conchas fire in the Jemez mountains near Los Alamos, N.M. just after its start at 1:30 p.m. on June 26, 2011. On the first day, driven by strong and unpredictable winds, the fire burned 43,000 acres--a rate of about an acre per second. By the time the fire was controlled, it had burned more than 150,000 acres. (Photo courtesy of NASA.)

How Computer Modeling Might Help Us Better Understand--and Better Manage--Wildfires

This summer, throughout the West, higher temperatures and decreased precipitation brought on by climate change have ramped up the frequency of wildfires -- big, catastrophic fires -- while a century of fire suppression feeds the flames with a thick tangle of fuel in our overgrown forests.

We can't stop all fires -- and we shouldn't. Healthy ecosystems depend on them. But understanding what drives big fires and predicting their behavior helps the fire community prepare for the next blaze through appropriate land management, emergency plans and firefighting strategies. Beyond those benefits, a deeper understanding of wildfires prompts important insights into tactics for using prescribed fire as well as insight into larger regional environmental issues, including how fires change river flows and the availability of water for drinking, agriculture and energy production.

For scientists studying wildfire, the challenge is predicting the seemingly unpredictable. A wide range of conditions -- temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, larger weather patterns, available fuel, fuel conditions and terrain --influence the behavior of fire. Figuring out details such as the movement of hot gasses coming off a raging forest fire or the combination of convective and radiative heat transfer that ignite unburned fuels, for example, seems impossible at first. There's so much to consider, from how the fire front interacts with the atmosphere that drives it forward to the feedbacks of the fuel's structure on the fire and winds to the impacts of the topography and regional meteorology.

Fortunately, Los Alamos National Laboratory is well suited to address this kind of multidisciplinary, ultimately physics-based problem -- and the lab has a stake in wildfire prediction and management. As the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires demonstrated, the laboratory and neighboring communities are equally vulnerable to runaway conflagrations on our doorstep. Furthermore, Los Alamos' mission includes addressing energy security and national security, both of which can be affected by wildfires.



Modeling wildfires exploits the lab's unique capabilities in physics, computational modeling and high-performance computing. For decades the lab has built computer models of complex systems that move and change through time. That work includes hot gasses -- fire -- and the atmosphere. The laboratory's supercomputers make it possible.

When a team of atmospheric scientists, computational physicists and mathematicians in the laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences division, collaborating with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and Southern Research Station, set out to simulate the interacting processes that make up a wildfire as a basis for predicting its behavior, they leveraged a wealth of expertise and experience that had been developed partially through the laboratory's weapons program.

A research effort initiated by Laboratory Fellow Francis Harlow, a pioneer in computational fluid dynamics, and Andrew White, a visionary figure in the national high-performance computing community, led to the development of FIRETEC. It was the first wildfire model to simulate the interaction among many of the physical processes that determine the continuously shifting dance between fire and its surroundings. FIRETEC, which is now developed in collaboration with U.S. Forest Service, simulates three-dimensional interactions among fire, fuel and the environment at landscape scales. By coupling FIRETEC with an atmospheric-dynamics model called HIGRAD and using real-world data, the team can represent the interaction between fire and atmosphere and the way fire adjusts to terrain, vegetation, fuel and the dynamics of fire itself.

FIRETEC presents a new way of studying fire and learning how to better manage and cope with it. The model provides additional scientific input for decisions by policymakers working in land management, water resources and energy. The team hopes it will eventually assist fire and fuel management operations. Currently the team is partnering with the Rocky Mountain Research Station to study the combined influence of wind and slope on heat exposure in firefighter safety zones, with the Air Force Wildland Fire Center to study the efficiency of various prescribed fire tactics and with INRA of France and the Canadian Forest Service to study the effects of fuel breaks for fire management.

