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astronomy

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CERN: The LHC Discovery of "New Physics" Particles Last December Were a Mirage --"We're Still Looking Only at the Tip of the Hidden Mystery"

Last December CERN announced a collection of unexpected observations at the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists quickly submitted over 500 papers, each inventing a new way to explain the observations, which seemed to challenge the foundations of the long-standing but tottering Standard Model. Now, in a new paper uploaded last night, CERN makes it clear that the exciting December measurements were mere statistical blips, flips of the hadron coin so to speak.

The particle accelerator ramped up to its fastest, most energetic collisions yet in 2015, with initially surprising results. Two different experiments (ATLAS and CMS) examine the products of collisions for new and unexpected physics—each serving as a check on the other. And in December, both teams reported the exact same thing: more pairs of photons with a combined energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts than expected. No particle or process in the Standard Model could explain the anamoly of the extra photons. The proponents of a New Physics buzzed: surely the new world of the dark universe was soon to be revealed.

Despite the discovery of the existence of the Higgs Boson on July 4, 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, puzzling questions about the nature of the universe remain unanswered. For example, the essential properties of neutrinos are still a mystery. And dark matter and dark energy, which together constitute 95 percent of the universe, are today still astonishing enigmas. The Higgs particle is unlike any other particle we have ever encountered. Why is it different? Are there more? Neutrinos are very light, elusive particles that change their identity as they travel. How do they fit into our understanding of nature? Are there new hidden dimensions of space and time?

Known particles constitute 1/6 of all the matter in the universe. The rest we call dark matter. But what is it? Can we detect these particles in our labs? Are there other undiscovered particles in nature? There are four known forces in nature. Are these manifestations of a single unified force? Are there unexpected new forces? Both matter and anti-matter were produced in the Big Bang, but today our world is composed only of matter. Why? Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?

A similar red herring event occured in 2012 when the LHC to reach previously unachieved energies, the accelerator started up again after improvements, and ATLAS and CMS both saw extra photons summing to 125 gigaelectronvolts. Teams searched again a few months later to check their results—and continued to see photons at the exact same energy. They were definitely observing a brand-new particle. At the time, though, there remained a single unconfirmed piece of the Standard Model: ATLAS and CMS had found the Higgs boson, the final piece of the puzzle. The Higgs is a huge step toward understanding how particles acquire mass—and measured “theta one-three”—an important number that may lead to a better understanding of neutrino properties and nature's imbalance between matter and antimatter.

But, unlike the Higgs discovery, the photons announced in December 2015 were a blip of particularly interesting noise. “This is pretty unfortunate,” theoretical physicist Michele Redi wrote Wired in an email, “as it would have been the greatest discovery in several decades in our field.”

It seems likely that with the Higgs, we're seeing only the tip of the iceberg. The Higgs field seems to give mass to just some particles; others are still complete mysteries. Meanwhile, we're working to understand why there's matter and not antimatter everywhere we look. What's more, there are particles out there like neutrinos about which we are still almost completely ignorant. And then there's the elephant in the room—the “dark universe” of dark matter and dark energy.

The Daily Galaxy via CERN, Symmetry.org, Wired.com

CERN: "Will This Summer's LHC Photon Collisions Reveal a New Theory of Space and Time?"

The Higgs Particle --"It Can Disintegrate Into Dark Matter"

"Beyond the God Particle" --China to Trump CERN's LHC: Twice the Size and Seven Times as Powerful

CERN's Large-Hadron-Collider Discovery of the Higgs Boson --"Points to an Unstable, Collapsing Universe"

Particles could give us clues to the aftermath of the Big Bang

Supersymmetry? --"Standard Model of the Universe Fails to Explain Dark Matter or Dark Energy"

Europe's Large Hadron Collider --"May Unveil Something Totally Unthinkable" In Months Ahead (Weekend Feature)

astronomy

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astronomy

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NASA Suspends Future Live TV Feeds from the International Space Station --"Move Follows UFO Cover Up Claims"

NASA has announced that the space agency has suspended future live TV feeds from the International Space Station. UFO theorists will now surely look at NASA's move as further confirmation after a live NASA video feed by the ISS was cut on July 9th as a blurry round object was seen descending from the upper-right corner on the live feed before the screen went dark as the UFO appeared to stop and a notice followed indicating technical difficulties. The incident was captured on a You Tube video that prompted alien hunters and conspiracy theorist to think that NASA was covering up the sighting.

Some reports theorized the object may be Chinese space station Tiangong-1, which was launched in 2011. NASA has been accused of cutting live feed before as an April video showing a horseshoe-like object supposedly changing direction suspiciously dropped.

NASA spokesman Daniel Huot told the Daily News in an email that the camera's signal was simply interrupted. The video was part of an experiment researching how ordinary cameras function in the harsh environment of space. Huot said sometimes the cameras lose connection with satellites used to transmit video to the ground, which is what happened in this case.

"It's very common for things like the moon, space debris, reflections from station windows, the spacecraft structure itself or lights from Earth to appear as artifacts in photos and videos from the orbiting laboratory," Huot said.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA Video, YouTube, Nature World News

Image credit top of page: static.guim.co.uk

ISS Destiny Module Leads to New Discovery --"Things can Happen Out There that Can't Happen Here"

"Beyond Astrobiology" --New Technologies in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

International Space Station Live Video Feed Cut "As Unknown Object Slows Down" --Triggers Viral UFO Speculation, NASA Denial

ISS-Bound Antares Explosion --Space X's Elon Musk: Rocket's Outdated Technology "A Joke"

A Moment of Zen --Titan Beyond Saturn's Rings

astronomy

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astronomy

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A Hubble Sky Full of Stars

NASA Goddard Photo and Video posted a photo:

So Coldplay isn't the only one to see a sky full of stars, these are 22K light-years away

Located approximately 22,000 light-years away in the constellation of Musca (The Fly), this tightly packed collection of stars — known as a globular cluster — goes by the name of NGC 4833. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the dazzling stellar group in all its glory.

NGC 4833 is one of the over 150 globular clusters known to reside within the Milky Way. These objects are thought to contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy. Studying these ancient cosmic clusters can help astronomers to unravel how a galaxy formed and evolved, and give an idea of the galaxy's age.

Globular clusters are responsible for some of the most striking sights in the cosmos, with hundreds of thousands of stars congregating in the same region of space. Hubble has observed many of these clusters during its time in orbit around our planet, each as breathtaking as the last.

bit.ly/2b85p36

Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA

NASA image use policy.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA's mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA's accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency's mission.

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astronomy

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astronomy

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Violent Past as Prelude -- "Milky Way Collided With a Small Galaxy or Massive Dark Matter Structure 100 Million Years Ago"

"Our Milky Way had an encounter with a small galaxy or massive dark matter structure perhaps as recently as 100 million years ago," said Larry Widrow, professor at Queen's University, part of a team of astronomers from Canada and the United States who have discovered what may well be the smoking gun of such an encounter, one that occurred close to our position in the galaxy and relatively recently, at least in the cosmological sense. "We clearly observe unexpected differences in the Milky Way's stellar distribution above and below the Galaxy's midplane that have the appearance of a vertical wave -- something that nobody has seen before," Widrow added.

The discovery is based on observations in 2012 of some 300,000 nearby Milky Way stars by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Stars in the disk of the Milky Way move up and down at a speed of about 20-30 kilometers per second while orbiting the ce nter of the galaxy at a brisk 220 kilometers per second. Widrow and his four collaborators from the University of Kentucky, the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have found that the positions and motions of these nearby stars weren't quite as regular as previously thought.

"Our part of the Milky Way is ringing like a bell," said Brian Yanny, of the Department of Energy's Fermilab. "But we have not been able to identify the celestial object that passed through the Milky Way. It could have been one of the small satellite galaxies that move around the center of our galaxy, or an invisible structure such as a dark matter halo."

"The perturbation need not have been a single isolated event in the past, and it may even be ongoing. Additional observations may well clarify its origin," added Susan Gardner, professor of physics at the University of Kentucky.

When the collaboration started analyzi ng the SDSS data on the Milky Way, they noticed a small but statistically significant difference in the distribution of stars north and south of the Milky Way's midplane. For more than a year, the team members explored various explanations of this north-south asymmetry, such as the effect of interstellar dust on distance determinations and the way the stars surveyed were selected. When those attempts failed, they began to explore the alternative explanation that the data was telling them something about recent events in the history of the Galaxy.

The scientists used computer simulations to explore what would happen if a satellite galaxy or dark matter structure passed through the disk of the Milky Way. The simulations indicate that over the next 100 million years or so, our galaxy will "stop ringing:" the north-south asymmetry will disappear and the vertical motions of stars in the solar neighborhood will revert back to their equilibrium orbits -- unless we get hit again.

The Milky Way is more than 9 billion years old with about 100 billion stars and total mass more than 300 billion times that of the sun. Most of the mass in and around the Milky Way is in the form of dark matter.

Scientists know of more than 20 visible satellite galaxies that circle the center of the Milky Way, with masses ranging from one million to one billion solar masses. There may also be invisible satellites made of dark matter. (There is six times as much dark matter in the universe as ordinary, visible matter.) Astronomers' computer simulations have found that this invisible matter formed hundreds of massive structures that move around our Milky Way.

Because of their abundance, these dark matter satellites are more likely than the visible satellite galaxies to cut through the Milky Way's midplane and cause vertical waves.

"Future astronomical programs, will be able to map out the vertical perturbations in our galaxy in unprecedented detail," Widrow said. "That will offer a strong test of our findings."

Today's Most Popular

The Daily Galaxy via Fermi Lab

Thirty Percent of Stars Have Migrated Across the Milky Way --"Was Our Sun One?"

Milky Way Found to Be Much Larger Than Thought --Extending Width 50% to 150,000 Light Years!

Colossal Void, a Dead Zone Discovered in Heart of the Milky Way --"Requires a Major Revision in Our Thinking"

The Milky Way's Massive Spinning Halo --New Insights

Astronomers Reveal the Rotation of the Hot Gas Around the Milky Way

astronomy

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pin-gaia

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Cuckoo wasp (Omalus

Cuckoo wasp (Omalus sp.) collected in Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG07040-F01; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=SSPAC1869-13; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:ACC8479)

pin-gaia

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technology

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The Hubble Cantata: A Song for the Stars

This swirling space opera will merge virtual reality, live music, and celestial imagery from the Hubble telescope for an audience of…

Continue reading on Kickstarter »

technology

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robots

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r0B0t: The Washington Post will use robots to write stories about the Rio ... - Recode

Recode

The Washington Post will use robots to write stories about the Rio ...
Recode
The Post is using homegrown software to automatically produce hundreds of real-time news reports about the Olympics. Starting tomorrow morning, those items ...
The Washington Post's Newest Olympics Reporter Is Artificial ...FishbowlDC (blog)
Robots will cover the Olympics for The Washington Post | TechCrunchTechCrunch
Robot reporters covering Olympics for the Washington PostThe Stack
Inquirer
all 6 news articles »

robots

1470467455000

design

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Gabriel Orozco presents a fresh body of work at the Aspen Art...

Gabriel Orozco presents a fresh body of work at the Aspen Art Museum

design

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culture

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Spanish poster for REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, USA,...

Spanish poster for REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1940)

Designer: Macario Gómez Quibus aka “Mac.” (b. 1926)

Poster source: Heritage Auctions

See more of the work of one of Spain's greatest cartelistas at Movie Poster of the Week on MUBI.

culture

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culture

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Elastic Opening Credits: True Detective, Season 1

Elastic has created some of the most intriguing title sequences in recent television history. Directed by Patrick Clair (Australian b. 1982), the opening credits for HBO's True Detective (2014 and 2015) present moody montages that fit the dark tone of the series.

This video was featured in the 2016 exhibition Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial.

Watch hundreds of videos on design and process on the Cooper Hewitt website: http://www.cooperhewitt.org/videos

The post Elastic Opening Credits: True Detective, Season 1 appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

culture

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culture

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http://insider.si.edu/2016/08/let-games-begin/
Let the Games Begin

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

With the kickoff of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro imminent, the time was right to pull out this groovy 1972 portrait from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. It shows the mustachioed swimmer Mark Spitz sporting the seven gold medals he won that year.

Spitz had competed in the 1968 Olympics, but the 1972 games in Munich saw him reach Olympics immortality when he set the world record for the most gold medals won during a single Olympic Games, collected in both individual and team events.

Michael Phelps, who will again swim in the 2016 Olympics, currently holds the record for the most gold medals received in a single Olympics. He won eight in the 2008 Beijing games and holds the record for the most Olympic medals won—though it remains to be seen if he can rock a star-spangled swimsuit like Spitz.

More Olympians in the Portrait Gallery's collection can be viewed here: http://npg.si.edu/portraits/olympians.

More Olympics items in the Smithsonian collection are here: http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/olympics.

The post Let the Games Begin appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

culture

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culture

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Another Earth? Kepler astronomers pinpoint likeliest candidates

Kepler-186f, seen here in an artist's rendering and discovered in 2014 by a team of astronomers, is one of more than 200 “exoplanets” that researchers say lie within the “habitable zone” of their stars and could potentially have life. (NASA image by Danielle Futselaar)

Looking for another Earth? An international team of researchers has pinpointed which of the more than 4,000 exoplanets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission are most likely to be similar to our rocky home.

The research, detailed in an article to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, outlines 216 Kepler planets located within the “habitable zone” — the area around a star in which a planet's surface could hold liquid water. Of those, 20 are named the best candidates to be habitable rocky planets like Earth.

“This is the complete catalog of all of the Kepler discoveries that are in the habitable zone of their host stars,” said Stephen Kane, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University and lead author of the study. “That means we can focus in on the planets in this paper and perform follow-up studies to learn more about them, including if they are indeed habitable.”

Studying and cataloging the more than 4,000 exoplanets took more than three years and involved researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, NASA, Arizona State University, Caltech, University of Hawaii-Manoa, the University of Bordeaux and Cornell University.

This figure shows the habitable zone for stars of different temperatures, as well as the location of terrestrial size planetary candidates and confirmed Kepler planets described in new research from SF State astronomer Stephen Kane. Some of the Solar System terrestrial planets are also shown for comparison. (Image by Chester Harman)

The research also confirms that the distribution of Kepler planets within the habitable zone is the same as the distribution of those outside of it — additional evidence that the universe is teeming with planets and moons where life could potentially exist.

The boundaries of the habitable zone are critical. If a planet is too close to its star, it will experience a runaway greenhouse gas effect, like Venus. But if it's too far, any water will freeze, as is seen on Mars. The authors sorted the planets by whether they were in a conservative or a more optimistic interpretation of the habitable zone. Then they further sorted them by size: smaller, rocky planets versus larger gas giants.

The four categories are aimed at helping astronomers focus their research. Those looking for moons that could potentially hold life can study exoplanets in the gas giant categories, for example.

The 20 planets in the most restrictive category — rocky surface and a conservative habitable zone — are the most likely to be similar to Earth. The authors have already begun gathering additional data on these planets, as well as those in the other categories.

“A catalog of Kepler habitable zone exoplanet candidates,” by Stephen R. Kane, Michelle L. Hill, James F. Kasting, Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Elisa V. Quintana, Thomas Barclay, Natalie M. Batalha, William J. Borucki, David R. Ciardi, Nader Haghighipour, Natalie R. Hinkel, Lisa Kaltenegger, Franck Selsis and Guillermo Torres, can be read online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00620 and will be published in an upcoming print edition of the Astrophysical Journal.

The post Another Earth? Kepler astronomers pinpoint likeliest candidates appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

culture

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Photos of the Rio 2016 Olympics Opening Ceremony (42 photos)

The games of the 31st Olympiad are now under way in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Organizers kicked off the proceedings with a colorful opening ceremony that highlighted Brazilian history and culture, and featured messages of hope and of care for the environment. Singers, lightshows, the Parade of Nations, multimedia performances, and Samba dances were all followed by the the lighting of the Olympic Cauldron in Maracana Stadium, and the beginning of the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics.

The Olympic Cauldron is lit at the Olympic Boulevard for the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 5, 2016. (David Ramos / Getty)

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St. Paul's Cathedral at Dusk, London

Faraz Tareen posted a photo:

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Sunrise 6 Aug 2016

Sculptor Lil posted a photo:

05:41

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robots

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r0B0t: Rio 2016 Opening Ceremony In Funny Tweets

Funny bikes, little plants, Dame Judi Dench and some insanely scary spiders - the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympic opening ceremony was certainly eventful.

Not that you'd have known it from the rather subdued start...

It's going to be a long night. #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/tsQ9TtbULD
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) August 5, 2016

It began with the beginnings of life itself.

#OpeningCeremony gets going with a recreation of a Russian athlete's urine sample under the microscope. pic.twitter.com/iF85LLeLTG
— David Schneider (@davidschneider) August 5, 2016

And when evolution kicked in people across the world got a little bit scared.

ah lá os zika vírus #OpeningCeremony #CerimoniaDeAbertura #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/04YpWlUXNf
— pedro rafhael (@falarafha) August 5, 2016

Who else was thinking the same thing? #OpeningCeremony #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/eE1TJ2cJ4o
— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2016

Just turned on the Olympics, saw giant robot spiders, and NOPE'd back out.
— Matt Silverman (@Matt_Silverman) August 6, 2016

Soon, humanity made an appearance.

#OpeningCeremony THE WHITES HAVE ARRIVED
— blige (@THECAROLDANVERS) August 5, 2016

Here come the Europeans in a dance section called “the arrival of death and syphilis”. #OpeningCeremony
— David Schneider (@davidschneider) August 5, 2016

All of a sudden suburbia sprang from the ground.

Am I the only one who seeing the similarity? #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/GJTKo26bRI
— Tommy McFLY (@TommyMcFLY) August 6, 2016

There were high hopes of who could make a guest appearance.

When Pitbull parachutes out of a helicopter all will be fine #OpeningCeremony
— Chris Stark (@Chris_Stark) August 5, 2016

He must have been disappointed because this happened.

HOLY SHIT GISELE!!!! #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/1UiwGrqi8w
— Purpose Tour Pics (@PurposeTPics) August 5, 2016

Gisele at #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/9tg2PXsTRA
— Declan Cashin (@Tweet_Dec) August 5, 2016

Out of shot, Gisele is still walking. Nobody's told her to stop. She's half way up Sugarloaf mountain. It's all she knows #OpeningCeremony
— innocent drinks (@innocent) August 5, 2016

But then the dancing started!

Shite. #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/lTqajrOanu
— Limmy Live: England (@DaftLimmy) August 5, 2016

Why am I still awake?#Rio2016 #OpeningCeremony
— The Media Blog (@TheMediaTweets) August 5, 2016

But at least the sound quality was good.

Get the same sound quality as the #OpeningCeremony by listening to an iPod through a tin can from a great distance.
— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) August 5, 2016

Sound engineer's getting sacked in the morning #OpeningCeremony
— General Boles (@GeneralBoles) August 5, 2016

The sound is shite. It's like what it must sound like living next to Hampden. #OpeningCeremony
— Limmy Live: England (@DaftLimmy) August 5, 2016

In fact Limmy appeared to be even more pissed off than usual at the whole thing.

Shut your eyes and just listen to that shite. #OpeningCeremony
— Limmy Live: England (@DaftLimmy) August 5, 2016

ECHOEY FUCKING SHITE. #OpeningCeremony
— Limmy Live: England (@DaftLimmy) August 5, 2016

But someone seemed to be enjoying it.

'yaaaaas I love this one' #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/gEQj6SlCYc
— General Boles (@GeneralBoles) August 5, 2016

Then there was a touching section on pollution and the climate narrated by none other than Dame Judi Dench.

In my head, Judi Dench narrates every moment of my life #OpeningCeremony
— Declan Cashin (@Tweet_Dec) August 5, 2016

Global warming #OpeningCeremony thought this was about sport #moodkiller
— Dave Readle (@DaveReadle) August 5, 2016

Oh God, we're getting a tedious bilingual lecture on Global Warming at the #OpeningCeremony of the #RioOlympics ...Please, stop it.
— Tunku Varadarajan (@tunkuv) August 5, 2016

look at the dancing and music OH BY THE WAY THE TREES ARE FUCKED AND WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE and now more dancing #OpeningCeremony
— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) August 5, 2016

We were only an hour in and it was already proving divisive.

That was one of the best #OpeningCeremony's ever. #posttruthpolitics
— Pokemom (@lilyallen) August 5, 2016

That was the SHITTEST opening ceremony ever #OpeningCeremony
— AR (@aroueno) August 5, 2016

And there was the small matter of when teams would appear in the arena considering Portuguese spelling mixed things up a bit.

Guessing which alphabetical team will come out next is certainly testing my non-existent Portuguese #OpeningCeremony #Rio2016
— Claire Phipps (@Claire_Phipps) August 5, 2016

And in the UK it was already getting late.

Question: are they classing the UK as UK or Great Britain? Just this ceremony is in alphabetical order....and it's 1am... #OpeningCeremony
— Robert Midgley (@RobertMidgley07) August 6, 2016

AND THEN THE TEAMS ARRIVED!!!

Here come Australia #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/blwf7dvYTX
— innocent drinks (@innocent) August 6, 2016

Australia rocking the Thomas Cook holiday rep look #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/x7ZOYYhm40
— General Boles (@GeneralBoles) August 6, 2016

It soon became apparent the commentators were engaged in some kind of fact-off competition with each other.

*doing olympics commentary*
"Ah Bulgaria, A fun fact about Bulgaria"
*checks wikipedia*
"He was the head womble... dammit"#OpeningCeremony
— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) August 6, 2016

#OpeningCeremony #Rio2016 Factoids, tripping off the tongue like lead weights....
— Alastair Stewart (@alstewitn) August 6, 2016

Five fun facts about Andorra. It is bedtime isn't it? #OpeningCeremony
— Jane Merrick (@janemerrick23) August 6, 2016

"Finland. Not land-locked. Thought by many people to be home to Santa Claus, up in the North."#Rio2016 #OpeningCeremony
— The Media Blog (@TheMediaTweets) August 6, 2016

If Wikipedia pulled its website for just ten minutes, this commentary could get quite exciting #OpeningCeremony
— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) August 6, 2016

There were a few unexpected entrances.

I'm on my way to the Opening Ceremony #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/I9ff7CIKpB
— Darth Vader (@DepressedDarth) August 6, 2016

The Empire better win gold or someone is getting force choked #OpeningCeremony #Rio2016
— Darth Vader (@DepressedDarth) August 6, 2016

Delegação da Nova Zelandia #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/nuj7NTOTjK
— Mordomo Olímpico (@mordomoeugenio) August 6, 2016

By now people were tired and realising waiting for all those teams to make an entrance was going to take a long time.

Me waiting for my country's team to make their entrance #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/C3nMJXUCvv
— 9GAG (@9GAG) August 6, 2016

Then we got to “M”.

México? not today #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/3hJpdUWo7T
— hir∆m (@estadohiramico) August 6, 2016

Meanwhile in London...

In case you're wondering, this is what the London 2012 stadium looks like during the Rio 2016 #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/Mu3dYDgPPG
— Francis Whittaker (@frittaker) August 6, 2016

But at least we had things like this to keep us entertained.

NOW THIS IS HOW YOU FLAG BEAR #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/66a5U3i24K
— innocent drinks (@innocent) August 6, 2016

Oh, and those bikes...

So the #OpeningCeremony went with the Saw angle & used the bikes. Still dk what I'm watching. pic.twitter.com/BmIK9oU6iq
— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) August 6, 2016

As a gay man, I can comfortably say that these bikes are very gay. #OpeningCeremony #Olympics2016 pic.twitter.com/k1OR8bXAgx
— #NeverHillary (@ScottPresler) August 6, 2016

I don't get the bikes. #OpeningCeremony
— Rosemary Barton (@RosieBarton) August 6, 2016

Then for some reason - can't think why - everyone went a bit la la over the Tongan flag bearer.

Current flights been booked by females around the world ✈️ #OpeningCeremony #Olympics2016 #tonga pic.twitter.com/vkfH61Io40
— δεmγ (@Demidinho) August 6, 2016

Me trying to find flights to #Tonga. #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/zQhMT4fVeu
— Jesse (@ncfac) August 6, 2016

Then things took a turn for the weird when it transpired the actual CIA were getting involved.

The best thing about the #OpeningCeremony is that the @CIA has turned it into a massive quiz https://t.co/LgrMEKsm6n
— Chris York (@ChrisDYork) August 6, 2016

Celebrating #Rio2016 #Olympics #OpeningCeremony? We'll be asking poll questions for you to test your world knowledge.
Hint: #WorldFactBook
— CIA (@CIA) August 5, 2016

Of corse what we were all waiting for was the entry of Team GB and whether or not flag bearer Andy Murray was going to carry on with Brit tradition and carry it one-handed, because apparently that's a thing.

Andy Murray looking stoked to be Great Britain's flag-bearer...#OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/XdVbbBSRdS
— Sportsbet.com.au (@sportsbetcomau) August 6, 2016

Then it was time for the unveiling of the rings.

And finally, the Olympics rings are revealed... https://t.co/VU4WHfqJNT #OpeningCeremony #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/cFCNOfvUQ1
— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) August 6, 2016

Is it just me or do the rings look like they are made of marijuana? #OpeningCeremony
— Sonja Nikcevic (@sonjanik13) August 6, 2016

The honour of lighting the Olympic flame went to...

BREAKING: Brazilian marathoner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima lights the Olympic cauldron for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games.
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 6, 2016

@AP literally who
— inquiett (@inquiett) August 6, 2016

@AP who?
— Bradley Headrick (@HeadrickBradley) August 6, 2016

But at least it looked pretty.

"Give them back their flame."
"No! The Olympics have preempted my favorite shows for the last time" #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/PMVGaD6Us3
— The Simpsons (@Simpsons_tweets) August 5, 2016

Imagine the scenes if Barry Manilow does a live version of Copacabana as the Olympic flame is lit. Stuff of dreams. #OpeningCeremony
— Ollie Heptinstall (@OliHepy) August 5, 2016

Anyway, that was about it.

Wasn't as good as London 2012 though...

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r0B0t: Pete McMartin: Modern Love The Hard Drive Wants what the Hard Drive Wants - Vancouver Sun

Vancouver Sun

Pete McMartin: Modern Love The Hard Drive Wants what the Hard Drive Wants
Vancouver Sun
In 2015, he created Tinderbox, a computerized robot app of Tinder that could learn which attributes the user found attractive — in effect, editing Tinder for his best selections. It proved so popular that by the start of this year, he came up ...

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Lasers reconfigure the properties of novel metasurface
Switchable material can block or transmit particular wavelengths of light

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r0B0t: Google executive quits self-driving car project - Daily Mail

New York Times

Google executive quits self-driving car project
Daily Mail
Aug 5 (Reuters) - Chris Urmson, who was instrumental in building Google's self-driving car project, said on Friday he is leaving the team after seven and a half years. Alphabet Inc's Google had named Urmson chief technical officer of the project after ...
Technology|Latest to Quit Google's Self-Driving Car Unit: Top RoboticistNew York Times
Google's Self-Driving Car Leader ExitsWall Street Journal
Google autonomous car team leader Chris Urmson is leavingFast Company
TechCrunch -Recode -Bloomberg -Business Insider
all 19 news articles »

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r0B0t: The World's First Industrial Tattoo Robot Looks Like A Really Fancy Torture Device
Pierre-Emmanuel Meunier and Johan da Silveira from Autodesk's Pier 9 created this tattoo robot using the principles of 3D printing. But unlike the 3D printer, this involves a lot of pain.
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r0B0t: Project Murphy Is Microsoft's Latest Artificial Intelligence Robot, And It Wants To Photoshop Pictures For You - Huffington Post UK

Huffington Post UK

Project Murphy Is Microsoft's Latest Artificial Intelligence Robot, And It Wants To Photoshop Pictures For You
Huffington Post UK
Microsoft's recent Artificial Intelligence robot Tay didn't exactly make headlines for the right reasons, after Twitter users somehow managed to trick it into becoming a Nazi. But the computer giant is probably hoping their latest venture will steer ...

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r0B0t: Dogs as Model for Emotional Expression by Robots - The Bark (blog)

The Bark (blog)

Dogs as Model for Emotional Expression by Robots
The Bark (blog)
The emotions expressed by the dog and by the robot were fear, joy, anger, sadness and neutral (no emotion). Both the dog ... Future work will explore ways that dogs (and perhaps other mammals) can serve as models for combining functionality with sociality.

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r0B0t: New Robot Doesn't Need Humans to Control it - Newsweek

Newsweek

New Robot Doesn't Need Humans to Control it
Newsweek
artificial intelligence alter robot japan An android named 'Alter,' developed by researchers at Tokyo University and Osaka University, at a press preview, Tokyo, July 29. The android can move its head, eyes, mouth, body and hands thanks to a neural ...

and more »

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r0B0t: Can Artificial intelligence, Robots, Humanoids learn ethics and morales? Tulsa Technology Time - Daily Star Gazette

Daily Star Gazette

Can Artificial intelligence, Robots, Humanoids learn ethics and morales? Tulsa Technology Time
Daily Star Gazette
Researchers at Georgia Tech believes Robots can learn to conform to human norms, the paper argues, through a method called “Quixote”, which teaches artificial agents to read stories that demonstrate human values and then rewards them for “good” ...

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Blogumentary: Giving Voice to Survivors from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima.

Hiroshima Today, with some distance of time and perspective, we can think about Hiroshima with a more balanced compassion than a few decades ago. It has become possible to reflect on not only the justification for the first dropping of an atomic bomb on a populated city, but also on how that impacted the many thousands of people caught up in the blast and its aftermath.

It was a bombing American hearts decided was justified; but which minds have largely disconnected from in terms of consequences for humanity. This was evident when the current Republican candidate for President allegedly questioned why we don't use our nuclear weapons for a third time.

"DSC_0947" — Yoshie Oka returns to the bunker where she survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. *Photos by Ari Beser*

Next January, either Donald J. Trump or Hillary Rodham Clinton will receive the nuclear football from President Obama. Either one of seemingly the two most controversial people in modern U.S. political history is going be in charge of our nuclear codes, a certain outcome of this election we should be most concerned about.

Seventy-one years ago my grandfather Jacob Beser was flying in the back of a B-29 listening to the radio. He wasn't listening to Beyonce—He was listening to frequency. He was monitoring a device that was going to end the war. This is what he trained for. This is what he knew and was prepared to die for. If anything went wrong, he was told to eat the device's frequency code, written on a small piece of paper.

"DSC_0371" — Sumiteru Taniguchi holds up photos of himself immediately after the bombing of Nagasaki. A prominent advocate for nuclear abolition, he was nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.

None of that was necessary. He did his job right, and he saw what men were capable of. He saw it twice, over Nagasaki too, and he never expressed guilt about it. But he, like the rest of America, disconnected from the reality of the human suffering 32,000 feet below. He, like the majority of his countrymen felt, it was necessary.

When my grandfather looked out the window, he likened the mushroom cloud to sand in the water, the way it billows along the shoreline in the tide. He couldn't connect with the children in the streets or the people as they packed in train cars on their way to work. He couldn't connect to the horrors they would witness and live with for the rest of their lives.

"DSC_0902" — Suano Tsuboi moments before meeting President Obama in Hiroshima during his historic visit on May 27, 2015.

Can we make those connections, America? Can we stop saying “What about Pearl Harbor,” long enough to look at what World War II brought humanity to accomplish? Can we ask ourselves, “what will it take to bring us there again?”

I am not asking for a justification. I am not asking for an apology. I am asking that we listen to the stories of the atomic bomb survivors as a testimony to the evils of nuclear war.

Today I invite you to my Facebook community, Hibakusha: The Nuclear Family, where you can learn about what it was like under the mushroom clouds. I've called it a Blogumentary. It is an interactive online documentary that begs you to remember what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What happened to them could happen to us. Listen to their words, not as Japanese, and not as Americans, but as people.

Ari M. Beser is the grandson of Lt. Jacob Beser, the only U.S. serviceman aboard both bomb-carrying B-29s. He is traveling through Japan with the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship to report on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fifth anniversary of the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima. Beser will give voice to people directly affected by nuclear technology today, as well as work with Japanese and Americans to encourage a message of reconciliation and nuclear disarmament. His new book, The Nuclear Family, focuses on the American and Japanese perspectives of the atomic bombings.

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Sunset and Crepuscular Rays 5 Aug 2016

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Sunset 5/8/16

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Sunset 5/8/16

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Chiswick Bridge

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Barns

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Sunset on Twickenham Bridge

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Innovative Technologies for Reducing Food Waste
Innovative technologies and best practices that are cost-effective for small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) and small agri-businesses for reducing food waste along the value chain include improved packaging, cold chain management, 100% utilization, and secondary uses for foods that for some reason do not enter the traditional marketing pathways (Kitinoja 2016).

Improved packaging is big business, but many of the innovative packaging systems developed for large scale agriculture have been successfully adapted or modified for use by smallholders. These include modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) for fruits, the use of very thin, vented polyethylene produce bags for reducing water loss in fruits and vegetables, smart packaging, and small PICS bags (triple layer hermetically sealed plastic bags) for pesticide free home storage of grains and dry beans. PICS bags prevent moisture, air and light from damaging the stored foods and kills insects when the oxygen concentration falls below a threshold percentage in the sealed package.

Food Magazine (2015) described a few of these innovations: "The terms active packaging and smart packaging refer to packaging systems used with foods, pharmaceuticals, and several other types of products. They help extend shelf life, monitor freshness, display information on quality, improve safety, and improve convenience. More recently this has been updated to include intelligent functions (sensing, detecting, recording, tracing, communicating and applying scientific logic) in order to extend shelf life, enhance safety, improve quality, provide information and warn about possible issues."

Cold chain management is a complex topic, but there are many small-scale methods and simple cooling/cold storage equipment that can be used by retailers and home use to reduce food waste. Use of a low cost Zero Energy Cool Chamber (ZECC) on the farm or at home for temporary storage of perishable foods, using a CoolBot™ equipped cold room for food storage in a restaurant or retail shop, and using ice in retail displays can all help to reduce food waste. Recent literature reviews on the cold chain were undertaken by The Postharvest Education Foundation and IMechE, and provide many examples of cost effective practices (IMechE 2014; PEF 2013). Learning how best to use a home refrigerator seems like a simple issue that does not require a lot of thought, but misuse can greatly increase food waste and may create food safety problems.

Way back in the 1980s Dr. S. K. Roy (the inventor of the ZECC) began promoting "100% utilization" of perishable foods produced in India. He developed many systems for using the portions of the plants that were typically discarded, including using the leaf trimmings of cauliflower to make high quality green vegetable powder, bottling a whole tomato concentrate, and drying overripe mangoes to make nutritious and low cost fruit powders, fruit roll-ups and confectionary products. Postharvest training teams based at Amity University in Uttar Pradesh worked with the World Food Logistics organization on cost/benefit analyses and field trials during 2009-10 and are currently disseminating many of these food processing practices in many rural communities in India (Raman and Dubey, 2014).

Secondary, non-food uses for foods that are discarded during harvest, postharvest handling, processing or distribution include bio-gas production, animal feeds or composting. The technologies used in each of these fields are relatively simple and can be implemented on an individual, group or community scale as desired.

This blog post is based on a major review article on food loss and waste issues prepared for the Brookings Institution's Ending Rural Hunger Project. For further information you can read the original review article and cited reports.

This post is part of our "Reclaim" initiative, which showcases solutions to the issue of food waste and engages our readers to take action. You can find all the posts in this initiative, as well as feature pieces, investigative stories and video, here . Follow the initiative on Twitter at #Reclaim. And if you'd like to add your own thoughts to our series, sign up https://us.blog.huffpost.net/cms/signup for a HuffPost blog account.

Citations

Food Magazine (2015). http://www.foodmag.com.au/features/controlling-food-losses-through-better-packaging

IMechE 2013. Global food: waste not, want not. Jan 2013

Kitinoja, Lisa. 2016. "Innovative Approaches to Food Loss and Waste Issues," Frontier Issues Brief for the Brookings Institution's Ending Rural Hunger project.

PEF 2013. Use of cold chains for reducing food losses in developing countries. White Paper No. 13-03. (December 2013). La Pine, Oregon USA: The Postharvest Education Foundation. 16pp

Raman, N.L.M. and N. Dubey (2014). Panchayat and Economic empowerment of rural women by hands on Training. American International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, 5(2), December 2013-February 2014, pp. 249-252.

-- 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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Wake Up: These Unneeded Instruments Can Wreck Mass Destruction
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has recently advanced a clean energy plan which mandates that New York transition half of its energy needs to renewables by 2030. By regressive contrast, New York's Public Service Commission (PSC) has approved enormous subsidies for three aging nuclear power plants―Ginna, Nine Mile Point and FitzPatrick―located in Upstate New York. Estimates of the costs of these subsidies range from $59 million to $658 million by 2023, with specialists such as Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group predicting that costs could grow to $8 billion. New York consumers will be covering the tab via their utility bills.

Ginna and Nine Mile Point are owned by the Exelon Corporation, and Exelon has plans to purchase the FitzPatrick plant. You can be sure that Exelon is frothing at the mouth for this huge bailout that was approved without adequate public scrutiny. Approval of this plan gives New York State the not-so-honorable distinction of being one of the first states to bailout the aging nuclear industry in our increasingly green energy age. The long-coddled nuclear industry is hoping that other states will follow suit.

Unfortunately, subsidizing the nuclear industry in the United States is nothing new. Since the first nuclear plants opened back in the 1950's, taxpayers have assumed nearly all of the financial risk. One of the most telling warning signs about the real cost of investing in nuclear power is that fact that Wall Street will not finance the construction of a nuclear plant without a full loan guarantee from the U.S. government. The reason for such caution by financial wheelers and dealers is the long history of delays, cost overruns and reactors that never came online. Whether the plants open or not, obeisant politicians pass many of the nuclear boondoggle costs to the taxpayers.

Atomic energy is also uninsurable in the private insurance market. Under the Price-Anderson Act of 1957, taxpayers must cover almost all of the costs if a catastrophic nuclear accident should occur. Think of the devastation caused by Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island, which experienced only a partial meltdown in 1979, cost approximately $1 billion to clean up.

The case to preserve the New York nuclear power plants is that they are an "emissions-free power source." There are, however, much better, more affordable and safer low carbon options that would replace the need for nuclear energy in New York. These options were not even discussed or evaluated. A more sensible approach would have been for the PSC to present some alternative scenarios, so that citizen taxpayers could compare the risk and costs of a massive nuclear bailout against significant investments in other energy-generating options like wind and solar, in addition to energy conservation measures.

Consider the absurdity of the complex and expensive nuclear fuel cycle itself. It begins with uranium mining which produces radioactive tailings and dust, followed by the fabrication and refinement of fuel rods, the risky transport of these rods to the plant where they are installed, and then firing up the reactor so it goes critical with a huge amount of radioactivity. The end goal? To boil water to generate steam to turn turbines to produce electricity!

What other method of boiling water has to have specific population evacuation plans?

There is also the significant problem of spent fuel rods which are stored in pools at nuclear plants. No permanent storage sites exist for these deadly radioactive wastes, which pose national security risks, and which must be kept for thousands of years.

It's notable to point out that the Indian Point nuclear plants in New York, which are located near an earthquake fault just thirty miles from Manhattan, were excluded from the PSC proposal. Even cautious Governor Cuomo and Hillary Clinton, when she was a Senator, have acknowledged the imminent danger that Indian Point poses to the Greater New York City area and urged its closing. The 5 PM rush hour in New York's metropolitan area is bad enough without adding the chaos of a panicked mass evacuation of millions of people.

So what about those who live within the fallout zone of these three upstate plants that will be the recipients of billions of dollars of taxpayer money? Why is Governor Cuomo trying to close Indian Point while saving these other plants? One explanation could be right out of the classic nuclear industry handbook―hold the state hostage by threatening that the lights will go out if they don't pony up.

The public was given just 14 days to comment on the bailout proposal. Despite pushback from anti-nuclear activists, the nuclear industry prevailed. Is two weeks enough time for a thorough public debate on the merits of bailing out the costly, risky, dirty nuclear power industry? Shame on the indentured PSC and Governor Cuomo!

Rather than prop up deteriorating nuclear plants with a huge hand out, New York officials should be focused on phasing out nuclear energy entirely. Nuclear power has been proven many times over to be unnecessary, uneconomic, uninsurable, unevacuable, unsafe and unfit for use in the unstable modern world.

New Yorkers―don't take this lying down. Write and call Governor Cuomo's office and tell them that you oppose the PSC's huge bailout to the nuclear industry. And, we hope that some citizen groups will challenge the decision in state court.

Have you seen the print, TV and radio ads touting atomic energy by the Nuclear Energy Institute? Its top executives and the CEOs of the nuclear energy corporations have not been willing to debate publically the assertions in these ads about cost, subsidies, evacuation, risk, alternatives and climate change. I'm confident that Peter Bradford, former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and former chairman of the New York PSC would agree to a debate in a neutral forum such as the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. So too would Amory Lovins, physicist, author and energy consultant to agencies from electric utility companies to the Pentagon.

Can you, readers, demand that the Nuclear Energy Institute open themselves up to informed debate? After all, they represent big corporate welfare kings that have taken taxpayers for a ride of hundreds of billions of dollars for the last sixty years. They owe you!

-- 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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Marcia G. Yerman: Is Your State Attorney General Undermining America's Clean Power Plan?
The surreptitious collusion between energy companies and specific state Attorneys General becomes crystal clear when looking at contribution supporters of Attorneys General who are part of the lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan.

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The Mystery Of Why Sunflowers Turn To Follow The Sun — Solved

Scientists have answered a burning question central to the charm of sunflowers: Why do young flowers move their blooms to always face the sun over the course of a day?

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r0B0t: Private Companies.....IN SPACE
Florida Company Gets Approval to Put Robotic Lander on Moon. Moon Express, a small startup based in Florida, is the first private enterprise to receive approval to land on a celestial body. If successful, such a feat would win the Google Lunar X Prize.

Of course, challenges remain.

Moon Express has a ways to go before it can reach the lunar surface, which it hopes to do next year. It still has to assemble the lander. The rocket that it plans to launch on has yet to fly even once.

Reuters:

The spacecraft will carry a number of science experiments and some commercial cargo on its one-way trip to the lunar surface, including cremated human remains, and will beam back pictures and video to Earth, the company said.

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This Week's Most Popular Posts: July 29th to August 5th

This week Microsoft delivered a big update to Windows 10 and we explored all the cool new features. We also tried upgrading ourselves with nootropic “smart” drugs, compared the two presidential candidates' cybersecurity platforms, talked with author Mary Roach, and more. Here's a look back.

All the Coolest Features of Windows 10's Anniversary Update

Microsoft's first big feature update for Windows 10, the Anniversary Update, is out today. With it comes a smarter Cortana, better multiple desktop tools, and tweaks that fix annoyances we've hated since Windows 10 launched.

How Effective Are Nootropics and “Smart” Drugs?

Imagine a pill you can take to speed up your thought processes, boost your memory, and make you more productive. If it sounds like the ultimate life hack, you're not alone. There are pills that promise that out there, but whether they work is complicated. Here are the most popular cognitive enhancers available, and what science actually says about them.

Which Form of Two-Factor Authentication Should I Use?

Two-factor authentication is one of the most important ways to protect your accounts. However, recently some authentication methods like SMS have come under fire for being vulnerable to hackers, which defeats the point of “something you know and something you have.” We decided to look at the most common methods and rank them by how secure they really are.

I'm Mary Roach, and This Is How I Work

Mary Roach wants to you to be uncomfortable, but intrigued. Her books examine the unexpected, curious minutiae of managing the human body and the science of how we deal with our own limitations.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's Cybersecurity Platforms, Compared

Every day it seems like there's another hack, password theft, or leak. Both government agencies and private companies are regularly attacked, by intruders just looking for sensitive data to sell, or foreign actors looking for valuable information. That alone is reason enough for a Presidential candidate to at least have an educated, informed cybersecurity policy. Let's take a look at their platforms to see if they do.

How to Run a Tabletop Game with Friends Around the World In Three Easy Steps

Sitting around a table with good friends is the best way to play tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, but that's not always an option. If your friends have moved away, live overseas, or don't want to brave the traffic, there's plenty of ways to make game night happen no matter where your group is located.

Poke Radar Still Works Great, and Now Has a Webapp and Android App

If you've been playing a lot of Pokémon Go, you're probably tired of catching the same ol' pokémon in your neighborhood. The Poke Radar map and iPhone app help you find the rest of them so you can complete your collection.

How I Manage My Income as a Freelancer

It's hard enough to manage your money on a steady, regular income. When your income varies from month to month as someone who's freelancing or self-employed, keeping your finances organized is even more of a pain. From my experience, you need a system. Set it up once, and it protects you forever. Here's the system I use.

Sunscreen Showdown: Creams vs. Sprays

Sunscreen is sunscreen, so you'd think the way you apply it doesn't really matter, but choosing between cream or lotion and a spray-on sunscreen can impact the likelihood you'll use it, the amount of coverage on your skin, and even the actual protection you get. Let's find out which might be better for you in this sunscreen showdown.

Top 10 Ways to Bring a Garden into Your Small Space

If you want to add a little green to your home—whether it's green for nature's sake or green because you like the idea of growing food—you don't need a lot of space to do it. Here are some suggestions to add a little plant life to your home or office, no matter what size it is.

You Can Still Get Windows 10 For Free If You Use Assistive Technologies

Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade offer officially ended yesterday. However, the company has left a loophole. If you need to use assistive technologies, you can still upgrade for free. Microsoft also isn't verifying if you do.

The Best Exercise Equipment for Your Dorm Room

If you live in a small space, you may think your at-home exercise options are limited to no-equipment, mostly bodyweight workouts. However, a suspension system or a couple of dumbbells can open the door to tons of new exercises without taking up a ton of space or stretching your student budget.

Spiral-Cut Pool Noodles Make Great All-Purpose Cushions

Have some extra pool noodles around? This video is chock-full of great pool noodle tricks, including a way to spiral-cut them into padding you can wrap around almost anything.

**Two Walking Tips Every Pokémon Go Trainer Needs to Know**

Even if you're no longer a novice trainer, there's still plenty you may not know about Pokémon Go and how it works. When it comes to using Incense and hatching eggs, the way you walk makes a huge difference.

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IBM makes randomly spiking neurons using phase-change - Electronics Weekly

Electronics Weekly

IBM makes randomly spiking neurons using phase-change
Electronics Weekly
IBM scientists in Zurich have created randomly spiking neurons using phase-change materials to store and process data. Recommended Articles. IBM DLD chip · IBM micro-machine separates bio-particles for disease detection · IBM 5 qubit computer with ...
Scientists discover a way to make crystals act like neuronsiNews
IBM Scientists Create Artificial Neurons for Cognitive ComputingCDA News
IBM Research Develops The World's First Artificial NeuronsScience World Report
Benzinga -scitech nation (press release) (blog)
all 8 news articles »

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Cognitive dissonance 101: John Edwards - MacroBusiness - MacroBusiness (blog)

Cognitive dissonance 101: John Edwards - MacroBusiness
MacroBusiness (blog)
Here's an insight into the cognitive dissonance that is the RBA Board, where it can't understand “why the economy is doing so well” yet has to cut rates to all time ...

and more »

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How long can the cognitive dissonance between my faith and the ... - The Guardian

The Guardian

How long can the cognitive dissonance between my faith and the ...
The Guardian
The latest allegations of abuse against George Pell have forced me to ask how a church that can do so much good can also be responsible for so much evil.

and more »

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Working Together: Research and Water Governance on Mount Kenya

Researchers meet with pastoralists in the Mount Kenya region. Photo by Matteo Dell'Angelo

By Kate Weiss, The National SocioEnvironmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC)

Environmental social scientist Jampel Dell'Angelo and filmmaker Matteo Dell'Angelo recently co-directed a documentary film of Elinor Ostrom's last research project. Working Together documents the challenges and successes of interdisciplinary research on smallholder climate adaptation and community water governance in semi-arid areas. The study found that involvement of all the river basin actors in a participatory way reduced social conflicts while providing more sustainable water allocation in the region. The film features water competition and governance in Kenya, which is a country that is innovative among developing countries for participatory water governance reforms.

A postdoctoral research fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Jampel Dell'Angelo conducted over nine months of fieldwork on Mount Kenya as postdoctoral researcher at the Ostrom Workshop and coordinator of an interdisciplinary team on the U.S. National Science Foundation research project awarded to Elinor Ostrom. The film chronicles Elinor Ostrom's last research project and can be found here: http://videos4water.org/.

The Dell'Angelo brothers worked on the project alongside an interdisciplinary science team that included social science researchers from Indiana University and hydrologists from Princeton University.

Jampel Dell'Angelo has a passion for science and scholarship that has the potential to inform decisions and improve public policies. He believes multimedia can provide a powerful and inspiring means for scientific storytelling to accomplish those goals. “It's not often science makes an effort to communicate in a way that is entertaining and for larger audiences, and this documentary thanks to the involvement of my brother Matteo, makes that effort,” he says. “The film also documents the value of critical efforts to address emerging problems, such as the issues around climate change adaptation and water resources in Mt. Kenya, through real interdisciplinary research.”

Ostrom was the only woman in history to win a Nobel Prize in economics for her work on community natural resource management. Ostrom unfortunately passed away before her research team got to the field; but she was the principal investigator who received the grant from the National Science Foundation research featured in the video. http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/19578.html/

I had the opportunity to catch up with Jampel to discuss the documentary, the research conducted in Mt. Kenya, and the implications of this research.

"In — In Working Together, Jampel Dell'Angelo and other researchers provide a glimpse into what happens when two teams of researchers combine efforts to gather important information on both human and natural systems. Here they learn about the water resource needs of villages and pastoralists in the Mount Kenya region.
Photo by Matteo Dell'Angelo. Enlarge by clicking photo.

Q: In Working Together, you provide a glimpse into what happens when two teams of researchers work together to gather important information on both human and natural systems. With so much happening on the research end, how did you begin filming this as a research narrative?

Dell'Angelo: It began both as a desire to keep Elinor Ostrom's legacy alive as well as a response to how, when I first arrived in Kenya, I was immediately touched with how much people were affected by and involved in managing water at a local level and how this really affected their lives. And all of this was happening in a scenery that was incredible and that had enormous ecological, cultural, and social variety. It was evident that this research was incredibly interdisciplinary and needed to account for an enormous amount of complexity. So, I thought, “Well, this is something that should be documented.”

Q: What were the main findings of the research?