But there's more research to be done to further improve wildfire modeling for practical use in the field during a fire. FIRETEC's complexity and the massive amounts of data involved require enormous high-performance computers such as those available at Los Alamos to perform simulations. The laboratory-led team is now working with the Forest Service to apply what it learns from FIRETEC to assist in developing and refining less detailed but faster-running tools that incident fire commanders could run on their laptops to predict fire behavior over the next few hours. This is a short enough time frame to deploy firefighters in anticipation of the fire's next move or help keep firefighters out of harm's way. This faster-running tool could also benefit decision-support tools such as Simtable, which is currently used in the laboratory's Emergency Operations Center.

On another front, as part of a larger Los Alamos study on the impact of climate-driven changes on watersheds, laboratory researchers are working toward using FIRETEC to potentially spin off simplified models. One model can explore, for example, how the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the Colorado River system might alter flows in the San Juan River. That's important locally because the San Juan supplies drinking water to Santa Fe and cools the Four Corners Generating Station, a major regional energy source. How will climate-driven changes to vegetation alter the pattern of fires and the severity of the effects in that watershed? What can be done to minimize those impacts? Research underway now should answer these questions.

Providing those answers is an appropriate endeavor for Los Alamos for several reasons. While the Los Alamos community has had more than its fair share of encounters with wildfire, the research is more than personal: it fits the laboratory's mission to enhance energy security and national security. Additionally, the required expertise in the combination of multi-phase fluid dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, computational modeling and computer science are optimally aligned with many of the laboratory's other mission areas. "Science serving society" is a catchy phrase, but in the case of wildfire modeling at Los Alamos, it couldn't be more apt.

Rod Linn is a senior scientist in the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he studies and models a wide range of atmospheric phenomenon using computational physics. Linn has led much of the development and application of the FIRETEC computer program for predicting wildfire behavior, but the breadth of work using this tool is accomplished through a broad set of Los Alamos investigators as well as domestic and international collaborators.


More about how Los Alamos National Laboratory prepares for wildfires:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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President Obama's New Energy Initiative Another Win for Solar  
Today, the White House announced a truly groundbreaking initiative called Clean Energy Savings for All Americans. This program aims to increase access to solar energy across communities of all income levels and geographies, so that no matter where you live, if you have a sunny roof, you have the chance to go solar. And the Administration did so by providing a bevy of options that move renewables and solar forward significantly.

The array of initiative components culminates in a goal of providing one gigawatt of solar for low to middle-income households by 2020. And chief among the announcements is the issuance of new guidance for property-assessed clean energy (PACE) financing that will allow mortgage insurance to now be issued by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA), rather than through the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association (Freddie Mac), which ran into roadblocks with PACE loans six years ago.

Cutting through the alphabet soup of federal agencies, the bottom line is that more Americans will now be able to choose solar, and private industry can seize the opportunity to build more solar systems.

"Solar panels are no longer for wealthy folks who live where the sun shines every day, they're already a reality for Americans in communities all across the country. Today we're offering even more families and communities the chance to choose cleaner sources of energy," said Obama about the initiative.




One of the greatest parts about the PACE plan is that it leverages the flexibilities of the executive branch in ways that are seldom seen in Washington stovepipes. The initiative cuts red tape with the result that roughly 200,000 homes could choose to lower their electricity bills through solar over the next four years.

SEIA applauds the President for taking these measures, which mirror the solar industry's commitment to expand solar access to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live. These policies empower veterans and lower income households to cut power bills, while putting more Americans back to work with good-paying jobs installing solar panels from Los Angeles to Boston.

This is how it should be. This year, solar reached one million installations in the U.S., crossed over the threshold of providing 1 percent of American electricity, and provided more new power capacity than all other energy sources combined in the first quarter, and we're just getting warmed up. It's time for all Americans to have a ticket to the solar revolution, celebrating American innovation and smart federal policy.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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The Armed Citizens of the Republican Convention  

Ohio is an open-carry state, so many people at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are toting firearms. For some, it's about protecting police. For others, it's about keeping protesters safe. The Atlantic spoke with two of these gun-wielding civilians about why they're armed at the RNC.

 
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