Dell'Angelo: I think that one of the most interesting things we observed was that this system of community-water governance has a real impact on people and on how resources are allocated. We were working with 25 communities along five different river basins that had experienced increasingly elevated conflicts over water resources. This was really because the downstream users didn't have a voice to articulate their discontent and frustration when they felt the up-stream users were withdrawing too much water. The transition over to a community-based water governance drastically reduced the level of conflicts between different users.

In terms of the main bio-physical findings, we found that, with climate change, what's happening in the area isn't that there's less rainfall, but that the distribution of rain is changing. This is important, because there is a big difference between the same amount of rain falling in one month versus in six months. This has significant implications in terms of agricultural production and agricultural decision making. This raises questions of how people will adapt to these various changes in the future.

Q: Why is it important for both researchers and decision-makers to understand the human dynamics and climate impacts of Mt. Kenya's water governance?

Dell'Angelo: Kenya is a little bit of a laboratory in terms of community irrigation schemes and community water management—they are pioneers in this new system of community water governance that's also hugely affected by climate change, so they are on the front-line of new systems of governance in the face of climate change. Understanding what is happening in this area is hugely important in terms of generalizing knowledge for other areas in developing countries that face similar challenges.

Q: What do you want people to take away from this video?

Dell'Angelo: I hope people take away from this documentary a better understanding of the complexity and importance of interdisciplinary research when combined with local people and local knowledge. I think it is both a valuable resource for those interested in natural resources, sustainability, and development as well as for those who might be facing similar problems in their own communities. I hope this can be an educational and practical tool as well as an insight into a reality that many communities across the world face.

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, funded through an award to the University of Maryland from the National Science Foundation, is a research center dedicated to accelerating data-driven scientific discovery at the interface of human and ecological systems. Visit us online at www.sesync.org and follow us on Twitter @SESYNC.

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The Laws Of Ecology And The Survival Of The Human Species
I was raised in a small fishing village on the Passamaquoddy Bay in New Brunswick, Canada and I still vividly remember the way things were in the Fifties. The way things were then is not the way things are now.

I'm not talking about technological, industrial or scientific progress. I'm referring to the health and stability of eco-systems. What was once strong is now weak. What was once rich in diversity is now very much the poorer.

I have been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with the gift of near total recall. I see the images of the past as clearly as the days that were. As a result it has been difficult for me to adapt to diminishment. I see the shells on the beaches that are no longer there, the little crabs under the rocks, now gone, the schools of fishes, the pods of dolphins, the beaches free of plastic.

I began traveling the world in 1967 -- hitch-hiking and riding the rails across Canada; joining the Norwegian merchant marine; crossing the Pacific and Indian Oceans; traveling through Japan, Iran, Mozambique and South Africa, working as a tour guide in Turkey and Syria, co-founding the Greenpeace Foundation in 1972 and, in 1977, founding the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

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Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson some forty years ago when he founded the non-profit.

Many things that I saw then no longer exist - or have been severely damaged, changed and diminished.

In the Sixties we did not buy water in plastic bottles. In the Sixties the word 'sustainable 'was never used in an ecological context, and except for Rachel Carson, there were very few with the vision to see into the future, where we were going, what we were doing.

But slowly, awareness crept into the psyche of more and more people. People began to understand what the word ecology meant. We saw the creation of Earth Day, and in 1972, the first global meeting on the environment in Stockholm, Sweden that I covered as a journalist.

Gradually, the insight into what were doing became more prevalent and to those who understood, the price to be paid was to be labeled radicals, militants, and a new word - eco-terrorist.

The real "crime" of eco-terrorism was not burning down a ski lodge, toppling a power line or spiking a tree. Such things are only outbursts of desperation and frustration. The real crime of eco-terrorism was having thought, perception, and imagination. In other words, the questioning of the modern economic, corporate and political paradigm.

The word eco-terrorism should be more accurately used for the destruction caused by progress like the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal or the BP Deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Picture of an oil rig taken during Sea Shepherd's Operation Toxic Gulf in 2014.

In the Seventies, the late Robert Hunter, along with Roberta Hunter, Dr. Patrick Moore, David Garrick, Rod Marining and myself observed and wrote down the three laws of ecology. What we realized was that these laws are the key to the survival of biodiversity on the planet and also the key to the survival of the human species. We realized that no species could survive outside of the three basic and imperative ecological laws.

The law of diversity: The strength of an eco-system is dependent upon the diversity of species within it.

The law of interdependence: All species are interdependent with each other.

The law of finite resources: There are limits to growth and limits to carrying capacity.

The increase of population in one species leads to the increase in consumption
of resources by that species. This leads to diminishment of diversity of other species, which in turn leads to diminishment of interdependence among species.

For example, increasing diminishment of phytoplankton populations in the sea is causing diminishment of many other species as well as a 40% diminishment in oxygen production since 1950. Diminishment of whale populations has contributed to the diminishment of phytoplankton populations because whale feces are a major source of nutrients (esp. iron and nitrogen) for phytoplankton.

The planet simply cannot tolerate 7.5 billion (and growing) primarily meat and fish eating necrovores. The killing of 65 billion domestic animals each year is contributing more greenhouse gases to the planet than the entire transportation industry. The industrial stripping of life from the sea is causing unprecedented biodiversity collapse in marine eco-systems.

Ecological systems globally are collapsing from coral reefs to rainforests because humanity is exploiting resources far beyond the capacity of eco-systems to create and renew natural resources.

Diminishment of eco-systems is also leading to the breakdown of human social structures causing global conflict in the form of wars and domestic violence. Terrorism is not the cause of society's problems, it is merely a symptom.

Humans are compromised by medieval paradigms like territorial dominance, hierarchical desires and superstitious beliefs combined with primitive primate behavior like greed and fear.

"2016-08-04-1470345289-7416340-bloodbathinleynarclaimedfourpregnantfemales377.jpg"

Sea Shepherd's 2010 Faeroe Islands Dolphin Defense Campaign: Operation Grindstop. Photo credit: Sea Shepherd /Sofia Jonsson

The fishing village that I lived in as a child is no longer a fishing village. The relative innocence of our lives as children of the Fifties and Sixties is no more. The African bush, the Arctic tundra, the marine reserve of the Galapagos Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazonian rainforests that I once traveled through are no longer what they recently were.

Humans have this amazing ability to adapt to diminishment. It's a trait that was exceptionally useful when we lived as hunter-gatherers. We adapted to food shortages, to changes in the weather and to the world as it evolved around us. Today we are trying to adapt to the destruction brought on by ourselves and that adaption is taking the form of more and more control by governments and corporations and a blind reliance on corporate technologies.

We no longer have the empathy we once felt. I vividly remember the events of October 23rd, 1958. I was seven years old on the day of the Springhill Mine Disaster in Nova Scotia. 75 men died and 99 were rescue. I remember crying for the fate of people I did not know and feeling excited every time a miner was brought to the surface alive. I no longer have that capacity. Perhaps I lost it when I became an adult, or perhaps society no longer has room for such emotions.

Disaster happened and we grieved for people we did not know. A few weeks ago nearly 100 people were viciously murdered within a few kilometres of where I live when a deranged man mowed them down with a large truck in Nice, France. Last week, a priest was beheaded in France. Every week brings us more stories about mass killings in the Middle East, Africa, America etc. It's a worldwide pain-fest of chaos and violence and yet it is met with complacency for the most part and a predictable Facebook posting of -- "say a prayer for Paris, or Orlando, or Nice, or Beirut, or Istanbul" in a litany of self-indulgent adaptation to tragedy, before being quickly forgotten.

This is not the world of my childhood. We remembered the horrors of World War II with real emotion. I remember talking with both World War I and World War II veterans and feeling their pain. Today it's just another short-term item on the news, in a world that seeks to escape through movies, celebrities, video games and increasingly more fanatical religious fervor.

Here is the reality. As human populations increase, the consumption of resources increases with it. But because resources are finite and the rate of renewables is overcome by demand, this can only lead to one result -- the collapse of resource availability.

And because we are literally stealing resources from other species, this will lead to
diminishment of species and habitats, which will contribute to even more resource diminishment.

"2016-08-04-1470342962-4408964-draggingontotheship273.jpg"

Sea Shepherd's 2008 Seal Defense Campaign photographs the murder and carcass dragging of a seal. Photo credit: Sea Shepherd / Greg Hager

At COP 21, I called for an end to worldwide government subsidies for industrialized fishing and at least a 50-year moratorium on commercial industrialized fishing. That solution was not given a moment's thought at a conference that did not even take into account the imperative role of the Ocean in addressing climate change.

My opinion of COP 21 is that governments were not looking for solutions. They were looking for the appearance of solutions. They certainly did not want to hear about solutions from people like me. They want solutions that are accompanied by jobs and profit. The one thing they do not want is any form of economic sacrifice.

I also do not believe that the majority of humanity -- certainly not the leadership -- understand the true gravity of the situation. There are six viewpoints concerning climate change: 1. Denial 2. Acceptance, with the view of it being a positive development. 3. Acceptance with the belief that science and technology will save the day. 4. Acceptance, but refusal to fully appreciate the consequences. 5. Apathy. 6. Acceptance with the resolve to find real solutions.

Those who are in denial have vested self interests in doing so, motivated primarily by greed or ignorance. My old Greenpeace colleague Patrick Moore sees climate change as an opportunity for longer growing seasons and better weather. (He lives in Canada and I don't think he's really thought it through.) Others like Elon Musk see our salvation in science, in moving off-world or developing artificial eco-systems on Earth. Most responsible world leaders recognize the problem but are too politically-impotent to address it with realistic solutions because those solutions would not be politically popular. And as with everything, the majority of the world is apathetic and too self-absorbed with entertaining themselves (developed world) or surviving (underdeveloped world).

On this path we are on now, the future is somewhat predictable. More resource wars, more poverty, more accumulation of wealth by the minority of privileged people, more disease, more civil strife and with the collapse of biodiversity - global mass starvation, and pestilence.

The rich tapestry of all our cultures and all our achievements in science and the arts hangs by threads linked to biodiversity.

If the bees are diminished, our crops are diminished. If the forests are diminished, we are diminished. If phytoplankton dies, we die! If the grasses die, we die!

We exist because of the geo-engineering contributions of millions of diverse species that keep our life support systems running. From bacteria to whales, from algae to the redwoods. If we undermine the foundations of this planetary life-support system, all that we have ever created will fall. We will be no more.

We made the mistake of declaring war on nature, and because of our technologies it looks like we are going to win this war. But because we are a part of nature, we will destroy ourselves in the process. Our enemy is ourselves and we are slowly becoming aware of that indisputable fact. We are destroying ourselves in a fruitless effort to save the image of what we believe ourselves to be.

In this war, we are slaughtering -- through direct or indirect exploitation -- millions of species and reducing their numbers to dangerously low levels while at the same time increasing human numbers to dangerously high levels.

"2016-08-04-1470343170-9873528-dolphinoffalandintestines645.jpg"

Dolphin offal and intestines photographed during the 2011-12 Taiji Dolphin Defense Campaign. Photo credit: Sea Shepherd / Christoph Heylen

We are fighting this war against nature with chemicals, industrialized equipment, ever increasing extraction technologies (like fracking) and repression against any and all voices that rise up in dissent.

In our wake over the past two centuries we have left a trail of billions of bodies. We have tortured, slain, abused and wasted so many lives, obliterated entire species; and reduced rich diverse eco-systems to lifeless wastelands as we polluted the seas, the air and the soil with chemicals, heavy metals, plastic, radiation and industrialized farm sewage.

We were once horrified by the possibility of a Chernobyl or a Fukushima. But the accidents happened and we adapted and accepted. Now we are complacent.

In the process we are becoming sociopathic as a species. We are losing the ability to express empathy and compassion. We idolize soldiers, hunters, and resource developers without giving a thought to their victims. We revel in violent fantasies hailing two-dimensional fantasy killers as heroes. We have become increasingly more Darwinian in our outlook that the weak (other species) must perish so that the strong (ourselves) may survive. We forget that Darwinism recognizes the laws of ecology and we cannot pick and choose when it comes to the laws of nature. In the end nature controls us, we do not control nature.

The consequences of our actions are not going to happen centuries from now. They are going to happen within this century. Oceanic ecosystems are collapsing -- now! The planet is getting warmer -- now! Phytoplankton is being diminished -- now!

To be blunt -- the planet is dying now, and we are killing it!

From what I have experienced and from what I see there is only one thing that can prevent us from falling victim to the consequences of ignoring the laws of ecology.

We must shake off the anthropocentric mindset and embrace a biocentric understanding of the natural world. We can do this because we have wonderful teachers in indigenous communities worldwide who have lived biocentric lifestyles for thousands of years just as our species all once did. We need to learn to live in harmony with other species.

We need to establish a moratorium on industrialized fishing, logging and farming.

We need to stop producing goods that have no intrinsic value -- all the useless plastic baubles for entertainment and self-indulgence. We need to stop mass-producing plastic that is choking our global seas. We need to stop injecting poisons into the soil and dumping toxins into the sea. We need to abolish cultural practices that destroy life for the sole purpose of entertaining ourselves.

Of course it won't be easy but do we really want the epitaph for our species to be, "Well we needed the jobs?"

Without ecology there is no economy.

I am not a pessimist and I've never been prone to pessimistic thoughts. There are solutions. We see people of compassion, imagination and courage around us working to make this a better world -- devoting themselves to protecting species and habitats; finding organic agricultural alternatives; and developing more eco-friendly forms of energy production. Innovators, thinkers, activists, artists, leaders and educators -- these people are among us and their numbers are growing.

It is often said that the problems are overwhelming and the solutions are impossible. I don't buy this. The solution to an impossible problem is to find an impossible solution.

It can be done. In 1972, the very idea that Nelson Mandela would one day be President of South Africa was unthinkable and impossible -- yet the impossible became possible.

It's never easy but it is possible and possibilities are achieved through courage, imagination, passion and love.

I learned from the Mohawks years ago that we must live our lives by taking into account the consequences of our every action on all future generations of all species.

If we love our children and grandchildren we must recognize that their world will not be our world. Their world will be greatly diminished and unrecognizable from the world of our childhoods. Each and every child born in the 21st Century is facing challenges that no human being has ever faced in the entire history of our species:

Emerging pathogens from the permafrost. (Just this summer, an anthrax virus from a recently thawed reindeer carcass broke out killing 1,500 reindeer and hospitalizing 13 people in Russia.) Eruptions of methane opening huge craters in the earth in Siberia, mass-accelerated extinction of plants and animals, pollution, wars and more wars, irrational violence in the form of individual, religious and state terrorism, the collapse of entire eco-systems.

This is not doom and gloom fear mongering. It is simply a realistic observation of the consequences of our deliberately ignoring of the laws of ecology. I call it the Cassandra Principle.

Cassandra was the prophetess of ancient Troy whose curse was the ability to see the future and to have everyone dismiss her prophecies. No one listened to her, instead they ridiculed her. Yet she was right. All that she predicted came to pass and Troy was destroyed.

Years ago I had a critic in the media label me as a doom and gloom Cassandra. I replied, "Maybe, but don't forget one thing. Cassandra was right."

"2016-08-04-1470346349-3492535-sscsgalapagosdirectorseanohearngimenezonasharkfinningarrestoperation226.jpg"

Sea Shepherd's Galapagos Director Sean O'Hearn-Gimenez on a shark finning arrest operation om 2007.

And over the years I have made predictions (that were ridiculed and dismissed) that have come true. In 1982 I publicly predicted the collapse of the North Atlantic Cod fishery. It happened a decade later. In 1978 I predicted the destruction of one half of the African elephant population in Defenders magazine. I was wrong. Some two thirds of the population have been destroyed. In 1984, I predicted ecological destruction by salmon farms including the spreading of viruses to wild salmon populations. Every prediction was based on observation with reference to the laws of ecology and every prediction was dismissed.

Nothing has changed. Today I am predicting the death of worldwide coral reef eco-systems by 2025, the total collapse of worldwide commercial fishing operations by 2030; and the emergence of more virulent viral diseases in the coming decades. It does not take any exceptional foresight to predict that war will be the major business of the next half-century, as well as the rise of more authoritarian governments.

Recently my old friend Rod Marining, also a co-founder of Greenpeace, said to me: "The transformation of human consciousness on a mass scale can not happen, unless there are two factors. First, a huge mass visual death threat to survival of our species, and two, the threat of the loss of a people's jobs or their values. Once theses two factors are in place humans begin to transform their thinking over night."

I have seen the future written in the patterns of our behavior, and it is not a pleasant future, in fact it is not much of a future at all.

The four horses have arrived. As death sits astride the pale horse, the other three horses of pestilence, famine and war and terrorism are stampeding at full gallop toward us while our backs are turned away from them. And when they trample us, we may look up from our latest entertainment triviality to see ourselves in the dust of the ecological apocalypse.

I also see the possibility of salvation. By listening to the words and observing the actions of indigenous people. By looking into the eyes of our children. By stepping outside the circle of anthropocentrism. By understanding that we are part of the Continuum. By refusing to participate in the anthropocentric illusion. By embracing biocentrism and fully understanding the laws of ecology, and the fact that these laws cannot -- must not -- be ignored if we wish to survive.

-- 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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Email proves UK boffins axed from EU research in Brexit aftermath

Scientists bundled out of labs despite reassurances Blighty can still get at Euro funds

Following anecdotes of British scientists being axed from EU-funded projects, one academic has revealed actual evidence of UK boffins being dumped from Euro research efforts in the Brexit aftermath.…

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The Myth Of Moral Ambiguity In Autonomous Cars

"2016-08-04-1470336740-4285115-DriverlessCars.jpg"

Image source: PhotoDune

When most vehicle manufacturers expect autonomous cars to be on the market by 2019 ― with more than 10 million on roads in 2020 ― one would expect people to start considering the various issues driverless cars create. For example, there are thousands of legal considerations to make, especially because different states or countries might enact different regulations on autonomous vehicles, preventing their owners from traveling from one place to another.

Yet, most people find these practical concerns incredibly dull. A much more exciting topic in regards to driverless cars is, surprisingly, ethics. Thanks to articles in the Atlantic (and elsewhere), giant swaths of the population have begun to question whether we can trust robot cars to make correct ethical decisions. What most people don't realize, however, is that these conversations are absolutely meaningless.

A Brief Discussion of Robots

Almost since their inception (in a 1920 Czech play) robots have incited discussions about ethics. Especially as science and tech inches ever closer to humanoid machines and artificial intelligence, people are becoming more concerned about the management of robots in all their forms. As we continue to establish egalitarian order in our society, discussions about robots are becoming more and more prevalent.

In simple terms, robots are not people, but by adding human-like traits to robots, such as voices, humanoid shape, or facial features, causes most humans to see the machines almost as equals. A handful of organizations have developed in support of robot rights; conversely, as robots continue to hijack vast numbers of jobs, other people are developing feelings of antipathy toward unconscious technology.

The Most Popular Ethical Issue with Driverless Cars

However, these ethical concerns are not the most popular discussions about autonomous cars. More commonly, non-academic writers and readers prefer to examine what is commonly called "The Trolley Problem." Undoubtedly, you've heard of it before:

A runaway trolley is careening down the street, heading toward a group of pedestrians who are milling about on the tracks. The trolley's conductor is limited in her ability to mitigate the damage; she can allow the trolley to continue on its course, hitting the crowd and causing injury to many people, or she can flip a switch, directing the trolley down an alternate route where the tracks are blocked by a lone child, who will certainly die from the collision.

There are dozens of variations of the trolley problem. In one, it is not the conductor's dilemma, but a bystander's, who has the opportunity to sacrifice one person for the sake of others. In another tale, the trolley conductor has the opportunity to derail the trolley, harming the people inside rather than anyone outside.

We only need to tweak the typical trolley problem to apply it to driverless cars:

"A driverless car is moving at speed on a crowded highway. An obstacle appears in the car's lane, forcing it to make a decision: It can swerve right to collide with an SUV, swerve left to hit a motorcyclist, or continue straight and certainly crash into the obstacle."

In each instance, the driverless car causes harm, but it is the robot car who decides the recipient of the harm. Again, there are several variations, some much more similar to the original trolley problem, but each raises a significant ethical question: Can we trust a car to make the right choice?

The Real Ethical Problems Driverless Cars Face

Most of us have driven cars for most of our lives, amassing thousands of miles on the road, and few (if any) have ever experienced such an unbearable ethical choice. Even putting aside the unlikelihood of such a scenario, we must remember that a human driver would never experience the opportunity to make a decision; rather, with only fractions of a second, human drivers would unconsciously react with little regard for costs or benefits or moral justice. If it isn't an ethical decision for a driver, it can hardly be an ethical decision for a robot car.

In actuality, no machines have the power to make decisions ever, regardless of time frame. Robots function because they have to, and the "decisions" they make are only protocols written by their programmers. Therefore, a more pressing ethical question when it comes to driverless cars is that of blame: If an autonomous vehicle malfunctions, who is responsible for the harm it causes? It could be the owner, manufacturer, or programmer.

In a traditional car collision, the drivers are under investigation, unless the collision is the result of machine malfunction, like Ford's potential brake failures, in which case the manufacturer is at fault. Yet in a driverless car, a collision should only occur when it cannot be avoided ― in which case, is it the liability of the programmer for not foreseeing such a situation?

Bottom Line:

These ethical problems are more pressing because they could stall the release of driverless cars onto the market. Before we can put autonomous vehicles on the road, manufacturers, insurers, and legislators must make a decision ― and not one that has anything to do with a trolley.

-- 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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r0B0t: SoftBank: Japan's most interesting tech company

Japan and technology are often mentioned in the same breath. Bullet trains, robots, only-in-Japan phones that'll never leave the island, digital pop-idols and so on. Tech legends like Sony, Nintendo, Panasonic, Sharp, Nikon, Canon, Toyota and more we...
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r0B0t: Elastic Electronics One Step Closer with Self-Propelling Liquid Metals - Sci-News.com

Sci-News.com

Elastic Electronics One Step Closer with Self-Propelling Liquid Metals
Sci-News.com
A pioneering work by an international team of scientists from Australia and Switzerland is setting the foundation for moving beyond solid state electronics towards flexible and reconfigurable soft circuit systems. Continuous motion of a self-propelling ...
Terminator-style robots could be step closer thanks to Australian researchersDaily Mail
Revolutionary liquid metals bring shape-shifting Terminator tech closer to reality (VIDEO)RT
Self-propelling liquid metal takes us a step closer to the TerminatorTechRadar
RF Globalnet (press release) -Daily Star -CNET -Indiatimes.com
all 26 news articles »

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r0B0t: High school in Japan to offer drone and robotics course

In the latest installment of 'Japan is too cool and I wish I grew up there,' one private high school has announced a new course dedicated to drones and robotics. While the specifics are a little hazy, RocketNews24 is reporting that it's a full-time,...
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r0B0t: Code Is My Co-pilot

On a balmy Tuesday afternoon in late July, 37-year-old attorney Joshua Neally left work early. He climbed into his new Tesla Model X to drive the 45 minutes from law office in Springfield, Missouri, to his house in Branson, Missouri. He was going home to celebrate his daughter's fourth birthday.

He steered the electric luxury SUV into the gathering rush-hour traffic on Highway 68 and turned on autopilot, a feature unique to Tesla that allows a car to pilot itself—braking, accelerating, steering—for long stretches of freeway driving. It's a feature that has drawn rebukes from rival companies and sparked investigations by federal regulators after a driver named Joshua Brown was killed in a crash in Florida while using it. Although a Tesla with autopilot is not a true self-driving car, the company's technology has become a bellwether for Silicon Valley's ambition to replace human drivers with software.

Neally knew about the Florida crash and the furor that followed. But he had already ordered his Model X after years of waiting and saving, and he was undeterred. When it arrived, he nicknamed it Ender, after the protagonist in the novel Ender's Game. By July 26, after a week of driving the Model X, he had grown to cautiously trust it to handle the bulk of his hilly, curvy, sometimes traffic-y commute. “I'm not a daredevil,” he told me. “I promised my wife I'd always be paying attention.” He doesn't drive hands-free, or play Jenga, or nod off, or watch Harry Potter movies, as Brown may have been doing when he plowed into the trailer of a semi truck. He admits, however, that he sometimes checks email or sends text messages on his phone.

Neally was about 5 miles out of Springfield, near a set of interchanges just beginning to clog with merging vehicles, when he felt something coil and stiffen in his abdomen. At first he thought it was a pulled muscle. But the pain forked upward from his stomach, he said, until it felt like “a steel pole through my chest.” When it refused to subside, Neally remembers calling his wife and agreeing through gasps that he should probably go to the emergency room.

He doesn't remember much of the drive after that.

Doctors in Branson told Neally later that he'd suffered a pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal obstruction of a blood vessel in his lungs. They told him he was lucky to have survived. If you ask Neally, however, he'll tell you he was lucky to be driving a Tesla. As he writhed in the driver's seat, the vehicle's software negotiated 20-plus highway miles to a hospital just off an exit ramp. He manually steered it into the parking lot and checked himself into the emergency room, where he was promptly treated. By night's end he had recovered enough to go home.

Did autopilot save Neally? It's hard to say. He acknowledges that, in retrospect, it might have been more prudent to pull over and call an ambulance. But the severity of what was happening dawned on him slowly, and by the time it had, he reckoned he could reach the hospital quicker via autopilot than ambulance. He also wonders whether, without autopilot, he might have lost control of the car and in effect become a deadly projectile when those first convulsions struck.

Neally's experience is unusual. It doesn't prove autopilot's worth as a safety feature any more than Brown's death disproves it. Yet Neally's story is the latest of several that have emerged since the Florida crash to paint a fuller picture of autopilot's merits, in addition to its by now highly publicized dangers. These stories provide at least a measure of anecdotal support for Tesla's claims that its own data show autopilot—imperfect as it is—is already significantly safer than the average human driver.

That's going to be a tough sell, though, to the public and regulators alike. Brown's death ignited a backlash that had been brewing since Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced autopilot in a heavily hyped, Steve Jobslike launch event in October 2014. Rival car companies felt from the start that Tesla was rolling out autonomous driving features too aggressively, before the technology was safe enough to earn consumers' trust. The skepticism intensified after Tesla activated the feature last fall, and drivers immediately began posting YouTube videos of themselves abusing it. Tesla calls autopilot a “beta” feature and requires the driver to agree to pay full attention and keep hands on the wheel while it's in use. But, despite some safety checks introduced in January, the car will still drive itself if the driver goes hands-free.

By mid-July, when a second Tesla Model S crashed while on autopilot on an undivided highway in Montana, Tesla had become the subject of three federal investigations. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was looking into the cause of the Florida crash. The National Transportation Safety Board was examining whether autonomous driving technology was a hazard to safety. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission opened a probe into claims by Fortune magazine that Musk had failed to disclose the Florida autopilot crash to investors in a timely manner, even as he sold some of his own stock in the company. (Tesla has vehemently disputed the claims.)

It added up to a grim cloud over both the company and self-driving car technology, whose future depends on drivers, bureaucrats, and chest-pounding politicians all agreeing to place human lives in the hands of potentially deadly robots. Even Consumer Reports, which has championed the Tesla Model S as one of the greatest cars ever made, called for Tesla to disable autopilot until the technology became more reliable.

“By marketing their feature as ‘Autopilot,' Tesla gives consumers a false sense of security,” Consumer Reports Vice President Laura MacCleery said. “In the long run, advanced active safety technologies in vehicles could make our roads safer. But today, we're deeply concerned that consumers are being sold a pile of promises about unproven technology.”

I'm among the critics who have suggested, both before and after the furor over Brown's death, that Tesla had implemented and publicized the technology in a potentially perilous way. Despite its name, Tesla's autopilot feature does not give the cars full autonomy, like the concept vehicles made by Google that you might spot tooling around Mountain View, California. The first time I test-drove a Tesla with autopilot, I wrote a review calling it “a safety feature that could be dangerous,” because it encourages drivers to relax while relying on them to take over at a moment's notice. After Brown's death, I wrote that the entire autopilot concept might be flawed.

Yet Tesla insists that calls for it to disable autopilot are shortsighted. In fact, the company argues that the critics have it backward: Given that its internal testing data suggest the feature drives more safely than humans do, Tesla maintains that it would be irresponsible and dangerous not to offer autopilot to its customers.

It's a typically brash stance from a company that has never backed down from a public relations battle, and it's tempting to dismiss it as another example of Musk's hubris. Yet, as usual, Tesla makes a strong case for itself. Pressed to defend autopilot's safety record, the company disclosed to me the process by which it tested and eventually decided to activate the feature to consumers.

First, the company developed the software and tested it in millions of miles' worth of computer simulations, using real-world driving data gathered by the sensors on the company's cars. Next it activated autopilot in about 300 vehicles driven by the company's own testers, who drove it every day and subjected it to challenging circumstances. (Musk was among them.) Then it introduced autopilot “inertly” via software update into the vehicles of existing Tesla drivers for a testing phase that it called “silent external validation.” In this mode, the autopilot software logged and analyzed every move it would have made if active but could not actually control the vehicle. In this way, Tesla gained millions of miles' worth of data on autopilot's performance in consumers' vehicles before it ever took effect. Finally, the company activated the feature for some 900 consumers who volunteered to test it and provide subjective feedback. Throughout the process, Tesla says, it released updates to improve the software, and by the end it was clear to the company that drivers would be safer on the road with autopilot than without it. At that point, Tesla argues, it would have been a disservice to its drivers to keep the feature inactive.

Without taking Tesla's word for it, it's tough to empirically validate Musk's contention that autopilot is already saving a significant number of lives. One confounding factor is that we're less likely to hear about it when something goes right with self-driving features than when something goes wrong. Given that Tesla says it anonymizes its tracking data for customers' privacy, there's no way for the public to know about these close calls unless drivers self-report them, as Neally did to Tesla after his pulmonary embolism. (Neally agreed to tell his story to Slate after I asked the company for real-world examples of autopilot functioning as a critical safety feature.) Even when we do know about these, it's hard to prove the counterfactual that someone would have died if the automation hadn't kicked in.

Still, Neally's case isn't the first in which Tesla safety features appear to have averted catastrophe. In Washington on July 16, a Model S was driving on New York Avenue when a pedestrian stepped in front of it. The car slammed on its own brakes, and no one was hurt. The incident was glossed in headlines as one in which autopilot may have saved a pedestrian's life. That isn't quite accurate, though: Autopilot was turned off at the time, the company told me. It was actually Tesla's automatic emergency braking system that kicked in. That's a safety feature that dozens of other car models already offer and which may come standard in all U.S.-made vehicles by 2022. Tesla deserves credit for implementing it, but not for pioneering it.

In another instance, the dashcam on an Uber driver's Model S captured a scary close call in which a sedan suddenly turned left in front of him, at night, in the rain, with no time to steer around it. Before the driver could react, the Model S braked sharply. It jerked to a stop a few feet from the car, which it otherwise would have plowed into broadside. In that case, it appears that autopilot was in fact engaged.

Meanwhile, the NHTSA has concluded that the fatal Florida crash should not set back efforts to make the roads saver through automation. The auto industry “cannot wait for perfect” to develop and deploy potentially lifesaving technology, NHTSA head Mark Rosekind said.

It's fair to remain skeptical when Musk claims that autopilot would save 500,000 lives a year if it were deployed universally. Unless the company were to release all its testing and tracking data, which it declines to do, we can't possible verify its calculations. One of the few specific figures that the company publicized in its blog post was that autopilot had been safely used in more than 130 million miles of driving before the first fatality, which is a higher ratio of miles to deaths than the U.S. or global averages. But just one more autopilot-related fatality tomorrow would undermine that claim. The math required to demonstrate conclusively that autopilot is safer than human drivers would be more nuanced, examining injury accidents as well as fatalities and controlling for biases such as the recommended use of autopilot predominantly on highways under favorable driving conditions.

What we know at this point is that autopilot can hurt or kill people if used improperly and that it also has the potential to save people. It's also fair to assume that the technology will get safer over time as Tesla and other companies study and learn from its errors. The only question is whether the public can or should tolerate its rare mistakes in the meantime.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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r0B0t: Robot Hackers Could Be the Future of Cybersecurity
The final round of DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge pits computers against one another as human programmers watch the future of cybersecurity unfold

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

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r0B0t: The new Roomba 960 is a cheaper smart robovac

iRobot also adds connectivity to the Braava jet robot mop.

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r0B0t: Suicide Squad Fans Who Want to Shut Down Rotten Tomatoes Want The Right Thing for the Wrong Reason

Uproxx reported Wednesday that a possibly tongue-in-cheek petition on Change.org to shut down critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes was attracting sincere support from fans of Suicide Squad, who were unhappy about the film's overwhelmingly negative reviews. To be precise, the petition, which now has more than 17,000 signatures, said:

We need this site to be shut down because It's Critics always give The DC Extended Universe movies unjust Bad Reviews, Like

1- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 2016

2- Suicide Squad 2016

and that Affects people's opinion even if it's a really great movies

There's a lot wrong with this petition, from the idea that Rotten Tomatoes somehow controls the opinion of the critics who didn't like the DC movies to the idea that a bad review should spoil the fun of an individual viewer who likes these films. But I'm shocked to report that I've found common ground with of people who believe that critics care in the slightest about DC vs. Marvel. I, too, think Rotten Tomatoes is a terrible thing for films—and not just Suicide Squad. Not because it “Affects people's opinion even if it's a really great movies,” or even because of problems with the model (a three out of five star rating is marked “fresh,” instead of “mediocre”), but because it uses a model at all. Rotten Tomatoes encourages a math-driven approach to something that is inherently personal and subjective. If your opinion about a work of art can be expressed as a number, it's not a very interesting opinion.

This is not to say that math has no place in writing about art; in fact, critics would greatly benefit from using it more. There's no music without rhythm and harmony, no poetry without meter, no prose without structure. In film, editing, shot composition, and story structure are all well-suited to quantitative criticism, to seeking to answer the question of how a film works or doesn't work. By the same token, we could probably spend more time talking about the qualitative aspects of math: Cantor's diagonalisation proof is a beautiful castle built on air; the Pythagorean theorem's various proofs by rearrangement are so grounded they don't need language at all. Our personal aesthetic and qualitative responses to great works of mathematics, like quantitative formal analysis of great works of art, can help us understand them better. But there's little value in assigning a number to how much we liked them. The interesting questions are “Why?” and “How?,” not “How much?”

There's nothing wrong with the question “Should I see this movie?,” and criticism can definitely help answer it. But the right way to find an answer is to consult one or two critics whose taste you trust, not a thousand critics you don't know. In fact, a review that talks about why and how a film works written by a critic whose tastes are completely different from yours will tell you much more about whether you, personally, might enjoy it than a “fresh” or “rotten” rating. Things don't get better by adding more voices to the din, they get worse. One of the greatest harms aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic do is convincing people that there's value in aggregation to begin with, that by asking enough people the same dumb question, a Rotten Tomato score will approach some mythical asymptote of objectivity. This is the logic that says that one shitty mortgage is a bad investment, but a thousand shitty mortgages are solid gold. Once you buy that, attacking critics whose opinions are “wrong” is an easy step to take. They're out of step with objective reality, as determined by math, so they must have an ulterior motive. The problem with the Rotten Tomatoes petition isn't the goal, it's that the person who wrote it has clearly internalized all the faulty premises the site is based on.

There's a larger argument here about the way aggregate scores dovetail neatly with our technocratic urge for assigning metrics to everything, which inexorably leads toward miserable people crying in their cubicles and collapsing from heatstroke—but it's probably unfair to lay scientific management at the feet of Rotten Tomatoes. Although Taylorism may be a garbage idea from a garbage culture, profit is undeniably quantifiable: artistic value just isn't. And from that initial category error, misery flows like blood from a wound, from fans who are genuinely sad and furious that someone is hurting their film's score to critics who have to deal with their harassment campaigns. Video game companies are even linking compensation to Metacritic scores: It looks like some kind of objective way of measuring the work a developer did; coincidentally, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than sharing profits. And so the loop of bullshit closes: The same internet hordes who attack critics who pan a big game can, correctly, say that those critics are hurting the game's creators financially. (To my knowledge, no critic has asked to be part of any company's human resources system, nor are any of them being paid for writing employee evaluations.) But in the HR spirit, here's some data-driven results-oriented analysis: The New Soviet Man this system produces is not James Agee but Milo Yiannopoulos, quantifying the value of other human beings like a deranged Nazi robot. (Not coincidentally, he's also an internet terrorist who allies himself with actual Nazis.) No thanks.

This is not to say that using Rotten Tomatoes will necessarily turn you into a Nazi. It's an aesthetic choice like any other. You can choose to understand the world around you by boiling down very complicated, personal responses from a wide variety of people to a single number. You can choose to be offended when your own response to something doesn't match the “objective” rating you've conjured out of thin air. But like any aesthetic choice, this too can be qualitatively described. So here's how I, personally, respond to Rotten Tomatoes, a website that assigns aggregate numbers to works of art. It's uninspired. It's boring. It's ugly. You can be on the side of Cogentiva or you can be on the side of Enlightened. I know which one I choose. After all, it's 86-percent fresh.

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Can Mutual Gaze Get You A Forever Passionate Love?
By Joy A. Dryer , Ph.D.

I. INTRO. Do you believe that intense romantic love can last a lifetime? OR, alternatively, do you believe that love naturally develops through phases? General phases such as the 3 that Margaret Mead is said to have defined: apparently she thought every woman needed three husbands: one for youthful sex, one for security while raising children, and one for joyful companionship in old age.

August is a good time to ask such long view questions. August is a kick-back month for many. Fewer folks in the office. Many on vacation. I hope you've taken a little time off from daily routines - maybe a few long weekends when you can kick up your feet and look at .... well ...along with a colorful garden...some beautiful view...... to look really look at your partner.

I'm here to tell you that mutual gaze with your partner is one way psychologists and neuroscientists have found you can know your partner more intimately, and help your passionate love last a lifetime.

Mutual eye gaze between you and your partner can help you learn to read, to understand, and to know one another better. Mutual gaze can help you feel more connected because it's emotionally arousing: your pupils dilate, the 'feel good' oxytocin neuropeptide releases. Try this exercise [3 minutes a night?] : you can use it to fight well. To soothe. To repair.

Here's the Gazing Exercise developed by Stan Tatkin, PsyD,[1] founder of PACT [Psychobiologic Approach to Couples Therapy][1]. Gaze quietly into your partner's eyes. [Not meant to be a sexual activity.] You can lie in bed or sit in facing chairs, knee to knee. No need to talk or to touch: ok to laugh, cry, giggle, or have whatever emotion arises. Try not to control your face. You can avoid feeling self-conscious by pouring your attention over your partner's face: notice every detail ...changes in his/ her eyes, face, skin color, skin tautness, breathing, muscle tension. I.e. your focus is on the Other, not on your own internal shifts or feelings. Look and be seen, just as you are. Know and be known, just as you are.

No need to set a timer. But try to do at least 3 minutes. Afterwards, notice how you both feel. Closer? Or more distant? Uncomfortable at any point? Triggered by what? If discomfort resolved, how?

This exercise can be a constructive and fun tool to use in your relationship. Below I describe why mutual eye gaze is so effective in oh so many let-me-count-the-ways.

II. MUTUAL EYE GAZE: Here's lookin' at you Kid. Baby researchers since the 1970's [2] showed us how babies' intense gaze at their mothers [or fathers] is a crucial psychological process of finding out who they are, and how to be in relationship with another. Present day psychologists are using the same gaze to help couples to know and to relate better to one another.

III. OUR PUPILS: Consciousness and Our unconscious. Scientists say they can study consciousness by observing pupil size changes. I'd add, that pupillary action and mutual gaze reflects our unconscious too! because our pupils involuntarily respond to our emotions.

When we look at someone we love, the visual cortex at the back of our brain [occipital lobe] captures the actual image. An older part of the brain, the autonomic nervous system [ANS] , actually registers and responds to these incoming signals. Our ANS regulates, without our awareness or permission, the continuous tuning of our pupil size [along with other involuntary functions including our internal organs such as our heart rate, heart rate variation, and blood pressure].

Our pupil size reflects both the Sympathetic [the accelerator, the exciting] branch - dilating our pupils -- and the Parasympathetic branch [the brakes, the relaxing] - constricting our pupils - branch. In a healthy secure relationship, when we feel safe, we can regulate our arousal state, balancing between excitement and tranquility. This occurs when both these branches of our ANS are in a synchronized balance of movement and stillness, self-activation and self-control. When you do the exercise I describe above, you both will likely be in a balanced state of what Tatkin [1] calls "quiet alertness."

IV. PUPIL SIZE and OXYTOCIN: Gazing is exciting. In our social interactions with another, we need to make quick assessments whether we are in a safe or dangerous situation, or with a safe or dangerous person. It turns out that when your pupils dilate with interest, arousal, or excitement, oxytocin is released. This is the "feel good" neuropeptide, or hormone, that plays a central role in enhancing emotions, communicating, and socially approaching others.

A slew of studies used double blind methods in which they randomly gave either the placebo or Oxytoxin [ administered through the nose] to participants. Results significantly showed that compared to the placebo groups, the Oxytocin groups a) gazed longer and more frequently toward angry vs. happy faces [3]; b) showed increased number of fixations and total gaze time toward the eyes [4] ; c) showed increased ability to read emotion more accurately in the eyes in the RMET - Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test [5].[Google the RMET.]

V. ATTACHMENT and OXYTOCIN: We're connected. Using oxytocin as the positive indicator of attachment, neuroscientists have used fMRI techniques to show what parts of the brain are activated when a pair is gazing at one another. They've discovered that similar areas of the brain light up when studying mutual gaze between parent-infant pairs who are attached to one another, and adult pairs who are attached. Some of these brain regions, like the substantia nigra, globus pallidus, and thalamus showed a high density of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. [6]

Both oxytocin and vasopressin as "feel good" hormones flag these areas as dopamine-rich areas of the brain. In turn, dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter of the feel-good circuit in the brain, associated with reward, motivation, and wanting. You "feel good" while gazing at your partner. So you continue the same approach behavior. This feels good so it reinforces the continued positive loop.

VI. MUTUAL EYE GAZE: Start here. Go! So mutual gaze is the entry point into that feel-good circuit loop. We all can learn to read and to know our partners well. We can use this exercise to fight well. To soothe. To repair. Both Stan Tatkin in his PACT work with couples, and Helen Fisher and her research colleagues believe that romantic love c a n last a lifetime. And, mutual gaze is one way to keep curious and knowing, to keep your relationship feeling novel and exciting.

SUM. Thus we've come full circle to understand that gazing at one's partner is an exciting event. Our pupils dilate automatically, out of our awareness. Because the "feel good" neuropeptide oxytocin [a chemical communicator, or transmitter] is released when stimulated by mutual gaze, you "feel good" while gazing into the eyes of your partner. Thus, you can use mutual gaze in numerous positive ways. The kids can be clamoring at the breakfast table, and a minute gaze across the table at one another can be a quiet connecting moment. You might be in the middle of a fight, and if one of you can remember to slow down, touch the other's arm and say, Hey! Lookin at you, Babe ! Stay for a moment, you could change the emotional interaction.

So try this mutual gaze with your partner: kick back.... stop time... and be known by one another with a few minutes of gaze. Enjoy. Here's lookin' at you, kid.

REFERENCES. In the interest of space, and the general public audience nature of this blog, I have not included a Reference list of the studies I've read: [1] Tatkin, S. 2011; [2] Stern, D. 1985, Beebe, B 2016; 3] Guastella, JA., Carson, DS. et al, 2008; [4](Guastella, JA, Mitchell PB, Dadds, MR, 2008; [5] Domes, G. et al, 2007; [6] Fisher, H.,1992; Acevedo, BP, et al 2011. If interested in specific references, email me at jdryerphd@gmail.com. As always, I invite your comments to this blog. And follow me on Twitter @joydryerphd.

-- 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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X-Rays Reveal Hidden Portrait Under Painting By Edgar Degas

A team of researchers in Australia used a special mapping technique to expose a striking painting of another woman under the French Impressionist's Portrait of a Woman.

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The United States Navy is finally getting rid of its blue uniforms

The Army is currently in the process of transitioning away from their pixelated Universal Camouflage Pattern uniforms to ones with the Operational Camouflage Pattern. Now, the US Navy is following suit by ditching their pixelated blue uniform in favor of a new pattern.

It will take three years to transition to the new uniform

It will take three years for the Navy to transition to the new Navy Working Uniform Type III, which is a digital woodland pattern with a mix of green, tan, and black. It will replace the pixelated blue Navy Working Uniform Type I, which has been widely ridiculed by sailors since it was introduced. The new design will be available for sailors on October 1st, 2016, who will receive an allowance to offset the cost...

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The Colorado Company That's Tackling 36 Million Tons of Food Waste

The United States throws away 36 million tons of food each year, which amounts to 40 percent of the total food generated. However, this massive issue presents a big recycling opportunity. In this short film from the web series The Perennial Plate, we tour A1 Organics in Colorado, which uses a machine called biogas digester to turn that waste into renewable natural gas.

To learn more about this series, visit its Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages.

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Elusive Arabian sand cat spotted after 10 years' disappearance
A rare sighting of this elusive and beautiful cat is bringing new insights into the life of a unique species adapted to nocturnal desert life
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An Open Letter To Our Politicians. Please Protect Our Oceans Now!

Dear Politicians and Elected Officials,

Our oceans are in peril. There is too much plastic in them. Plastic suffocates and strangles marine wildlife who consume it, thinking it is food.

The oceans have far too many chemicals in them; recklessly dumped with abandon.

We have removed and/or finned too many sharks and fish. Ecosystems are in danger. We are testing the oceans' ability to sustain life.

Carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions are released into the atmosphere daily from transportation, energy, agriculture, and animal agriculture. These emissions not only affect global temperatures and the atmosphere, they also affect the pH of the oceans, and the ecosystems that existed long before humans came along.

Look, I know you're busy working on other important issues. I know you've been working on issues of "green energy," endangered species protections, and transportation improvements. But, what about the oceans? Over the years, most of your focus has been directed towards land, land animals, and fossil fuels.

I get it, we live on land, we understand land. Yet, even here, we are "missing the boat." After all, there are only 25,000 Rhinos left, and elephants are brutally murdered every 15 minutes! I get it. Something's gotta give.

But, moving forward, I do ask; please spend as much time and effort on our oceans; rather, more time! They sure do seem to get the short shrift.

FACTS ABOUT OUR OCEANS:

Did you know that our oceans cover 70% of the earths surface? Did you know that the oceans account for 90% of all habitable space on earth? Yet, did you know that less than 1% of our oceans are currently protected?

The oceans absorb nearly 50% of the carbon we emit, and produce nearly 50% of Earth's oxygen.

The oceans give us air to breathe, and water to drink (though indirectly.) We have removed more than 80-90% of our large fish. Many whale populations remain threatened and still hunted by some (Japan, Iceland, Norway, Faroe Islands).

We have dumped agricultural wastes, chemicals, and pollution into our oceans, creating dead zones where marine-life cannot live! These chemicals have
also affected marine-animals ability to reproduce!

Instead, we need to spend more effort, time, resources, and conservation dollars to protect this most vital of ALL resources. We need to protect the
oceans; or, at the very least, think about them and act on them, as much as we do our lands and the animals that live there. Protecting only 1% of our
oceans is NOT enough.

In fact, we need to do BETTER! Both on land, and in the oceans!

We lose more and more species every year. There will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2048.

The reason I set out to write this letter to you is because, in 2048, my son will be my current age. But I fear the planet will not look as it does today, at my current age.

I fear we will lose the life-support system that our oceans provide us. I fear we will lose too many species.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

As an elected official, you can work towards policies and guidelines that protect our oceans by:

Banning the use of single-use plastic beverage lids and bags.

Banning the use of gill nets, trawl nets, or purse-seine nets that kill more unintended species than intended! (This would never be acceptable on
land!)

Enforcing the bans on fishing of endangered species. Just as you prosecute anyone who steals from a merchant, prosecute anyone who steals critical life from the oceans or the land.

Changing dietary guidelines to reflect the need for sustainability.

STOPPING agricultural-waste dumping and runoff into streams, rivers, and oceans.

If we want the oceans to survive and protect the livelihoods of the billions of people who depend on them for food, money, life, and climate stability, you, our elected officials, must do more to help now.

I would gladly fill your seat, in congress or the senate or in local government, and work on plans to save our oceans, and our planet. But, since it will likely take me many years to get into your seat, I implore you, do something, do it now. Protect our oceans and wildlife. Don't wait another moment. That moment may be too late.

Thank you, and respectfully,

Dana Ellis Hunnes PhD, MPH, RD

To contact Dana: recipe.for.survival@gmail.com
Twitter: recipe4survival
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RecipeForSurvival/
PlanetExperts: http://www.planetexperts.com/author/danahunnes/"

-- 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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Agroecology and industrial farming: leveling the playing field
Driving across the United States, the landscape of genetically modified corn stretches for hundreds of miles. Same crop, same variety, same methods, even the same seed company dominates the heartland--visual proof of the dominance of industrial agriculture. (Most of this vast sea of corn is used for animal feed or ethanol production rather than for human consumption...)

The same lack of biological diversity can be found in the industrial tomato fields of Florida, the vegetable fields of California and the cotton fields of the southern United States, with soy, rice, wheat and livestock also following the same pattern.

The negative consequences of industrial agriculture--from climate change to antibiotic-resistant bacteria--have been extensively documented. Agroecology, the "cleaner and greener" alternative to industrial agriculture, has also been extensively documented. Contrary to popular belief (and to a lot of industrial propaganda) agroecological methods can be just as productive as industrial methods.

While a few techniques have crossed the agroecological-industrial divide, they rarely challenge the monoculture mantra. Most large-scale farmers in the United States are locked-in to the markets of industrial agriculture and are reluctant to make sweeping changes to their farming system.

Over the last century chemicals and big machinery have replaced millions of workers. It's capital intensive, though. Farming is a multi-million-dollar proposition--and a marketer's dream.

Because all these inputs lead to chronic crises of overproduction and falling farm gate prices, farmers typically increase production and acreage to make ends meet. They take out more loans and buy more chemical inputs and more patented seed, which keeps the inputs industry very happy. But these farmers don't just consume more inputs; they ultimately consume smaller neighboring farms too, growing the scale of their operations in order to maximize slim profit margins. Industrial agriculture is tailored to the needs of a capitalist marketplace - it overproduces vast amounts of food, feed and fuel and consumes vast amounts of commoditized inputs. This doesn't necessarily help farmers, who, like many poor countries, produce cheap raw materials but consume expensive industrial goods. The wealth of our powerful industrial agricultural system ultimately accumulates capital in the hands of the input, grain and retail monopolies.

Agroecology isn't compatible with this system. First off, agroecology, with its diversified cropping systems and labor-intensive fertility and pest management practices requires specialized, place-specific knowledge and skilled labor--and lots of it. While this can produce plenty of food and jobs, it can't be scaled up to the massive farm size the monopolies demand. And even though agroecology does not result in the soil erosion, groundwater contamination, greenhouse gases and pesticide poisoning typical of industrial agriculture, neither the benefits, nor the costs of the environmental "externalities" are recognized in the marketplace. Agroecology gives us its environmental benefits for free, while industrial agriculture makes us pay for its environmental damage. How?

Industrial agriculture systems don't pay for farmworkers' illnesses after prolonged exposure to pesticides. It doesn't pay for the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It doesn't pay for the loss of biodiversity, the runoff into our drinking water, or the decimation of rural communities and their social services. Industrial agriculture is a façade of economic efficiency - and we all pay the price.

Nevertheless, industrial agriculture thrives because it is compatible with existing social, political, and financial systems. It has what agricultural sociologists call "thick legitimacy" i.e., everything about the system legitimizes the practice--no matter how destructive. The consolidated wealth of the input and retail sectors do not account for real costs of production, which is precisely why industrial agriculture thrives.

For agroecology to have a fair chance to "compete" with industrial agriculture we have to level the playing field by internalizing the true costs of industrial agriculture--that is, by making polluters pay.

But how do we do this without penalizing the farmer and making sure those pushing the poisons and the overproduction (the monopolies) are the ones paying? It starts with making them pay a fair price to the farmer for the product. It also means something called "supply management" to prevent overproduction. George Naylor, a corn and soy farmer from Churdan, Iowa calls for a "quota system":

"Under the current laissez-faire policy of planting fencerow-to-fencerow, a farmer is always going to try to produce more bushels to sell either out of greed or fear of going broke. If a chemical input can seemingly increase income over the cost, it makes sense to use it. But when all farmers follow suit, overproduction results in low prices and our land and water are degraded. Instead, let's say that each farm had a quota based on history of production and an assessment of how a good crop rotation along with conservation plantings could regenerate the soil and biodiversity. If the farmer is compensated with a price that will stabilize his or her income, their thinking and practices will be just the opposite of the laissez-faire, free market straight jacket. If a farm has a quota of 10,000 bushels of corn, that farmer will think, "How can I produce 10,000 bushels of corn with the least amount of chemicals and fertilizer and the most amount of conservation? Maybe I could use some of the other land for soil saving hay and pasture to feed a new herd for grass fed beef or dairy." That farmer would be well on the way of becoming organic."

It would also help level the playing field between agroecology and sustainable agriculture.

Co-written with Ahna Kruzic

-- 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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Busy Beach

photo fiddler posted a photo:

as thousands of migrating semipalmated sandpipers eat mud shrimp on their only stop on a 4000 km migration from the Artic to South America.

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A Special Time on the Bay of Fundy Shore

photo fiddler posted a photo:

at Evangeline Beach near Grand Pre

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Gathering of Birds and Photographers

photo fiddler posted a photo:

Semipalmated sandpipers

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Your Air Conditioner Is Making You Cooler, And The World Warmer. We Can Change That.

"2016-08-03-1470253689-1721507-airconditioninginchina.jpg"

Cooling and refrigeration are essential to increasing labor productivity, improving educational outcomes, safeguarding food and minimizing its waste, improving healthcare, and supporting countries' digital ambitions (that computer of yours heats up pretty fast). And all of this, from improved productivity to education to health, is vital to eliminating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity across the globe.

And yet, it turns out that that refrigerator in the corner is doing more than extending the life of your fruits and vegetables: it's also contributing to global warming. In a somewhat ironic twist, we know now that in filling the hole in the ozone layer over the past few decades under the aegis of the Montreal Protocol, we unwittingly had been adding to global warming. The good news, though, is that we can act on this quickly, and the result (in ecological terms) is almost immediate. But if we continue as we have been, we could face big problems.

Undoubtedly, the Montreal Protocol's success at reversing a universal environmental problem, depletion of the earth's ozone layer, also helped in our fight against climate change. Without the Montreal Protocol agreement and its 25 years of action to stop production and human consumption of harmful chemicals, the climate challenge facing the world today would be far worse. Overall, the climate achievements in phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) an organic compound made exclusively of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon, have been equated to the equivalent of eight billion tons a year of CO2. Yet, in hindsight we've learned that hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, the chemicals picked to replace some CFCs, are very potent greenhouse gasses. What's worse, their use is on the rise globally, since they are seen to be the best substitutes for chemicals used in air conditioners and refrigerators.

The most concerning HFCs are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. Yet unlike carbon dioxide, HFCs tend to stay in the atmosphere for a shorter period, making it possible, if removed, to see a visible reversal of temperature rise impacts within the lifetime of our children. By contrast, the longer atmospheric life of CO2 means it takes longer to see the impact of the removal of the gas, so tangible results would only be seen by our children's children.

From Dubai through Vienna to Kigali

With the climate challenge facing the world already immense, it's clear that action to reduce HFCs must be accelerated to avoid an irreversible tipping point. This has been the key focus of the Montreal Protocol meetings just held in Vienna, attended by ministers from around the world with a focus on phasing down HFCs. One seminal study projected that global temperatures can be reversed by as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius if HFCs and their projected growth are eliminated. We need every tenth of a degree possible.

Several of my colleagues and I attended the Vienna meetings, which were part of a series that started last November in Dubai with the specific aim to work toward amending the Montreal Protocol to phase-down HFCs. An amendment is important because it will give a clear global signal for action and since it's taken within the Montreal Protocol framework, it would enter into legal force rapidly. The discussions highlighted the need for flexibility to respond to different country situations, while at the same time demonstrating strong multilateral consensus for decisive action. The final decision will be made in October in Kigali, Rwanda.

We're already working on it

But with predicted growth projections of HFC being the highest in developing countries (no surprise, since this correlates closely with economic development), the World Bank Group is not waiting for an international agreement to start accelerating action on HFC reductions. We are already working with countries under our Montreal Protocol projects to see where reductions can be taken and where we can reduce HFCs as technology becomes available, affordable, and safe. For example in Thailand, we're working with manufacturers to produce air conditioners that are friendly to the ozone layer, while reducing HFCs and saving energy. Additionally, with Government of Canada support, we are developing tools for Bank teams to identify and act on opportunities for a "triple win" to reduce ozone, reduce HFCs, and increase energy efficiency where air conditioning and refrigeration are part of Bank investments.

We know the Montreal Protocol has already achieved results. We've had reports this year that the recovery of the hole in the ozone layer has already reached a surface area equivalent to the size of India, and full recovery is projected to be achieved before mid-century. But it's too early to celebrate: the challenge remains immense. October will be the time to make a decision that reverberates for generations to come.

-- 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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Why We Don't Need More Environmental Organizations
As the founder of Greening Forward, a youth-driven and youth-imagined environmental organization, I often mentor young people on whether or not they, too, should create their own organization, and my immediate response is a passionate, "No!" Likewise, my answer to adults with the same question is identical.

Often times, individuals want to start an organization when starting an organization may not be necessary to achieve their intended goals. One of the early steps to starting a new organization of any kind involves brainstorming lists of organizations who do similar and complementary work. What makes these organizations unique? What makes these organizations successful or unsuccessful?

Eight years ago, these were questions I began asking myself when I realized that no one was putting young people in substantive roles within the environmental movement. My peers and I believed that young people should be on boards, and at the forefront of campaigns, and Greening Forward would become a refreshing organization that could show adults how students could serve in these roles.

Before one starts a new campaign, one must also ask themselves: What's the innovative and refreshing thing that this new organization will bring to the movement? Frankly, environmental organizations already saturate the non-profit sector insomuch that it is likely that most things under the sun have been imagined and tried.

But, if it is true that we already have so many environmental organization addressing so many issues already, why is it that the most recent data from 2005 tells us that the number of new environmental organizations is growing at a rate that should double every 13 years?

I believe one of the issues is that existing environmental organizations are failing to be collaborative and cooperative, and are not being responsive to new ideas and research. Ultimately, more research must be done to adequately address whether these factors have led some individuals to chart their own paths with new organizations.

Some of the most reliable data we have on the growth of the environmental movement from 2005 tells us that our movement is growing much quicker when compared to all non-profits. Given that the number of environmental and conservation organizations registered with the IRS has grown by 4.6 percent per year, the growth rate of our subsector has outpaced non-profit organizations as a whole by 164%.

When it comes to measuring environmental impact, more organizations does not always forecast better outcomes. Environmental practitioners may be able to recognize themselves how the environmental movement has or has not changed despite the growth in quantity of environmentally-focused organizations after reflecting on these questions:

Has the environmental movement become more competitive over the past couple of decades and is this competition more noteworthy than in other non-profit issue areas?
Has the environmental movement gotten substantively more effective at its tactics over the past couple of decades? (i.e. does it cost less to educate X amount of people than it did in the past, has the process of organizing X events become less time-consuming)
Is there increased confusion from the general public about the role that different environmental organizations serve for the movement?

We do not need any more environmental organizations as much as we need existing organizations that can (1) understand the difference between collaboration and cooperation, and are ready to do both, (2) be responsive to new people and new ideas, as well as (3) keep data on what works and what doesn't work.

Understand the difference between collaboration and cooperation, and be ready to do both. Collaboration is a process of shared co-creation. Collaboration is not agreeing to share another organization's event on social media. Instead, this is an example of cooperation. Cooperation is when one organization has set the rules, and has allowed another organization to play along. Both collaboration and cooperation are important to addressing problems with efficient solutions without the need of starting a new organization, but it is only collaboration that involves mutual risk, trust, and even potential embarrassment.
Be responsive to new people and new ideas. I'm not asking organizations to open Phishing or spam emails, but it appears that some mainstream organizations have approached emails from grassroots community organizers and Phishing e-mails the same. While it may seem time-consuming to respond to external suggestions and comments, it could be equally disastrous if an organization is blinded by an important movement change and shift. Social science researcher, Debra J. Salazar discusses more about this phenomenon as experienced by Washington state environmental organizations in her report, "The Mainstream-Grassroots Divide in the Environmental Movement: Environmental Groups in Washington State."
Keep data on what works and what doesn't work. As a practitioner in the field, I have observed that the best-funded environmental organizations do not always have the best results, and the least funded environmental organizations do not always have the least impact, which is a result of ineffective philanthropy. Partnerships should be pushing our movement in a way towards more substantive work that leads to proven results, even if it means challenging how the work was traditionally done.

With the threat of environmental degradation coming from all corners of the globe, we all must work together to ensure that our efforts are efficient, meaningful, and worthwhile. Now is the time to rise to these challenges that will define our movement.

-- 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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Climate Change This Week: Siberia Exploding, Too Hot to Work, LED Job Surge, and More!
Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.

"2016-08-04-1470347129-8633846-5womenfrogbyJohannesStoettersourcewww.rebelsmarket.comccr338.jpg"

Soon This May Be The Only Kind Of Tropical Frog In Existence - one made of painted women; better to conserve our carbon-storing tropical forests. By Johannes Stoetter, source www.rebelsmarket.com

Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon

"2016-08-04-1470347165-6034537-deforestationforpalmoilinBorneomongabay.jpg"

Palm Oil Eats Away as its plantations wipe out forests. Credit mongabay.com

OO Can We Feed The World Without Cutting Forests? It can be done, says U.N. (MEH: not really - see below.) Agriculture is biggest driver of deforestation globally, but:

Giving people clear land ownership creates sustainable management;
Boosting investment boosts land productivity;
Forests can be protected.

MEH: The above argument is greatly flawed:

boosting land productivity beyond sustainable limits has already destroyed arable land;
our global population levels are already beyond sustainable limits;
forests fall when desperate, unsustainable populations use them for resources.

80% of all arable land is already under cultivation globally;
The total amount of arable land is decreasing due to desertification and overuse.

Humanity is crashing through its global limits.

FORESTS ARE BURNING UP

"2016-08-04-1470347196-9946695-climatechangewildfireinfographicSourceMissoulaFireSciencesLaboratoryccr340.jpg"

Climate Change Drives Wildfires - as higher temperatures both melt out mountain snowpacks earlier (meaning less water later in summer), and, in combo with drought, dries out trees, creating tinderbox conditions for fires. Source Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory

OO Wildfires Have Burned More Than 2.6 Million Acres So Far This Year - under continuing climate change, higher temperatures and more frequent and intense droughts will fuel ever more intense and larger wildfires - until we run out of forests.

OO California's Costly Wildfire Season Might Never End until it runs out of forests.

"2016-08-04-1470347226-1766756-russiasiberiawildfires2016mapSourcesiberiantimes.comccr340.jpg"

Source siberiantimes.com

OO Huge Swaths Of Russia's Forests Are Ablaze
- Possibly A Record Fire Season - The past few years have seen huge conflagrations in this region, from a combination of forest management practices, firefighting policies, human-caused global warming and shorter-term weather fluctuations.

OO Russian Wildfires Put Key Climate Change Resource At Risk - as the government's practice of leaving massive wildfires to burn out of control in sprawling stretches of Siberia shrinks a key global resource for absorbing climate-warming emissions: its trees.

When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

"2016-08-04-1470347260-8969114-cattledeforestationamazonbrazilSourcewww.vox.comccr340.jpg"

Just How Desperate Are You For A Hamburger? - enough to fuel climate change by destroying carbon sinks? Source www.vox.com

OO Cattle Grazing Is Now Causing Massive Deforestation Hotspots
In The Peruvian Amazon

OO Drought 'Shuts Down Amazon Carbon Sink' by killing trees and slowing trees' growth rates, a study has shown.

"2016-08-04-1470347294-1092951-redwoodtreesforestSourcewww.smarborists.comccr337.jpg"

Source www.smarborists.com

OO Global Warming Could Limit Forest Capacity as Carbon Sinks - more specifically, North American forests, says a new study.

"2016-08-04-1470347324-1576508-indigenousAmazonforestpeopleAwaorGuajaSourcepinterestccr322.jpg"

OO How To Stop Deforestation?
Give Indigenous People Rights To Land - Indigenous people are better than governments at preventing forests from being cut and should be seen as a solution, not a barrier to protecting them, said a UN official.

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GOING, GOING...

$"2016-08-04-1470347357-2348733-KernRiverOilFieldfrackingrigsCACreditMarkGambaatCorbisviaFoundationforDeepEcologyccr303.jpg"$

Fracking As Far As The Eye Can See Credit Mark Gamba at Corbis via Foundation for Deep Ecology

OO Humans' Consumption of Earth's Natural Resources Has Tripled in 40 Years - says a new UN report.

Growing consumption drives climate change, as it uses huge amounts of climate-polluting energy; those energy sources, in turn, are using increasing amounts of energy just for extraction and distribution.

"2016-08-04-1470347383-2164355-asiadeforestationSourceuletifanatflipboard.comccr338.jpg"

Asia Deforests Source ulet ifan at flipboard.com

Trees, Orchids, Beautiful Birds, And More - All Gone when a tropical forest disappears, and often extinguishing unknown, unique forms of life.

"The alarming rate at which materials are now being extracted is already having a severe impact on human health and people's quality of life," said UN International Resource Panel co-chair, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra.

"We urgently need to address this problem before we have irreversibly depleted the resources that power our economies and lift people out of poverty.

[It] calls for a rethink of the governance of natural resource extraction."

OO UN: Shorter Working Hours May Be Needed To Save Environment - to increase efficiency of resources used and slow their extraction.

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HOT NEWS

"2016-08-04-1470347542-9423108-heatalertsheatwaveUSjuly2016TDCccr340.jpg"

OO Heat Alerts Blanket US. - N.Y.C., L.A. and Chicago were all under heat advisories recently, plus 23 states in between.

OO Deadly Dangerous Heat Wave Scorched Central And Eastern U.S. with at least 6 heat related deaths. The heat index, a measure of how hot it actually feels, could reach 115°F in parts of Washington, DC and 108°F in Philadelphia.

Related Headlines:

"2016-08-04-1470347712-4591634-averagetemperaturesanomalyforJune2016SourceNOAAccr340.png"

How Much Hot Temperatures Differed for June 2016 in the US from the average. Source NOAA

OO Sizzling Midwest Previews a Hotter Future Climate - 'Climate change is putting heat waves on steroids,' says prominent climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, with dire consequences for public health.

"Heat waves are getting more frequent and stronger."

OO Heat Dome Had Tens Of Millions Sweating From Minneapolis To Mississippi and the high pressure area persisted for days, creating a vast heat wave across much of the US.

"2016-08-04-1470347844-1496031-eggearthfrying490onsidewalk.png"

OO Eastern Hemisphere's All-Time Temperature Record:
Kuwait Fries In 54°C (129.2°F) Heat on July 21, 2016 in the Middle East.

"2016-08-04-1470347876-9805477-2016globaltemperatureanomaliesSourceClimateCentralviaNASANOAAdataccr340.jpg"

A Hot Map tracing global temperature anomalies. Source Climate Central via NASA, NOAA data

OO First Half of 2016 Blows Away Temp Records -the first half of 2016 has blown away temperature records, capped off by a record hot June, once again bumping up the odds that 2016 will be the hottest year on record globally, according to data released recently.

OO Earth On Track For Hottest Year Ever As Warming Speeds Up - and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also confirmed that June was the 14th consecutive month to break temperature records.

OO Global Warming Happening Faster Than Predicted says the World Meteorological Organization, reporting the first six months of this year have seen all previous global warming records broken.

It also marked the 378th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th century average.

@@ Climate Change 101: Why Care?
What You Need to Know - Bill Nye tells it all in five minutes amid graphic, dynamic, engaging, compelling imagery. Check it Out!

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MELTDOWN

OO Siberia: Areas Leaking Methane 200 Times Faster Than Usual,
Massive Releases Creating Giant Holes, 'Trembling Tundras' - as Russian scientists measured the gas emitted by the mysterious bubbles The 'trembling tundra' also contains concentrations of carbon dioxide 20 times higher than usual levels.

Scientists theorize the sudden appearance of giant holes in northern Siberia - a 2013 eruption was heard 60 miles away - is from methane gas from melting tundra is trapped in existing ice, exploding it.

Siberia: Scientists Discover Unusual Methane Bubbles Underground

OO Siberia: Heat Wave Sparks Anthrax Outbreak - as it melted the decades old, anthrax riddled carcase of a reindeer, allowing the pathogen to spread. 1500 other reindeer died from the highly infectious disease, and 13 people were hospitalized.

"2016-08-04-1470347910-4511146-greenlandicemeltcanyonCreditJamesBalogccr326.jpg"

A Canyon in White - as Greenland melts away. Credit James Balog

OO Greenland Lost A Staggering 1 Trillion Tons Of Ice In Just Four Years - How much is that?

Think of the ENTIRE weight of humanity currently - now multiply that by about 3,000.

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GOOD CLEAN NEWS

"2016-08-04-1470347949-6789510-solarLEDstreetlightsSourcewww.truelite.usccr340.jpg"

Sun Lights A Night Time Street with solar powered LEDs. Source www.truelite.us

OO Off-Grid LED Lighting Could Create 2 Million Jobs as solar systems come on-line across the globe.

OO Governments Look to Phase Out HFCs, which are potent climate changing gases, causing 1,300 times as much warming as carbon dioxide over a span of 100 years even though they exist for a shorter duration in the atmosphere.

Diplomats and leading national ministers are negotiating to phasing them out. Originally, HCFs substituted chlorofluorcarbons (CFCs) as refrigerants for air conditioners.

"2014-05-16-moneybagsgreenmrviaforcechangecomcctw92.jpg"

OO Solarcity Raises $345 Million To Fund New Projects

OO Corporate Investment In Energy Efficiency 'At An All-Time High'

@@ Time To Choose - this is the trailer but one can view the entire documentary here via download torrent.

OO Not Your Typical Climate Change Documentary:
It Focuses On Solutions, Not Doom - The film provides a compelling argument to its audience that renewable energy and alternative forms of living and eating are not only legitimately effective, but can give us a real shot at stopping climate change.

OO California: Alameda County Bans Fracking - the results of 2+ years of persuasion from a coalition of environmental groups.

OO California Moves Forward With Oil, Gas Methane Rules to slash methane emissions from oil and gas facilities 40-45% by 2025.

"2016-08-04-1470347984-422991-rooftopsolarinstallationjobsjobSourcewww.solsystems.comccr317.jpg"

OO Obama Plans to Expand Solar for Low-Income Homes to One Gigawatt - via the 'Clean Energy Savings For All' initiative by 2020.

The DOE also will award up to $100,000 for projects that develop solar farms and train solar workers in low-income communities.

OO India Doubles Down On Solar Parks After Sunedison Setback - the company formerly contracted to build major solar projects. India will double the target for energy to be generated from solar parks by 2020.

OO PM Modi Lures India's Top Fossil Fuel Companies To Back Solar Boom

"2016-08-04-1470348011-8862640-ElonMuskteslasolarcityspacexSourcewww.theodysseyonline.comccr340.jpg"

OO Elon Musk Unveils Tesla's 'Master Plan':
Package Electric Cars, Solar Panels and Energy Storage for Customers by merging two big companies, Tesla and Solarcity.

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OH-OH

"2015-09-15-1442277605-5381443-extremeweatherbcompositedroughtheatwavestormwildfiremehccr290.png"

What We're Doing Won't Prevent More of This and worse, as climate change continues. Use your vote to tell leaders we have to do more.

OO The World's Climate Pledges Are Not Even Close To Good Enough - the Paris agreement won't prevent our planetary thermal shields, the polar ice caps, from melting, or rainforests from dying.

But there's still time to prevent even more catastrophic change - and the good news is, countries can easily do more than they've promised so far.

"If all countries were to replicate policies that are currently successfully implemented by some countries, the gap toward two degrees Celsius could almost be closed," says a senior Netherlands government climate policy analyst.

Beyond national governments, organizations and corporations are also moving to effect change. Get involved.

"2016-08-04-1470348038-7510633-louvreparisfrancefloodingSourcewww.caribflame.comccr340.jpg"

Missing In Action are measures to prevent the drowning of European civilization. Source www.caribflame.com

OO EU Climate Targets Fall Short Of Paris Deal Ambitions, Experts Warn - the European Commission missed an opportunity recently by failing to introduce a mechanism to increase emissions targets over time, a European coalition of environmental NGOs said.

OO Six EU Countries Have Already Met Their 2030 Climate Targets - indicating that the targets are way too weak.

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SPEAKING OUT

"2016-08-04-1470348070-9968076-blackchurchleadersspeakoutonclimatechangeTDCccr340.jpg"

OO 'World Can't Afford To Silence Us':
Black Church Leaders Address Climate Change - One of the largest and oldest black churches in the US warns that black people are disproportionally harmed by global warming and fossil fuel pollution.

OO France And UN Press For Ratification Of Climate Agreement

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NATURAL REPERCUSSIONS

"2016-08-04-1470348099-3828191-climatehaschangedfrom1950swhenyougrewupCreditClimateCentralusingNASAdataccr340.jpg"

Higher and Higher - what is now our lowest global average temperatures is higher than the highest global average temperatures just 40 years ago... Credit Climate Central using NASA data

OO The Climate That Most Of Us Grew Up With Is Gone For Good

"2016-08-04-1470348136-3601621-californiawildfirerecord20062016andclimateSourcewww.climatesignals.orgccr340.png"

Climate Change > Drought, Heat > Dry Forests > Wildfires in the US West Source www.climatesignals.org

OO Massive Wildfires Rage Across California - destroying lives, homes, forests and sparking mass evacuations.

Extreme heat and years of ongoing drought, both linked to climate change, are increasing wildfire risk in California, and ten of the state's 20 largest wildfires on record have all burned in the last 10 years.

OO Flame Broiled Alaska: With soaring temperatures and crackling lightning, wildfires erupt across the state.

"2016-08-04-1470348169-3112218-fiercerincreasedstormsanddamageCreditClaudioAccheriatflickrccr340.jpg"

Credit Claudio Accheri at flickr

OO Tropical Storms To Get Fiercer As The World Warms − known variously as cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes, they bring death and destruction to huge swathes of the Earth's surface. And new research suggests that they are likely to become even stronger.

Air pollution that cools the air masks the accumulating heat on the planet, and as the air gets clean, that mask will be stripped away: heating air absorbs more water - that extra water and energy translates into fiercer storms.

As if life weren't exciting enough already...

"2016-08-04-1470348199-5759420-toxicalgaebloomUtahlakejuly2016CreditRickEganatTheSaltLakeCityTribuneviaAPccr340.jpg"

A Stinking Green Monster Is Engulfing US Waters - toxic algal blooms are sickening swimmers, suffocating water life, driving away tourists, and smell like "death on a cracker." Credit Rick Egan at The Salt Lake City Tribune via AP

OO Why Disgusting Toxic Blue-Green Algae Blooms Seem Increasingly Common - across the US and elsewhere, sickening algal blooms are occurring more frequently.

"We've primed the system perfectly for blue-green algae blooms," says Australia government scientist Darren Baldwin:

Nutrient runoff from agriculture settles in lakes and coastal areas;
Fiercer storms, fueled by climate change, stir up those nutrients more;
Hot waters, heated by global warming, and nutrients fuel massive algal blooms.

"2016-08-04-1470348232-2961094-greatbarriercoralreefcollapseatLizardislandCreditJustinMarshallattheUniversityofQueenslandccr340.jpg"

An Undersea Rainbow Collapses Into Gray and Brown - as corals bleach die, taking down an entire ecosystem with them in the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere. Credit Justin Marshall at the University of Queensland

OO Sections Of Great Barrier Reef Suffering From 'Complete Ecosystem Collapse' as fish numbers tumble and surviving corals continue to bleach into winter, says a scientist witnessing it.

"2016-08-04-1470348268-8901659-GreatBarrierreefcoralsturtleSourcetravelingearth.comccr288.jpg"

What Once Was Is No More at Lizard Island and other devastated areas of the Great Barrier Coral Reef.

These natural undersea wonders, the evolutionary work of millennia, have been destroyed, and will not come back for generations, if ever.

"2016-08-04-1470348298-8837275-polarbearstarvinga570Aug2015notuncommonsightsaysCreditKerstinLangenbergeratFacebookccr295.jpg"

The Face of Climate Change - this could be the face of humanity in coming decades, if we do not address the underlying causes of climate change. Credit Kerstin Langenberger at Facebook

OO Polar Ecology In Flux Due To Climate Change - glacial melting and rising ocean temperatures are affecting the feeding, breeding and dispersion patterns of species, such as krill, cod, seals and polar bears, in the polar regions, say two new research studies.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls...

OO Wildlife Dying En Masse as South American River Runs Dry - the Pilcomayo River in Paraguay is littered with dead caiman and fish carcasses; in some areas almost all the caimans and capybaras - furry river animals - have died.

WASTE MAKES CLIMATE CHANGE

"2016-08-04-1470348329-9529417-foodwasteSourceTDCccr288.jpg"

OO America Wastes $160 Billion In Food Every Year But Is Too Busy To Stop

OO Denmark Leads Europe In Tackling Food Waste - 33+% of all food is spoiled or squandered, resulting in nearly a loss of $1 Trillion, and generating 8% of global greenhouse emissions.

"Waste makes everybody poorer," said a Danish minister.

Led by a passionate activist, Denmark has been working intensively on solutions backing a global food waste measurement standard; once measured, it can be managed.

"2016-08-04-1470348362-692467-freefoodbaskettotacklefoodwasteCreditS.BrandlinatDeutscheWelleccr340.jpg"

Credit S. Brandlin at Deutsche Welle

Strategies include:

Supermarket "stop food waste areas" where nearly expired food sells very cheaply;
"ugly" food gets used in prepared food;
Public campaign urging people to eat their UFOs* once a month;
Too Good To Go startup pairs unsold meals with people who can buy them cheaply at day's end.

*Unidentified Frozen Objects found in overstocked freezers. Yes, you probably have some.

OO Wal-Mart, America's Largest Grocer, Is Now Selling Ugly Fruit And Vegetables - at a discount, using weather dented produce that might otherwise go to waste.

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SOCIAL REPERCUSSIONS

"2016-08-04-1470348393-7310925-toohottoworkconstructionworkersTDCccr340.jpg"

OO Soaring Temperatures Will Make It Too Hot To Work, UN Warns.

OO Global Warming Set To Cost The World Economy $2+ Trillion By 2030 as it becomes too hot to work.
'If you are physically active in work, the hotter it is, the slower you work.'

"2016-08-04-1470348426-3415075-IndiaheatwavetoohottoworkumbrellaSourcewww.independent.co.ukccr340.jpg"

Source www.independent.co.uk

OO Heat Stress To Wipe Billions Off GDP In India, China

"2016-08-04-1470348455-7708140-meltingpoolofarcticseaiceJuly142016SourceNASAccr340.jpg"

So Pretty, So Deadly For Humanity - the loss of reflection as ice melts, not only speeds Arctic warming, but contributes to climate disruption worldwide. Source NASA

OO This Year's Record Arctic Melt Is A Problem For Everybody - "Melt ponds are a major contributor to radiation and heat in the Arctic," says a NASA sea ice scientist. Takeaways:

Global warming is melting ice;
This increases Arctic heat absorption by darker waters;
Further heat speeds Arctic warming;
Arctic warming wobbles the polar jet stream;

Wobbling further mixes extreme cold and warm air masses over the northern hemisphere;
Thus, the wobbling is linked to more extreme weather where humanity lives.

So, Arctic warming helps fuel more extreme weather. Be concerned.

WATER, MORE AND LESS

"2016-08-04-1470348482-6468604-girlrescuechinaflood2016Sourcewww.chiangraitimes.comccr340.jpg"

Source www.chiangraitimes.com

OO Torrential Rains, Floods Kill At Least 112 Across China,
With Scores Missing

OO Colorado: Climate Change Causes Earlier Snowpack Runoff,
Late Summer Water Scarcity For Farmers

"2016-08-04-1470348508-9080738-pouringwaterinAfricadroughtTDCccr340.jpg"

Drought Continues even as the devastating 2015-16 El Niño subsides; many parts of Africa, Central
America and Southeast Asia rains and harvests are not expected to recover until 2017.

OO Devastating Droughts Continue As El Niño Subsides

"2016-08-04-1470348540-8374489-nigeriadroughtriskstomatostaplecrop2016TDCccr340.jpg"

OO Nigeria: Pests and Drought Hit Farms of Tomatoes - a staple of Nigerian diet. Increasing drought and desertification, along with pesticide resistance to the tomato moth worm, are decimating this important food crop.

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FIXING CLIMATE CHANGE

@@ A Simple And Smart Way To Fix Climate Change given by Dan Miller in 2014 at a Ted talk suggests a way to profit as we tackle climate change, by finally charging those who sell and use fossil fuels - and distributing the revenues back to all of us.

The strategy is sure to speed transition to clean renewable energy. What's not to like? Check it out!

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CLUELESS LEADERSHIP

"2016-08-04-1470348569-2982262-cleancoalcartoonJuly232008CreditDonaratpoliticalgraffiti.wordpress.comccr339.jpg"

Credit Donar at politicalgraffiti.wordpress.com

OO GOP Platform, Which Calls Coal 'Clean',
Would Reverse Decades Of US Energy And Climate Policy

OO Republican Platform Rejects Paris Climate Agreement,
Climate Regulations

OO Republican Dream Of Shrinking EPA Could Hurt Industries former EPA officials say, and "rejects 40 years of environmental history and success," says an ex EPA head under the GHW Bush administration.

"2016-08-04-1470348601-3365609-trumpimmigrationmodifiedclimatecartoonCreditNateBeelerattheColumbusDispatchccr329.jpg"

Credit Nate Beeler at the Columbus Dispatch

OO President Trump Would UP Climate Change
By Upping US Oil, Gas Production - a policy promoted by his energy advisor.)
l

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ELECTION YEAR:

"2016-03-08-1457470019-7186523-voteforclimateactionDIFyourfamilymehccr317.png"

If You Don't Vote For Climate Action, You Can Forget The Rest - in a climate-changing world of famine, drought, rising seas, giant storms and heat waves, there will be no security in jobs, health, wealth, or national safety. There will be chaos ensuing from increasing crises and disasters. Vote.

OO Global Warming Policies We Set Today Will Determine The Next 10,000 Years - of global warming, a new study shows -- and whether our civilization survives or not: history shows that harmful climate change has destroyed civilizations before.

This time, it could be worldwide. Let's keep "The Hunger Games" in the realm of fiction.

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GOOD IDEAS

"2016-08-04-1470348634-4887567-communitysolarWestmillSolarCooperativeSourceWikipediaccr340.jpg"

Source Wikipedia

OO Invest In Small Scale Renewable Projects Too,
To Ensure Universal Access To Low Carbon Energy

OO The Public Health Case For Energy Storage - A new study proposes storage and demand response to avoid extra air pollution while meeting peak demand.

OO Curb the Marijuana Industry's Voracious Energy Appetite - policymakers should start by requiring indoor cultivators to consume only carbon-free energy sources or to pay a carbon fee until such measures can be implemented.

"2016-08-04-1470348664-4667497-relaxingimmersioninwaterSourcewww.arcticspas.comccr340.jpg"

Some Like It Cool - but if a cool pool isn't nearby, try a cool neck wrap instead. Source www.arcticspas.com

OO The Best Strategies To Keep Bodies Cool In A Heatwave, say researchers, is full body immersion or cooling the extremities to help maintain healthy body temperatures.

Okay, let's just assume we all don't have a cool pool handy at home or work. What to do?

The Wet Scarf: Carry a cotton scarf/cloth, a wash cloth, and bottle of water with you. When you start heating up, thoroughly wet the scarf and wash cloth, roll the latter inside the former, and tie around your neck. It makes a BIG difference. Replenish occasionally with ice cubes or cold water (often free at fast food places).

At night, keep a wet wash cloth nearby for periodically swabbing down your extremities.

"2016-08-04-1470348691-8407575-googledatacenterSourceGoogleRexccr340.jpg"

Google Data Center Source Google/Rex

OO Google Uses Artificial Intelligence To Cut Data Centre Energy Use By 15%

OO How A Former Wal-Mart Executive Is Helping The Air Force Cut Energy Costs

OO Paying Businesses To Power Down 'Could Save UK Billions' a new industry report finds.

"2016-08-04-1470348720-743182-zipcarcarsharingcroppedccr268.jpg"

Zipping Around In a Borrowed Car helps reduce pollution.

OO Car-Sharing Reduces Pollution, Autos On The Road says a new study, filling in the small gaps between those who commute using mass transit or bicycling.

OO China Launches New System To Efficiently Channel Wind Power Investments - to prevent investment in areas where lack of infrastructure results in useless power production.

OO Australia, Cheap And Clean:
Company Creates Hydrogen With Near-Zero Emissions - using cheap iron ore to convert methane into hydrogen, capturing any resulting carbon as graphite.

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CLIMATE LEADERSHIP

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The Man Gets It - "Stay safe as it heats up: Drink water, stay out of the sun, and check on your neighbors," tweeted President Obama. Source www.baltimoresun.com

OO Weather-Communicator-In-Chief? President Obama Calls Attention To Heat Wave

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FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES

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OO Increased Asthma Attacks Tied To Exposure To Natural Gas Production

OO Ships Worsen Air Pollution Over China, Killing Thousands finds a new study.

OO The Future Of Big Oil?
At Shell, It' The "New Coal," Natural Gas as the deluded energy giant thinks this will help address climate change.

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Credit Joel Pett

OO New Documents Reveal
Oil And Tobacco Industries' Dirty History Of Working Together to mislead the public on the harms of each.

OO Tobacco And Oil Industries Used Same Researchers To Sway Public - as early as the 1950s, the two groups shared scientists and publicists to downplay dangers of smoking and climate change.

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If we do not grow sustainably,
Our children will die inhumanely.

@@ Myth vs Truth: The Huge Value of Contraception is an incisive, heartfelt recognition of the value of contraception by Sarah Brown, CEO, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

Unintended Pregnancy Costs US Taxpayers:

Unintended Pregnancies Cost US Taxypayers Nearly $11 Billion Yearly
-the Guttmacher Institute

Teen Childbearing Alone Cost US Taxpayers $9+ Billion In 2010
And the costs of raising a child usually ensures decades, if not a life, of poverty for its mother.
- US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Help prevent unintended pregnancies in your community:
publicize where women can access affordable contraception.

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They can go here to find locations:

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And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

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SOLAR KEEPS RISING

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OO Tanzania: Dodging Costs And Power Cuts,
Firms Profit From Solar Drive

OO China Installed 20 GW Of Solar Power in first-half of 2016; triple from a year ago.

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Check it out here, right now!

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WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

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Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, Aug 4, 2016

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is "caused" by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Looking above at recent temperature anomalies, much of the US and the waters surrounding it are experiencing warmer than normal temperatures: the eastern Pacific warm spot continues and so does the drought in California.

Much of the areas surrounding the North Pole are experiencing much warmer than normal temperatures - not good news for our Arctic thermal shield of ice. Hotter than usual temperatures continue to dominate human habitats.

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There is, of course, much more news on the consequences and solutions to climate change. To get it, check out this annotated resource list I've compiled, "Climate Change News Resources," at Wordpress.com here. For more information on the science of climate change, its consequences and solutions you can view my annotated list of online information resources here.

To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!

Every day is Earth Day, folks, as I was reminded by this wild spotted coralroot orchid I photographed one spring. Making the U.S. a global clean energy leader will ensure a heck of a lot more jobs, and a clean, safe future. If you'd like to join the increasing numbers of people who want to TELL Congress that they will vote for clean energy candidates you can do so here. It's our way of letting Congress know there's a strong clean energy voting bloc out there. For more detailed summaries of the above and other climate change items, audio podcasts and texts are freely available.

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-- 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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Brad Friedman and Desi Doyen: 'Green News Report' - August 4, 2016
The Green News Report is also available via...

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: New criminal charges for MI state employees in the Flint Water Crisis; $1...

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Finance, Renewable Energy And Social Inclusion Are Key To A Sustainable Future
When opening the Climate Summit in Copenhagen, I quote one of my favorite Guyanese creole sayings: wan wan dutty build dam. Put differently, every house must sit on solid foundations and we build it one brick at a time. Many years later, the Paris Climate agreement brought us the international breakthrough many have fought for so hard: near universal action to address climate change and keep global average temperature well below 2 degrees centigrade.

Of course it was the euphoria of the outcome that made the headlines. But the Paris agreement also noted some important points of caution. First that the commitments made in Paris are not enough to achieve the temperature goal, second that early action is imperative and thirdly that the provision of finance, technology and capacity support are essential to enable enhanced pre-2020 action by developing countries. As early as 2018 countries will meet to take stock of efforts taken to meet the long term goal.

If Paris was all about setting the goal(s) and drawing the boundaries of the pitch, the next conference in Marrakesh will be about defining the rules of the game. That is critical if the 2018 stock-taking is to provide the confidence to take next and bolder steps towards achieving the long-term goal. As the Guyanese also say in creole: clath ah easy fuh dutty but hard fuh wash (having achieved a goal, it is difficult to retain it)!

As an organization dedicated to working with its members to achieve a greener model of growth, the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is now doing everything to help countries understand how international climate finance can be made to work for climate action, remove the barriers that prevent investments in renewables, translate climate ambitions into bankable projects, build national finance institutions to support this and ensure that growth is more socially inclusive.

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In line with an effort to identify practical solutions to sustainability challenges, GGGI and its partners will organize the Global Green Growth Week (#GGGWeek2016), on September 5-9, on Jeju Island, Republic of Korea. The sessions throughout the five-day event will focus on three key topics: 1) mobilizing finance for climate action and green growth, 2) driving renewable energy and green investments in Asia and 3) improving the livelihoods of and creating a green and inclusive economy for the poor.

First, finance is an important issue. In principle, sufficient financial resources from the public and private sectors are available to support developing nations. However, not enough attention has been paid to enhancing the capacity of the system to absorb the capital in ways that are beneficial to the poor in developing countries and acceptable to those that bring the capital. The Global Green Growth Summit (GGGS) aims to explore ways to unblock the barriers to capital flowing to emerging markets, develop innovative international financial instruments for green growth, strengthen national financing vehicles and build solid project proposals. It is critical to find blended financial models and innovative solutions to mobilize climate finance.

Second, transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy will bring health and financial benefits as well as enhance employment opportunities. Asia is claiming to be going green, but according to the International Energy Outlook 2016, China and India are projected to be the top two coal-consuming countries together with the United States, accounting for more than 70% of world coal use. For instance, in 2012, China accounted for 50% of world coal consumption and its coal use is expected to grow through 2025. Coal is expected to continue to play a prominent role in Asia's energy consumption due to the abundant regional endowment of coal and low extraction costs.

On a brighter note, energy demand is projected to almost double in the Asia and Pacific region by 2030. This rapid rise in demand is a reflection of the dramatic economic growth in countries such as China and India. Countries in Southeast Asia have also been enjoying remarkable economic progress in recent years while solidifying their position as a major driver of global growth in energy demand. Investments in renewables have now overtaken investments in fossil fuel and renewable investments in developing countries have significantly overtaken those in industrialized countries - all of which is positive. But the reality remains that making more money available and decreasing costs of technology is not enough to address the challenges of climate change.

The Asia Regional Policy Dialogue (ARPD) will examine the success factors and barriers to scaling up the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy. The discussions will be tailored to the Asian context, in line with the goal of building consensus among major stakeholders on strategic, actionable solutions to be taken to promote clean energy.

Third, more emphasis needs to be placed on creating better lives and livelihoods for poor people in society by using green growth policies. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, but the gap between the rich and poor is increasing. 90% of urban population growth this century will occur in developing countries, predominantly in Africa and Asia and a significant proportion of that growth will be in cities that don't exist yet. Although the world has made significant progress in reducing poverty in the last decade, inequality still persists, with large portions of humanity, particularly in developing countries, lacking basic sanitation, access to electricity, and clean drinking water.

Growth in developing countries will continue, yet this growth needs to be green and inclusive. The discussion topics for the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) Annual Conference include examining challenges of inclusive green growth, exploring the climate change and poverty nexus and identifying whether economic growth can be inclusive and green.

#GGGWeek2016 will serve as a platform to generate innovative solutions, leverage green growth opportunities and promote delivery of growth that is pro-poor, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

Click here to learn more about #GGGWeek2016.

-- 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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An Analyst of Gothic Monsters Explores Trump's Appeal
A student of Gothic literary monsters assesses Donald Trump's allure.
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Want to Fight Food Waste? Get with the Food System

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Above: Students working in the Field and Fork Student Gardens at the University of Florida. Part of creating a sustainable food culture is appreciating the labor and resources that go into food production. UF/IFAS Photo by Amy Stuart

At the University of Florida's Innovation Academy, students are challenged to come up with creative, inventive solutions to some of our toughest problems.

This year, the freshman class was tasked with developing a business concept or invention that responded to the issue of food waste. As the campus food system coordinator and part of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, I was invited to talk to some of these students about their ideas and probe their thinking.

Needless to say, this was a group of very smart, very talented young people. But as I listened to them talk about their ideas, I began to notice a trend that worried me.

It's not that their ideas were unrealistic. For example, one student proposed a composting device people could install in their homes and use like any other appliance, an approach I thought was both clever and practical.

The problem was that they all assumed that waste was inevitable and that all we can do is figure out what to do with it. They weren't asking themselves how they could reduce the amount of waste produced in the first place.

When I pointed this out, some of the students got excited. Others looked daunted, struggling to imagine a world in which food waste wasn't a given.

This isn't to say that composting or participating in food drives are bad things to do. These efforts are a great step toward sustainability and food security. In our campus food program, Field and Fork, we embrace composting in our student garden, and we ask our community to donate extra food to our on-campus food pantry.

But these efforts are a response to food waste and don't necessarily stop it from happening.

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Above: Student volunteers learn not only how to grow their own food, but also how to manage the gardens' operations. UF/IFAS Photo by Tyler Jones

I encouraged the students to think about how food is often wasted as a result of our preference for beauty and abundance. I asked the students to visualize how fresh fruits and vegetables, for instance, apples, are typically displayed in stores--hundreds of shiny apples, all the same color, size and shape.

The store may not sell all those apples, and the ones not sold may be thrown out. But a mountain of fruit conveys abundance, and we're attracted to abundance. A display of only a few dozen apples is underwhelming, even suspicious. If given the choice, we'd likely choose an apple from the big pile over one from the small pile, even if the apples themselves were identical.

As a class time drew to a close, the students and I thought about how we could tap into this preference for abundance in a way that doesn't lead to wasted food.

One way to reduce food waste may be to offer people, particularly young people, a chance to be part of food production.

As consumers buying broccoli at the store, we only know the end product--we may not even know what a broccoli plant looks like. But when a student at the Field and Fork Student Gardens grows a broccoli plant from seed, she not only understands where her food comes from but also gains an appreciation for all the resources--energy, labor, time, water--that go into producing it.

Understanding how an apple or a head of broccoli is produced may be one way to recognize the vast abundance already embedded in our food.

-- 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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Radar tracking reveals the 'life stories' of bumblebees as they forage for food
Scientists have tracked the flight paths of a group of bumblebees throughout their entire lives to find out how they explore their environment and search for food.
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American Crocodiles on Florida Bay

Nick Scobel posted a photo:

Crocodylus acutus

A pair of recent hatchlings take their first steps into the world in a remote estuary of Florida Bay in south Florida. Because of long term conservation efforts, this species was downgraded from Endangered to Threatened on the Endangered Species list in 2007. Today, more than 1,500 wild crocs are estimated to inhabit south Florida. Long term conservation and management plans are essential for the long term survival of this species moving forward.

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London at Sunset

Waterford_Man posted a photo:

Over The Shard

Thanks for all the views, Please check out my other photos and albums.

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Photos of the Week: 7/30-8/5 (35 photos)

Scenes from Rio as the Olympics are set to begin, wildfires in Greece, horses at a McDonald's Drive-thru in Spain, the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany, fireflies in Mexico, a bear atop a New Mexico garbage truck, and much more.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds Kellen Campbell of Denver, right, and Evelyn Keane, of Castle Rock, Colorado, during a campaign rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on July 29, 2016. (Evan Vucci / AP)

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Towards Deptford Strand

DaveLevy posted a photo:

the clouds come in

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london-29

The Collecting Traveler posted a photo:

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london-25

The Collecting Traveler posted a photo:

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Get Thee to a Hospital

This story originally appeared on the Conversation and is reproduced here with permission.

A report published in May from researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine claims that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S., behind only heart disease and cancer.

According to the researchers, medical errors account for 251,454 U.S. deaths each year—and they regard this figure as an underestimate.

That's the sort of finding that makes headlines. Indeed, you might have read about this report in the newspaper or even seen it reported on the evening news.

But as we'll argue, the methods the researchers used to draw this conclusion are flawed, and that means the conclusion that medical error is the third leading cause of death is highly questionable.

When a report like this gets broad media coverage, it can foster unwarranted mistrust of medicine, which could prevent people from seeking needed care—a concern for everyone who takes care of patients.

A medical error can be defined as a decision or action that results in patient harm, one that experts agree should have been made differently given the information available at the time. But applying such a definition in reviewing patient records is fraught with difficulty.

The study's authors argue that death certificates should be redesigned to recognize that more deaths are attributable to medical error. That's a reasonable suggestion. But the implication of many media reports that these findings prove hundreds of thousands of people are dying each year due to medical errors is highly problematic.

First, the authors of the Johns Hopkins report did not collect any new data. Instead, they based their conclusions on studies performed by other authors. There is nothing wrong with that, in principle.

But in this case, the results are highly misleading because they are based on large extrapolations from very small data sets: The authors based their conclusions on four studies that included a total of only 35 deaths attributable to medical error—out of nearly 4,000 hospital admissions. Extrapolating from 35 deaths to a population of 320 million is quite a leap.

In addition, these studies frequently do a poor job of distinguishing between adverse events and errors. They are not the same thing.

An adverse event is defined as any undesirable outcome after a drug or treatment is administered to a patient. Every medical test and therapy, from antibiotics to surgery, is associated with some risk of an adverse outcome. Adverse events can include death, although that is rare. While every adverse outcome is regrettable, it does not prove that an error was made—that based on what was known at the time, a medical professional should have made a different decision or acted in a different way.

Physicians typically cannot know in advance which patients will experience such reactions, so attributing such deaths to error is misleading.

There is another problem with the Hopkins report: Two of the four studies it draws on use Medicare data, which generally include patients advanced in years, in relatively poor health, and being treated in the hospital. Sad to say, many such patients are at substantially increased risk of death to begin with. Many will die during their hospitalization no matter how well they are cared for. To attribute such deaths to error is to fail to account for the inevitability of death.

In fact, one of the studies on which the Hopkins report is based even includes a prominent correction factor. The author estimates the number of deaths due to medical error at 210,000. Then, based on the fact that the tools used to identify errors are imperfect, the author chooses to double his estimate of the number of deaths due to error to 420,000.

The sort of medical chart review used in these studies is radically different from caring for patients. The uncertainty and stress associated with caring for the very sickest patients are often invisible to hindsight. Seriously adverse patient outcomes are associated with a greater tendency to blame someone. When a patient has died, we want someone to be responsible even if every action taken appeared justifiable at the time.

This isn't the first study to try to assess how often medical errors can lead to death. Other studies paint a very different picture of the number of deaths attributable to error.

In one study responding to claims of very high death rates due to medical error, physicians reviewed 111 deaths in Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals by attempting to determine whether such deaths were preventable with “optimal care.” VA patients are generally older and sicker than the U.S. population, and thus somewhat comparable to studies based on Medicare data. Also, by using “optimal care,” the study may catch even more deaths than the “medical error” standards, resulting in a tendency to overestimate the number of deaths due to error.

At first, the researchers estimated that 23 percent of deaths could have been prevented. But when they were asked whether patients could have left the hospital alive, this number dropped to 6 percent. Finally, when the additional criterion of “3 months of good cognitive health after discharge” was added, the number dropped to 0.5 percent. Preventable deaths should be viewed in context, and there is a big difference between preventing death and restoring good health.

Applying the rates from the VA study to U.S. hospital admission data, medical error would drop down to No. 7 of the top 10 causes of death in the United States. Applying the additional criterion of three months of good cognitive health, medical error would not even rank in the top 20. Of course, doing so runs the same risks as the Johns Hopkins study; namely, extrapolating from a small study to the entire U.S. population.

To produce a truly balanced account of medicine's role in causing death, it would be necessary to account not only for the risks but also the benefits of medical care. Many patients with heart disease, cancer ,and diabetes whose deaths such studies attribute to medical error would not even be alive in the first place without medical treatment, where its benefits vastly outweigh its risks.

Looking at medicine from this point of view, we are fortunate to be living in an era of unsurpassed medical capabilities, when the profession is doing more to promote health and prolong life than at any time in the past.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that such studies overestimate the role of medical error is that the fact that, when causes of death are ranked by authoritative organizations such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, medical error is not even included in the top 10. Would adding medical error to death certificates change this? We doubt it.

There is no doubt that mistakes occur in medicine every day, and if we take appropriate steps, error rates can be reduced. But inflated estimates of the number of deaths associated with error do nothing to advance understanding and may in fact make many patients more reluctant to seek care when they need it. A blinkered focus on error without corresponding accounts of medicine's benefits contributes to a distorted understanding of medicine's role in health and disease.

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American Crocodile

Nick Scobel posted a photo:

Crocodylus acutus

A hatchling explores a mangrove estuary on a remote key in south Florida.

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Technology that Could Turn the Tide on Climate Change: Clean Coal Technology
New technology is required to make meaningful progress on climate change. This column will focus on one of those options: making coal power greener.

Coal will be a part of the international energy equation for decades to come. While domestic coal consumption is decreasing, worldwide consumption is still trending upwards. For many regions, coal is a plentiful, inexpensive feedstock and it is often the only option available for energy generation. Any pragmatic approach to attacking the global problem of climate change must include a way for developing economies to continue to use coal in an environmentally sustainable way.

Researchers are exploring several options to reduce emissions from burning coal. One approach is pre-combustion capture which separates the CO2 after gasifying the coal. It is less expensive and more efficient to capture the carbon dioxide on the front-end of the process than to add CO2 capture equipment on the back-end of a traditional power plant.

Another alternative is burning coal in recirculated flue gas and oxygen rather than air. This changes the chemistry of the emissions, eliminates the nitrogen, and recycles most of the CO2 so that it is not emitted.

Industry and government have invested in research, demonstrations and pilot projects to test these technologies. Depending on the results it could be a real game changer for power generation.

-- 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 Climate Post: New York Joins Handful of Other States with Ambitious Clean Energy Targets
By 2030, half of the energy produced in the state of New York will come from renewables, according to a new policy adopted Monday by the state's public service commission. The move is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels (80 percent by 2050) and to attract billions in clean energy investment.

"New York has taken bold action to become a national leader in the clean energy economy and is taking concrete, cost-effective steps today to safeguard this state's environment for decades to come," said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. "This Clean Energy Standard shows you can generate the power necessary for supporting the modern economy while combatting climate change. Make no mistake, this is a very real threat that continues to grow by the day and I urge all other states to join us in this fight for our very future."

The plan calls for New York to retain its nuclear reactors--though The Washington Post reports that those facilities don't count as part of the 50 percent renewables target. According to New York regulators, doing so might cost $965 million over two years but could lead to net benefits of $4 billion due to avoided carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution. While supporters of this provision applaud New York's effort to retain its emissions-free nuclear generation, opponents are likely to challenge the nuclear subsidies on the grounds they are discriminatory, hurt markets, and intrude on federal authority.

New York is not the first state to announce an ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target. In April 2015, California announced it planned to cut those emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels in the same time frame with renewables increases. Like California, New York plans to phase in its renewables increase; 31 percent of its energy is to come from renewables by 2021 and 50 percent by 2030. Those targets are meant to give utilities and clean energy companies time to develop their business models.

The only states with higher renewables standards are Vermont, which set a target of 75 percent renewable power by 2032, and Hawaii, which set a target of 100 percent renewable power by 2045.

White House to Federal Agencies: Consider Climate Change Impacts

In an action with broad implications for thousands of projects, including energy and mineral development on public lands, natural gas import and export facilities, and transportation projects, the Obama administration issued final guidance on how federal agencies should consider greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts when conducting reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (subscription).

"Focused and effective consideration of climate change in NEPA reviews will allow agencies to improve the quality of their decisions," the guidance states. "Identifying important interactions between a changing climate and the environmental impacts from a proposed action can help Federal agencies and other decision makers identify practicable opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve environmental outcomes, and contribute to safeguarding communities and their infrastructure against the effects of extreme weather events and other climate-related impacts."

The guidance, the product of a six-year effort by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, advises agencies to quantify projected greenhouse gas emissions of proposed federal actions whenever the necessary methodologies and data are available. It also encourages them to draw on their experience and expertise to determine the appropriate level and extent of quantitative or qualitative analysis required to comply with NEPA and to consider alternatives that would increase the climate-change resilience of the action and affected communities.

"From the public standpoint, we are now going to know what all of our decisions add up to in terms of impacting climate change," said Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the Council on Environmental Quality. "You can think of all the different federal decisions, and how they all add up. We have numbers where we can actually say, 'this is a huge decision, given the amount of greenhouse gases coming out of it.' And that gives the public a chance to really weigh in on decision-making."

Several media outlets pointed out that because the White House guidance is not a regulation, agencies are not legally bound to follow it.

Clean Power Plan Analysis: National Costs Low, State Costs Varied

Wednesday marked one year since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally rolled out the Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. Even with the February stay by the U.S. Supreme Court, which halted implementation of the plan pending resolution of legal challenges, some say the plan is having an impact while others are finding more reason to explore the legality of the rule (subscription).

Should the rule survive judicial review, a new paper by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions uses the Nicholas Institute's Dynamic Integrated Economy/Energy/Emissions Model to evaluate Clean Power Plan impacts on the U.S. generation mix, emissions, and industry costs. It indicates that industry trends are likely to make Clean Power Plan compliance relatively inexpensive, with cost increases of 0.1 to 1.0 percent. But policy costs can vary across states, which might lead to a patchwork of policies that, although in their own best interests, could impose additional costs nationally.

"The answer is not the same for everyone in terms of what's going to be the least-cost way for a particular state to approach this policy," said lead author and Nicholas Institute Senior Economist Martin Ross. "Nationally, it would make the most sense to have a broadly coordinated policy where you can take advantage of the usual economic [tools] to spread the cost reductions around and pick up the most cost-effective sources for reducing emissions."

Similar findings were presented at a conference of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. Because of lower-than-expected natural gas prices, renewable power, and extended federal tax credits for that power, the country as a whole is set to meet the Clean Power Plan's early goals, reports ClimateWire.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

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Regardless of Fierce Opposition, Rooftop Solar Is Unstoppable
As the Spanish saying goes, the sun is the poor man's blanket. And thanks to technology, it's also our heating system, air conditioner, refrigerator and a shinning spot that lights up our clean energy future.

The solar industry is the fastest growing sector of the US economy. It currently employs more than 200,000 workers, thousands of them Latinos, and double that of the coal mining industry. And for us Latinos, solar energy is a three-fold blessing.

"Since I had my rooftop solar panels installed last year, I spend less than half of what I used to pay for dirty energy," says Oscar Medina, a client of Solar City in Tucson, AZ. "It not only keeps my home cool in the Arizona desert, it also allows me to avoid using power from dirty coal."

And one of those thousands of Latino solar workers is Roberto "Bobby" Rosthenhousler, another Tucson resident, whose mother is from Los Mochis, Mexico. He enthusiastically supports solar.

"If you are Latino, this is a good choice," says Bobby, who installs panels for Net Zero Solar. "As long as the sun is there, we are going to have a job. I want to be a pioneer because there is only room to improve in this industry."

But dark clouds loom over solar --the backlash of public utilities. In the last four years, the explosive growth of rooftop solar has turned it into a severe threat to an archaic system based on a monopolistic model that heavily depends on dirty energy.

Take Arizona utility Tucson Electric Power (TEP), which owns, at least partly, four coal-burning plants, including the San Juan Generating Station in Northern New Mexico.

TEP is due to review its energy plan for the next few years, which presents it with the opportunity to drop at least a large part of its coal fleet and expand its clean, renewable energy portfolio. Alas, TEP plans to stick with the dirty coal plant, hike rates for its customers and damage Arizona's growing rooftop solar industry with new fees on solar customers such as Oscar.

Utilities across the country justify these rate hikes by arguing that rooftop solar clients continue relying on the electric grid without contributing their fair share to its maintenance. Study after study, however, indicates that rooftop solar reduces the stress and wear of the grid by using it less often. Furthermore, it limits the construction of expensive, dirty plants, thus substantially reducing coal pollution and the climate change it triggers.

These abusive practices may paint a bleak future for the rooftop solar industry. The clean energy progress, however, is unstoppable. A Cambridge University study indicates that photovoltaic solar panels will soon be more competitive than any fossil fuel energy. And this scares the living lights out of the energy dinosaurs.

"They need to let other environmentally friendly companies come in and provide a service that would especially benefit working-class families," says Oscar. "It's clear that utilities need to stop the pollution that makes people sick, especially us Latinos."

"My four-year-old is autistic," says Bobby. "And that's one other reason I went into clean energy. I worry about all those chemicals in the air affect my child. This is something I can give back to him."

No matter how hard the utilities try, you can't block the sun with an umbrella.

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How I Fell In Love With Ugly Food

While grocery shopping one day, I realized I'd spent close to 30 minutes just in the produce section, meticulously choosing the best-looking apples, bananas that were ripe, but not spotted, ears of corn with perfectly aligned kernels. I admit, I'm picky about my produce. But I bet I'm not the only one that rejects the slightest bruise, blemish or mark on my fruits and veggies.

How did we get this way? Could it be because we are living in a society where everything is filtered, where beauty is rewarded, where supermarkets reject foods that don't adhere to a certain standard, where everything is shiny and bright?

I've also seen how my pursuit of perfect produce has impacted my kids. When I pack their lunches, I make sure to include the plumpest tomatoes, crispest blueberries, cucumbers without any dents or scratches. But one day when my daughter refused to eat an avocado that was turning slightly brown, I knew I had to change my ways. I realized I was unconsciously raising my children to accept society's norms of perfection and that these perceptions can have a devastating impact on our environment.

In the U.S, up to 40 percent of food produced is wasted every year. Most of this waste ends up in landfills that create dangerous greenhouse gases. Around 20 percent of food waste is produced directly at the farm because this so-called ugly food may not meet certain cosmetic standards set by grocery stores, yet are still perfectly consumable. Meanwhile, 48 million Americans live in food-insecure households.

On a recent night in San Francisco, I attended a dinner party to raise awareness about this growing problem. The event was called the Salvage Supperclub and it is the brainchild of food waste activist Josh Treuhaft, who decided to create a unique, immersive experience as a conversation starter around food waste. It was an intimate gathering of 16 people dining on a table made from reclaimed wood, all within a cleared-out dumpster. The chef, Pesha Perlsweig, prepared a six course meal with food that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Perlsweig sourced some of the evening's ingredients from Imperfect Produce, a delivery subscription service that specifically sells “ugly” fruits and vegetables. Boxes of produce might contain organic crooked carrots or knobbly sweet potatoes for 30 to 50 percent of the price that one might pay at a traditional market.

I was blown away by Perlsweig's creative dishes made from food the industry considers trash including stuffed wilted kale, ugly eggplant and squash ratatouille, and a delectable banana doughnut made from the actual peel of a banana. Before each course, Perlsweig offered guests tidbits and tips about how we can reduce our food waste. Did you know that if you cut off the end of a limp carrot or celery stalk and place it in water it will become firm again?

After the evening's dinner, I became inspired to rethink the way I shop for and consume food, to embrace the imperfect, the ugly, the unique. My actions have inspired my daughter to think differently as well. One morning, while she was helping prepare her school lunch, I noticed her choosing a handful of cherry tomatoes with slight blemishes. “They're special,” she said.

Here's hoping these small changes in our perception might make a big impact on our world.

Watch more of Laura Ling's reports on Seeker. Follow her on Twitter @lauraling.

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Spider sharing isn't always caring: Colonies die when arachnids overshare food
Spiders living together in colonies of tens of thousands can go extinct from sharing food equitably, finds new research.
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Lab-reared maggots may save Darwin's famous finches
Researchers reveal how they used chicken blood to rear larvae of the fly Philornis downsi, an invasive species that parasitizes birds in the Galapagos Islands. The new method may be the first to effectively rear an avian blood-feeding fly from egg to adult in the absence of its host.
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Tim Profeta: The Climate Post: New York Joins Handful of Other States with Ambitious Clean Energy Targets
By 2030, half of the energy produced in the state of New York will come from renewables, according to a new policy adopted Monday by the state's publi...

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Sumatran Tiger On Danger

dptro posted a photo:

Sumatran Tiger habitat were pushed away by oil palm plantation and poacher.

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Joan Michelson: Energy & the Environment Positions in the 2016 Election - Dispatch from the 2016 Democratic National Convention
The Democratic and Republican platforms and their nominees' energy plans reflect complete opposite views. Here's a round-up of the differences, including excerpts from selected energy and environment events this week in Philadelphia where historic Philadelphia rolled out the red carpet and an analysis by top energy consultant, Peter Kelly- Detwiler* of Northbridge Energy.

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The Current State of Manufacturing Human Organs
Thirteen. The number of people that die each day waiting for a life-saving kidney transplant.

$5 billion. The cost to create a new drug.

$3 billion plus. The amount invested in engineered tissue and organ research by the Federal government in a three year period.

Zero. The number of organs currently being manufactured by US industries for transplant.

322,762,018. The number of Americans in 2016 that could benefit from the Department of Defense's new Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Manufacturing Innovation Institute (ATB-MII).

The Department of Defense has been interested in engineering organs, tissues and limbs for decades as a means of treating its wounded soldiers. The number of veterans in need of tissue repair and limb replacement has skyrocketed in the 21st century, due primarily to the recent and pervasive use of improvised explosive devices, coupled with dramatic improvements in body armor that save lives but not without sacrifice. Meanwhile, the need is equally as strong in the civilian world, where hundreds of thousands of Americans wait on organ transplant lists living day-by-day in fear of what the future holds.

Many wonder: "Why can't we manufacture organs TODAY?" The charge is not new, nor will it fade in the coming years. It rises from the halls of Congress. It mingles with tears in homes across our nation. It echoes down hospital hallways and lingers in operating rooms. As a DoD scientist working in the field of biofabrication and tissue engineering for over 15 years, I wake up every morning trying to answer that same question; trying to explain to my children, my colleagues, my friend whose husband is on his second and final kidney transplant--why can't we make faster and more substantive progress?

The answer, as is often the case in the world of science, is not so simple. The world is full of promising technologies. Stem cells. Bioprinters. Gels that simulate the biological and structural properties of human tissue. Sophisticated imaging and computer-aided design technologies. Why, then, do we not have manufacturing plants that churn out organs? We should be able to use these starting materials just as Henry Ford used steel, rubber, and assembly lines to create the first automobiles, right? Answers like "Biology is really complicated" and "Soft, living materials are just more difficult to build than computer chips and iPhones", don't resonate too well, especially when the need is so high.

Despite these challenges, progress is being made on all fronts. After decades of research, these technologies are maturing to the point where manufactured tissue is almost within reach. All that is needed is one big push.

Enter the Government's most recent investment, bringing at least $160 million to the table to accelerate tissue and organ development: the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Manufacturing Innovation Institute, or the ATB-MII for short, sponsored by the Manufacturing Technology Program within the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. The ATB-MII will pull emerging technologies into the industrial world--the world of manufacturing, automation and standardization. It will convene the best and brightest minds in the country across universities, small and large businesses, as well as local, state and federal governments, to identify, elevate, and synergize technologies. It will enable disruptive biofabrication tools, currently isolated in specialized laboratories across the country, to be inserted into manufacturing processes throughout diverse biotechnology sectors. It will enable biological starting materials and biofabrication tools to be standardized to the small- and mid-sized companies looking for a competitive edge. Ultimately, the ATB-MII will evolve into an enduring ecosystem that will accelerate the development to manufacture tissues, organs, and organ-based products.

Short-term products will emerge from the institute such as miniature tissues or organs, coined "organs-on-a-chip," that can be used to eliminate poorly performing drug candidates before they enter costly animal and human trials. These organs-on-a-chip will translate test results into the world of personalized medicine, helping speed up decision-making by clinicians looking to determine the most effective and least dangerous treatments for critically-ill patients.The industry is poised to revolutionize the way new drugs are discovered, as well as the way we engineer tissues and organs.

The ATB-MII is the path to create definable tools, products and standards that will have tangible

Dr. Ringeisen will serve as the DoD's Chief Technology Officer for the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication MII, which is currently under solicitation. He also serves as the Head of the Bioenergy and Biofabrication Section at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and ORGANIZE, a non-profit looking to end the organ donation crisis by identifying and building on opportunities for improvement through technology, advocacy, and policy. Learn more at ORGANIZE.org.

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A Closer Scientific Look at Antibacterial Soap Unearths Some Problems
Do antibacterial soaps do more harm than good? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Tirumalai Kamala, Immunologist, Ph.D., Mycobacteriology, on Quora:

Over the years, the consensus that the harm caused by antibacterial soaps outweighs the benefits has indeed coalesced. But to understand how antibacterial soaps could harm, we first need to understand how they differ from regular soaps. Also referred to as antimicrobial or antiseptic soaps, they contain chemicals that regular soaps don't.

Many liquid soaps labeled antibacterial contain triclosan, a synthetic compound, specifically a phenylether or chlorinated bisphenol. While the US FDA classifies it as a Class III drug, i.e., a compound with high solubility and low permeability, triclosan is also a pesticide. Triclocarban is another common chemical found in antibacterial soaps. Many of the concerns about triclosan also apply to triclocarban (1).

Since it appeared on the scene in 1972, triclosan has steadily permeated through the consumer landscape such that it's practically ubiquitous today (see lists below from 1 and 2).

"Screen

Triclosan is so ubiquitous it's even found embedded in medical devices such as catheters and sutures to prevent infections (3).

As for its beneficial effects, a 2015 study compared the bactericidal effects of plain versus triclosan-containing soaps in conditions that mimic hand washing, and found no difference in their ability to reduce bacterial numbers during a 20-second exposure (4). In other words, dubious benefit when used for routine hand washing under normal circumstances, i.e., only washing hands for a few seconds. After all, most of us don't scrub as though preparing to do surgery every time we wash our hands.

How Triclosan Inhibits/Kills Microbes

In vitro studies show triclosan can stop bacteria growing at low concentrations (bacteriostatic), and kill them at high concentrations (bactericidal). It also has some activity against some fungi (5) and even parasites such as those that cause malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, and toxoplasmosis, Toxoplasma gondii (6).

Triclosan is able to target many different types of bacteria by blocking the active site for an enzyme essential for bacterial fatty acid biosynthesis (7, 8). Blocking the enzyme enoyl-acyl carrier protein reductase, triclosan prevents bacteria from synthesizing fatty acids, which they need for their cell membranes and for reproduction.

Problems With Triclosan

I. Triclosan selects for antibiotic resistance

As widespread triclosan use increased, labs increasingly started finding cross-resistance to antibiotics. Under selection pressure from triclosan, bacteria mutate to develop resistance mechanisms to it, which end up bestowing antibiotic resistance as well. In other words, studies show triclosan selects for antibiotic resistance (see table below from 9).

"Screen

II. Discharged widely into the environment, triclosan can affect biomass such as algae and bacterial communities

Since it's widely used in such a diverse array of products, triclosan ends up in soil, ground water, and municipal wastewater treatment plants. Such plants require proper functioning of microbes to break down sewage. Triclosan can inhibit methane production in wastewater plant anaerobic digesters as well as select for multi-drug resistance in such bacterial communities (10). Triclosan's effects persist even beyond because it's discharged from wastewater treatment plants as effluent. Certain algae species in the vicinity of such plants have been found to be very sensitive to triclosan (11, 12). Triclosan also affects bacterial communities in rivers (13). Potential environmental risk of triclosan becomes even more relevant in areas of water scarcity where it doesn't get sufficiently diluted.

III. Triclosan can alter gut microbiota in fishes and rodents, potentially alter human microbiota, and even promote tumors in rodents

Triclosan could profoundly (14) and stably (12) alter fish gut microbiota as well as those of baby rats (15).
While so far triclosan doesn't appear to affect human gut microbiome, the data are far from conclusive, being based on just one study with 7 volunteers (16). On the other hand, a study on nasal secretions from 90 healthy adults found a positive correlation between presence of triclosan in nasal secretions and nasal colonization by Staphylococcus aureus (17). This suggests triclosan indeed has the potential to influence and even alter human microbiota.
One mouse model even found triclosan capable of promoting liver tumors (18).

IV. Triclosan can disrupt hormonal function

Triclosan was found to disrupt thyroid hormone-associated gene expression and altered the rate of frog metamorphosis (19). It could also disrupt thyroid (20, 21), estrogen (22), and testosterone (23) function in rats.

V. Triclosan bans

Given the increasing litany of concerns about triclosan's deleterious effects on the physiology of a wide variety of species, which may also increasingly include humans, several governments are either considering banning it or have already done so.

In March 2010, the European Union banned triclosan from any products that may come into contact with food (2).
On 16 May, 2014, the US state of Minnesota banned the sale of triclosan-containing cleaning products (soaps), giving manufacturers time until early 2017 to phase them out (24).
As of 2015, Health Canada was considering banning triclosan. It's estimated that ~1730 products, including cosmetics, health, and personal care products containing triclosan were available in Canada in 2011 (1).
The US FDA is mulling its regulation (25), with a report due in September 2016.

Bibliography

1. Dhillon, Gurpreet Singh, et al. "Triclosan: current status, occurrence, environmental risks and bioaccumulation potential." International journal of environmental research and public health 12.5 (2015): 5657-5684. Triclosan: Current Status, Occurrence, Environmental Risks and Bioaccumulation Potential

2. Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics. "Triclosan." White Paper prepared by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) (2011). http://emerald.tufts.edu/med/apu...

3. Stickler, David James, G. Ll Jones, and Allan Denver Russell. "Control of encrustation and blockage of Foley catheters." The Lancet 361.9367 (2003): 1435-1437. http://carambola.usc.edu/Biofilm...

4. Kim, S. A., et al. "Bactericidal effects of triclosan in soap both in vitro and in vivo." Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (2015): dkv275.

5. Vischer, W. A., and J. Regös. "Antimicrobial spectrum of Triclosan, a broad-spectrum antimicrobial agent for topical application." Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie, Parasitenkunde, Infektionskrankheiten und Hygiene. Erste Abteilung Originale. Reihe A: Medizinische Mikrobiologie und Parasitologie 226.3 (1974): 376.

6. McLeod, Rima, et al. "Triclosan inhibits the growth of Plasmodium falciparum and Toxoplasma gondii by inhibition of Apicomplexan Fab I." International journal for parasitology 31.2 (2001): 109-113. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

7. McMurry, Laura M., Margret Oethinger, and Stuart B. Levy. "Triclosan targets lipid synthesis." Nature 394.6693 (1998): 531-532.

8. Levy, Colin W., et al. "Molecular basis of triclosan activity." Nature 398.6726 (1999): 383-384.

9. Schweizer, Herbert P. "Triclosan: a widely used biocide and its link to antibiotics." FEMS microbiology letters 202.1 (2001): 1-7. http://femsle.oxfordjournals.org...

10. McNamara, Patrick J., Timothy M. LaPara, and Paige J. Novak. "The impacts of triclosan on anaerobic community structures, function, and antimicrobial resistance." Environmental science & technology 48.13 (2014): 7393-7400. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

11. Reiss, Richard, et al. "An ecological risk assessment for triclosan in lotic systems following discharge from wastewater treatment plants in the United States." Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 21.11 (2002): 2483-2492.

12. Lawrence, J. R., et al. "Resilience and recovery: The effect of triclosan exposure timing during development, on the structure and function of river biofilm communities." Aquatic Toxicology 161 (2015): 253-266. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

13. Ricart, Marta, et al. "Triclosan persistence through wastewater treatment plants and its potential toxic effects on river biofilms." Aquatic Toxicology 100.4 (2010): http://www.clipmedia.net/galera/...

14. Narrowe, Adrienne B., et al. "Perturbation and restoration of the fathead minnow gut microbiome after low-level triclosan exposure." Microbiome 3.1 (2015): 1. Microbiome

15. Hu, Jianzhong, et al. "Effect of postnatal low-dose exposure to environmental chemicals on the gut microbiome in a rodent model." Microbiome 4.1 (2016): 1. Microbiome

16. Poole, Angela C., et al. "Crossover Control Study of the Effect of Personal Care Products Containing Triclosan on the Microbiome." mSphere 1.3 (2016): e00056-15. http://msphere.asm.org/content/m...

17. Syed, Adnan K., et al. "Triclosan promotes Staphylococcus aureus nasal colonization." MBio 5.2 (2014): e01015-13. Triclosan Promotes Staphylococcus aureus Nasal Colonization

18. Yueh, Mei-Fei, et al. "The commonly used antimicrobial additive triclosan is a liver tumor promoter." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.48 (2014): 17200-17205. http://www.pnas.org/content/111/...

19. Veldhoen, Nik, et al. "The bactericidal agent triclosan modulates thyroid hormone-associated gene expression and disrupts postembryonic anuran development." Aquatic Toxicology 80.3 (2006): 217-227. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

20. Crofton, Kevin M., et al. "Short-term in vivo exposure to the water contaminant triclosan: evidence for disruption of thyroxine." Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology 24.2 (2007): 194-197. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

21. Zorrilla, Leah M., et al. "The effects of triclosan on puberty and thyroid hormones in male Wistar rats." Toxicological Sciences 107.1 (2009): 56-64. The Effects of Triclosan on Puberty and Thyroid Hormones in Male Wistar Rats

22. Stoker, Tammy E., Emily K. Gibson, and Leah M. Zorrilla. "Triclosan exposure modulates estrogen-dependent responses in the female wistar rat." Toxicological Sciences (2010): kfq180. Triclosan exposure modulates estrogen-dependent responses in the female Wistar rat

23. Kumar, Vikas, et al. "Alteration of testicular steroidogenesis and histopathology of reproductive system in male rats treated with triclosan." Reproductive Toxicology 27.2 (2009): 177-185.

24. SF 2192 Status in the Senate for the 88th Legislature (2013

25. Kuehn, Bridget M. "FDA pushes makers of antimicrobial soap to prove safety and effectiveness." JAMA 311.3 (2014): 234-234.

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Why We Usually Have No Idea We're Getting a Sunburn
Why is it so hard to tell you're getting a sunburn? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Joshua Engel on Quora:

The reddening of sunburn isn't caused by the sun itself, but by red blood rushing in to heal the damage. Blood vessels swell in response to the damage, a bit like a bruise. That extra blood causes the skin to appear red.

It also causes the skin to feel hot to the touch. Ordinarily, the skin is a few degrees cooler than your internal body temperature, because it's on the surface radiating heat, and evaporation from sweat cools the skin. The extra blood (heated to fully 37 degrees C in the core of the body) warms the skin up, making it feel hot.

Like a bruise, it doesn't appear immediately. The damage is done, but it takes the body's systems a while to react to it. Thus, you get redder over the course of hours or even a day.

Turning brown is another effect, as the melanocytes react to the damage by producing more melanin. This happens slowly, and takes a couple of days to produce noticeable browning. The red isn't really "fading to brown:" as the damage heals, the swelling shrinks, and the reddening decreases, around the same time as the melanin has accumulated to the point that you can see it.

You can't feel the damage as it's being done because it's very slow, and it doesn't trigger the pain nerves. The energy is being accumulated in the cells, but it's not making you all that much warmer. You will feel warm, but you'll just attribute it to the overall warmth of the day. (If you manage to be out on a glacier, you may well notice that your skin feels warmer than expected. That's a warning, one that I've ignored to my peril.)

The damage is the same as caused by a regular burn from a fire, but it happens over hours rather than seconds. You need to be aware of the sun (which can cause burns even when the temperature is cold) and not depend on your body to warn you.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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Break out the Elder Scrolls: Skyrmion characters seek storage possibilities

Durham Uni-based adventurers given gold* for their efforts

Durham University quantum physicists have been funded to run a Skyrmion Project involving other British universities, which, among other aims, could mean less electricity was needed to power the world.…

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You know what would really make your metamaterial pop? 6th century Japan tech

Science by a 1,000 cuts: Power of kirigami adds 3D

Engineers at the University of Bristol have applied the traditional Japanese art of Kirigami - where paper is folded and cut to construct intricate models - to create a new shape-changing metamaterial.…

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Wainwright prize goes to Amy Liptrot's 'searingly honest' The Outrun

Author's account of returning to the wilds of the Orkneys following personal disaster in London wins unanimous acclaim from judges

The Outrun, Amy Liptrot's account of reconnecting with nature in Orkney after leaving a troubled life in London, has won this year's Wainwright for the best UK nature and travel writing.

The Outrun saw off five other acclaimed examples of the boom genre including Common Ground by Rob Cowen, The Fish Ladder by Katharine Norbury, A Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks, Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane and The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy.

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Jacques Boucher de Perthes Scientist of the Day Jacques...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Boucher_de_Cr%C3%A8vec%C5%93ur_de_Perthes#/media/File:Biface_de_Boucher_de_Perthes_MHNT.jpg

http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/ref/collection/human/id/301

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Boucher_de_Cr%C3%A8vec%C5%93ur_de_Perthes#/media/File:Boucher_de_Perthes.jpg

Jacques Boucher de Perthes Scientist of the Day

Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, a French customs official and amateur antiquarian, died Aug. 5, 1868, at the age of 79.

Love Through the Ages by Алексей Романовский

Алексей Романовский: Photos

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Golden Hour A380.

spencer.wilmot posted a photo:

Ready to push at Terminal 4.

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Front by Wesley Wilquin aka belk

Front by Wesley Wilquin aka belk

Sunset

Wesley Wilquin aka belk: Photos

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Evening Pushback At Heathrow.

spencer.wilmot posted a photo:

China Southern 787 at Terminal 4.

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Sunset Over Westminster

The Narratographer posted a photo:

Well, I decided to process a lot of the images from my trips across Europe over the last few years. Recently, I haven't done many landscapes and cityscapes, so Ive decided to get back into them.
The main reason for this, is the fact that my best friend, Anthony, has decided to move across the pond to Canada. Best friends since we were 11, he was my travel companion, my ally and my source of inspiration. We spent most of our adult life travelling across the UK, and across Europe, having fun and taking photos. For all those years, we were inseparable, the closest two friends can ever be.
Like I say, a year ago, he decided to move to Canada, to be with a girl he met on Facebook. Now, they have a child and are married...and I haven't seen him since. So all of these images are dedicated to my distant friend. He was with me when I took all of them, and without him, Id have never have taken them. So I just thought that I would post these images, as lately Ive been feeling very nostalgic and sad that we don't get the chance to do these sorts of things anymore. so thanks Ant, for being the best friend anyone could ever wish for. I miss you.
Anyway, I hope you like the images.

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r0B0t: Project Murphy Is Microsoft's Latest Artificial Intelligence Robot, And It Wants To Photoshop Pictures For You

Microsoft's recent Artificial Intelligence robot Tay didn't exactly make headlines for the right reasons, after Twitter users somehow managed to trick it into becoming a Nazi. But the computer giant is probably hoping their latest venture will steer clear of any controversy.

Project Murphy is described as a “robot with imagination” - you can talk to it through your Facebook Messenger app and ask it to dream up funny pictures for you.

For example, you could ask Murphy “What if Donald Trump was a fish?” and it would automatically edit the presidential candidate's head onto a sea creature.

Naturally, people are devoting a lot of time to finding the funniest possible combinations.

Here are a few of our favourites:

My best masterpiece so far with #ProjectMurphy. pic.twitter.com/G53KFmaWbE
— Jeremy Nielsen (@Jnn575) July 12, 2016

Идеально #projectmurphy pic.twitter.com/BoB753SQ5z
— Maxim Vakulich (@vma392) July 8, 2016

Having way too much fun with #projectmurphy @ThePoke pic.twitter.com/hpgAjF2fC9
— Tom Nightingale (@Tomn_1986) August 5, 2016

What if Davey Cameron is a pie? #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/ySfvvewwLK
— Ryan Barrell (@RyanBarrell) August 5, 2016

Oh dear. #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/O1pNGzwpTc
— Jason Wilson (@WhizzoUK) August 5, 2016

#ProjectMurphy is easily the best thing Microsoft has done in recent memory. pic.twitter.com/qVR9uBEeMd
— Matt Kremske (@Kremdog28) July 10, 2016

Rather happy with my first question to #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/5s1iHbaOQu
— Jason Wilson (@WhizzoUK) August 5, 2016

#projectmurphy pic.twitter.com/vsNhYGbqEy
— Chris Dyson (@ChrisLDyson) August 5, 2016

"Do you ever sit back and ask yourself what you're doing with your life?" - Saru, 2k16 #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/jGj1mGnmRX
— Animus (@cinderskull) July 25, 2016

#projectmurphy what if Donald Trump was Miley Cyrus? pic.twitter.com/OEPoQULMeb
— Jack (@JackMeeOff) July 22, 2016

#ProjectMurphy is amazing pic.twitter.com/OyTsMcPKHt
— Jeremy Nielsen (@Jnn575) July 12, 2016

Although they don't always work out:

#projectmurphy What if Sunderland had an airport - I'm genuinely not sure how to respond to this pic.twitter.com/rt3jGO3EWn
— Chris Swinton (@Keawyeds) August 5, 2016

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Big unknowns: what is consciousness? - podcast

What does it mean to be you? And how can science unpick the age-old debates around conscious experience? Join us for a journey into the unknown

Ever since Descartes famously split the world into “mind” and “‘matter”, the debate amongst philosophers and thinkers about conscious experience has raged. And with recent advances in brain imaging technologies, scientists now offer a new and exciting viewpoint on this quintessential human phenomenon. But are we any closer to revealing the mechanisms behind it? And can science offer anything other than objective measures? Under the watchful gaze of the cognitive neuroscientist Professor Anil Seth, Ian and Nicola delve into the murky world of consciousness in an attempt to unravel its mysteries. Along the way we meet UCL's Dr Steve Fleming and Professor Christof Koch from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, to hear how experimental practice and theory are tackling this problem head on.

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Book Readers Live Longer Lives, According to New Study from Yale University

"Urval

Image by Johannes Jansson, via Wikimedia Commons

What are the keys to longevity? If you ask Dan Buettner, the author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest, he'd list nine key factors. They range from slow down and don't stress out, to have a clear purpose in life, to eat mainly plant based foods and put family first. Nowhere on his list, however, does he suggest sitting down and reading good books.

And yet a new study by researchers at Yale University's School of Public Health indicates that people who read books (but not so much magazines and newspapers) live two years longer, on average, than those who don't read at all. Becca R. Levy, a professor of epidemiology at Yale, is quoted in The New York Times as saying, “People who report as little as a half-hour a day of book reading had a significant survival advantage over those who did not read.” “And the survival advantage remained after adjusting for wealth, education, cognitive ability and many other variables.” Precisely how book reading contributes to increased longevity is not spelled out. You can read the abstract for the new study here.

via NYTimes

Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps.

Study Finds That Reading Tolstoy & Other Great Novelists Can Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

New Study: Immersing Yourself in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflammation & Increase Life Expectancy

Book Readers Live Longer Lives, According to New Study from Yale University is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Can Young Blood Make You Live Longer?

Soooo … I heard Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, age 48, is using the blood of twentysomethings to stay young.

Actually, he's not doing that yet. Reportedly, he's considered receiving blood transfusions from younger people, which he hopes might reverse signs of aging, but he hasn't actually said anything publicly beyond hint that he might be game.

Wait, is that even possible? Sucking in young blood to make yourself younger?

Let's back up a few steps. There's been some exciting, preliminary research in mice that suggests there's something about young blood. In these experiments, scientists have stitched together a young mouse and old mouse so that their circulatory systems are pumping the same blood through each other's veins. This makes tissue stronger in the older mice: repairs spinal cord damage, prompts new brain cells to grow, and “even makes their fur shinier,” writes journalist Megan Scudellari for Nature in a great primer on the research's history.

When these experiments were done in the 1950s, mice sometimes reacted by trying to bite each other's heads off. It was not great. But in modern experiments, they are carefully selected for compatibility and hang out beforehand, which seems to help. They seem to behave normally while sewn together and can even be separated afterward. The older mice might be healthier for it but as Scudellari writes, “no one has convincingly shown that young blood lengthens lives, and there is no promise that it will.”

You'd have to be physically stitched to another person and receiving their blood for this to work?

No, no, obviously not, though that is the method that's shown most of the best results in mice. There's some evidence that repeated injections of plasma will work the same way, too: A 2014 study showed that they improved cognitive function in aging mice. But we would not stitch humans together, no.

Well, what are we doing to humans then?

We're basically trying to figure out if any of this translates to humans. This is all very preliminary, but there are actually a couple companies trying out various methods of the idea that young blood can reduce disease in older patients. Stanford researcher Tony Wyss-Coray, who has long been stitching together mice, founded a company called Alkahest and is carrying out a clinical trial on 18 people with Alzheimer's to see if plasma injections can improve their cognitive function—and, if so, which parts of the plasma are doing the work. The general understanding is that the proteins in young blood have some sort of restorative property, though no one quite understands the mechanism that makes young blood useful.

Another company, Ambrosia LLC, founded by a recently minted Stanford MD, is booting up a clinical trial for anyone over 35 who is aging (aka anyone over the age of 35). (It's this company that attracted the attention of Thiel's health adviser, though there's no sign that Thiel himself has enrolled in the trial.)

In the Ambrosia trial, 600 participants will each receive a liter-and-a-half of blood from someone under 25 over the course of a couple days. Before and after the trial, Ambrosia will analyze various measurements of the participants' health to see if they can assess any change from the infusion.

Where do they get the young blood?

They buy it from blood banks, just like any other hospital would.

OK, I guess that's not that weird. So, I'd like to live longer. How do I sign up?

Whoa, slow down. This will probably not actually extend people's lives. It's not even always effective in mice. In a trial that involved injecting rodents with plasma over the course of 16 weeks, the mice didn't live any longer than a control group inject ed with saline. There isn't enough research done in humans to know if the small benefits to tissue health transfers, and we do know that mice are not perfect foils for the human body.

“There's just no clinical evidence [that the treatment will be beneficial], and you're basically abusing people's trust and the public excitement around this,” Wyss-Coray told Science magazine of the Ambrosia trial. (Yes, his company could be considered a competitor to Ambrosia, though it doesn't seem like he's selling anything yet.)

Ambrosia's founder Jesse Karmazin, on the other hand, tells me that he finds the evidence from mouse studies along with encouraging results from the few small studies that have been conducted in humans, like Wyss-Coray's, enough to justify his trial.

At any rate, transfusions are very safe when properly supervised, so it's not like he's trying some experimental procedure that could do harm. He is, however, charging participants $8,000.

Seems pretty fair for a shot at longer life, no?

Well, normally, in clinical trials, people are paid for their time and participation, not the other way around. This is actually pretty weird. So weird, in fact, that it's unlikely this trial will result in reputable results able to tell us anything meaningful about blood transfusions.

Taking money from participants is referred to as pay-to-play. While a handful of researchers are trying it, it's rife with ethical issues, many of which University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist Ezekiel J. Emanuel (and co-authors) outlined in an editorial for Science Translational Medicine last year. (They also noted that the method has been favored by “unscrupulous companies and health facilities” looking to turn a profit.)

The reason why this is suspect is because clinical trials are setup to test a treatment as objectively as possible. In fact, the highest standard of clinical trial is one that is placebo-controlled and conducted double-blind. Participants are recruited based on specific criteria—for example, if they all have a disease and are within a certain age range. These participants are randomly assigned to different groups. One of these groups receives a placebo (a sugar pill instead of a drug), so researchers can understand what changes are attributable to the drug itself and what changes are attributable to the theater of the treatment. Patients are put in these groups randomly: Ideally, neither the patient nor the experimenter knows what kind of treatment they're receiving.

Isn't Ambrosia doing that?

Nope. In Ambrosia's trial, all patients appear to be getting the same treatment—there is no placebo set up, so there is nothing to blind. The thinking is that people shelling out eight grand won't accept the terms of a randomized treatment, and the possibility of receiving a mere placebo—the very backbone of a good clinical trial.

The terms of enrollment for Ambrosia's trial are also laughably general. I mean, 35-year-olds aren't exactly elderly. They aren't going to have any diseases associated with aging. As Harvard researcher Amy Wagers told Scudellari in Nature last year, most effective use of young blood will probably be for treating a specific disease, or helping elderly recover from surgery. It's hard to know what kind of measurable effect it might have on a—by all appearances spry—40-something like Thiel.

It also means that Ambrosia's sample is going to be skewed toward people who are can afford the treatment and who self-select to prioritize youth. There's no telling how this sample size may compare to the average person.

Maybe it's not a perfect clinical trial. But won't the people still get something out of it?

Honestly, who knows! The pay-to-play model is potentially very dishonest: Most clinical trials do not work out. This is how science goes. A clinical trial is an experiment, not a service. When scientists set it up like one, it puts patients in a position to be taken advantage of because the treatment being tested probably will not work.

Hmmm. But this is legal and everything?

Yes, technically it is. Blood transfusions are a common, Food and Drug Administrationapproved treatment, and Karmazin has a medical degree, so he can administer them at his discretion.

I asked Karmazin about some criticisms of the pay-to-play model. He wrote in an email that “patients frequently pay for off-label uses of medications, based on physician judgment.” That's true. But the doctor's judgement in this case is rather optimistic. The price is also pretty steep.

I think I'm going to sit this one out and see what they come up with.

That seems best.

What else I can do to live longer?

There are a number of actions you can take that have been shown to extend lifespan, such as eating more vegetables, exercising regularly, or not smoking.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

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Sunset from Royal Hill - Day 4

Joe.Gibson posted a photo:

Part of a project I have set myself to upload a photo for each day for the two weeks that I am off work.
Went to try and catch some shots of the sunset from Royal Hill in Greenwich.

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Windows by Konstantin Gribov

Windows by Konstantin Gribov

Moscow, July 2016

Konstantin Gribov: Photos

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© chicheri by raquel lopez-chicheri

raquelchicheri.com

raquel lopez-chicheri: Photos

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St. Paul's Dome

crissudi posted a photo:

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London sunrise

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Work in progress

crissudi posted a photo:

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Sunrise on Thames

crissudi posted a photo:

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The Shard

crissudi posted a photo:

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Sunrise in London

crissudi posted a photo:

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Velvet Antlers

www.matthewcattellphotography.com posted a photo:

A Red Deer Stag in a misty meadow, photographed so that the low morning sun created a halo around its velvet-covered antlers.

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How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half?
Jack Baker answers this often-asked question

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Perlan 2: The glider that will slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the edge of space

Sailplane en route to Argentina for sky-scraping test flights

Euro airliner firm Airbus is sponsoring a glider capable of soaring to greater altitudes than the famous SR-71 Blackbird spy aircraft.…

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A physical feast
Mystified by modernist cuisine? Margaret Harris reviews a book that takes culinary physics "out of the lab and into your kitchen"

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A physical feast
Mystified by modernist cuisine? Margaret Harris reviews a book that takes culinary physics "out of the lab and into your kitchen"

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Reach in and touch objects in videos with 'Interactive Dynamic Video'

Full Text:

We learn a lot about objects by manipulating them: poking, pushing, prodding, and then seeing how they react. We obviously can't do that with videos — just try touching that cat video on your phone and see what happens. But is it crazy to think that we could take that video and simulate how the cat moves, without ever interacting with the real one? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have recently done just that, developing an imaging technique called Interactive Dynamic Video (IDV) that lets you reach in and “touch” objects in videos. Using traditional cameras and algorithms, IDV looks at the tiny, almost invisible vibrations of an object to create video simulations that users can virtually interact with.

Image credit: Abe Davis/MIT CSAIL

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The Yellowstone River

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The Yellowstone River in Yellowstone National Park after a late spring snowstorm. Earlier annual snowmelt periods may decrease streamflow and reduce forests' ability to regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study. By mid-century, a shift in snowmelt timing could lead to 45 percent reduction of forest CO2 uptake.

Image credit: Theodore Barnhart

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You May Also Like by Tom Vanderbilt review what forms our tastes in a digital age?
Why do we like what we like this band or that ice-cream flavour? Is it biological or cultural? And what role do Amazon and Netflix play in shaping our preferences?

When an earnest undergraduate quizzed the aged E M Forster about the good life, the novelist is supposed to have replied: “Don't ask about the good life. Find out what you enjoy.” I'm not sure of the source of the story, which I've heard in more than one version, but the dictum attributed to the novelist encapsulates a popular type of liberal philosophy. Arguments about the good are unending and inconclusive. Despite Aristotle, Buddha, Laozi and all those who followed them, there is no more agreement on the subject than there was two and a half millennia ago. Given the essential elusiveness of goodness, why not focus on something we can judge with reasonable confidence? After all, we all know what we like. If we stick to what we enjoy, we can hardly go wrong.

The trouble is that, in fact, what we like is often unclear to us. As Tom Vanderbilt writes:

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The Midas Throne Row
There is some furor over an exhibit now at Philadelphia's Penn Museum: "The Golden Age of King Midas," showcasing the art of Turkey's ancient Phrygia, a kingdom ruled by Midas in the first millennium BC and known for its superb artistry. Particularly at issue is the curator of the show, C. Brian Rose, suggesting that one of the pieces on display, an ivory statuette known as the "lion tamer" could have been part of the "Midas throne" Herodotos mentions (but never describes) as Midas's gift to Delphi (the Greeks). To date, not even the remains of Midas have been found, although lots of exquisite Phrygian art has been recovered from the so-called "Midas Mound" at Gordion (present day Ankara) and from five tombs to the southwest near the village of Bayindir, with some of the most spectacular objects now on view in Philly through November.

"2016-08-03-1470244392-6214847-masterofthebeast.jpg"

Lion Tamer

Actually, two pieces in the show that I know of -- there may be more revelations to come -- are now being disputed by archaeologists. And getting it right matters because such objects help us to understand human history. The other object, whose image opens and closes the Penn Museum show catalogue, is a silver statuette thought to be of a "eunuch priest." Phrygian priests traditionally emasculated themselves to honor the Phrygian goddess, Matar Kybele.

"2016-08-03-1470244732-717379-PhrygianSilverPriest.jpg"

Silver Priest

The eunuch priest had its public debut in America 27 years ago in a story I wrote with Turkish journalist Özgen Acar for the December 1989 issue of Connoisseur. The magazine (now defunct) at the time was run by Tom Hoving following his other famous run as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"2016-08-03-1470245693-9530099-ConnoisseurPhrygiap.1.jpg"

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A little background. . . The art we presented in our above Connoisseur story, experts dated between late 8th century BC and early 7th century BC -- and we interviewed a variety of experts. The pieces were found near present day Bayindir village (ancient Lycia), outside what once were the known borders of Phrygia. But there was a Phrygian presence in the region, including places for travelers and pilgrims to worship Matar Kebele, and Phrygian pottery and metal artifacts had been found in the area prior to the Bayindir discoveries. The Bayindir tombs were also adjacent to a stretch of meadow, considered a resting place for assorted ancient caravans en route to the Mediterranean Sea or making passage over the Taurus Mountains.

As we reported, the Bayindir art was largely considered by experts to be Phrygian in design -- and still is. And because the find was so far to the southwest, the story suggested that the map of ancient Asia Minor might have to be redrawn.

Özgen Acar and I both stand by what we reported then. Özgen has recently emailed me reaffirming:

"I think the Bayindir finds are Phrygian."

I did not have an opportunity to physically examine the Bayindir objects for Connoisseur in the hands-on way I had the Euphronios vases for an Economist magazine story the following year, prior to my coverage of Sotheby's sale of the Bunker and Herbert Hunt collection. Instead, I worked from slides of the artifacts found at Bayindir and from my taped conversations with scholars both here and in Turkey. Frankly, I was astonished by the brilliant artistry upon first seeing the silver pieces showcased in Philly.

Particularly dazzling in design is a belt made of one continuous sheet of metal incised with a four-square repeating pattern that was found in Tumulus D wrapped around the waist of the remains of a 20-25 year old woman (per pelvic bone analysis). The Phrygians loved geometrical design in art, some patterns meant to honor the Phrygian goddess and others intended as puzzles, mazes.

The current row over the two objects mentioned at the top of this story is largely a stylistic one, but, again, one that impacts history. And again, the pieces in question -- both in the Philly show -- are the two statuettes pictured above: (1) an ivory figure known as the "lion tamer" on loan to Penn Museum from the Archaeological Museum, Delphi, Greece, and (2) a silver eunuch priest on loan from the Antalya Museum.

The Penn Museum actually does indicate in its press that the silver priest is from Lycia (Bayindir) even though the object is the star image opening and closing the King Midas Phrygian show catalogue.

Lycia was a culture that was subject to both Near East and Greek influences, and was located in what is now southwest Turkey. It was the home of Sarpedon, the legendary prince depicted both in Homer's Iliad and on the Euphronios krater and wine cup auctioned at Sotheby's for the Hunt brothers (now returned to Italy).

The Penn exhibition also includes pieces found in other ancient cultures that had relationships with Phrygia: Lydia, Urartu, Assyria, Persia, Greece -- perhaps because art historians increasingly take the perspective that art of this period reflects diverse cultural influences as a result of trade, war, marriage and other associations.

But Dietrich von Bothmer, for one, chairman of the Met's department of Greek and Roman art, told me for the Connoisseur article that he clearly thought the silver eunuch priest and other objects found at Bayindir were "purely" Phrygian:

"This is a fabulous discovery. I have never seen anything like it. Each and every piece is of purely Phrygian type."

Oscar White Muscarella, who was early on part of the Gordion excavation team and for decades an Ancient Near East (ANE) expert at the Met, dated the Bayindir tombs at the time of our story late 8th to early 7th century BC -- in concurrence with a 2,000-page computer analysis of fibulae (ancient pins), some of which were found with the remains of the young woman in Tumulus D wearing the silver belt.

Muscarella has more recently told me: "Von Bothmer knew nothing about Phrygian art," saying further that he plans to review the objects presented in the Connoisseur story, claiming pieces may be East Greek. He has already expressed doubts in print about the silver eunuch priest being Phrygian.

We await Oscar Muscarella's further analysis. . .

However, it is the ivory "lion tamer" about which scholars are most divided and the reason is this. The claim has been made by Brian Rose, who also heads the Gordion excavation in Tukey for the University of Pennsylvania, that the piece is Phrygian, late 8th century BC. And in a 2012 article: "The Throne of Midas? Delphi and the Power Politics of Phrygia, Lydia, and Greece," which is based on an unfinished paper by University of Pennsylvania professor and museum curator Keith DeVries, Rose establishes his claim that the lion tamer may be a piece of the Midas throne Herodotos mentioned.

Brian Rose recently emailed me from Gordion, where he is digging for the summer, saying that he stands by the 2012 story:

"Thanks Suzan. I've written about this with Keith DeVries in 2012, and we still stand by that."

Other ANE experts say the link between the Midas throne and the ivory lion tamer seriously lacks evidence and is a distortion of history as well as commercial hype, partly to sell tickets to the Penn Museum show, which has been ongoing since early February.

There was, for example, a black tie "Golden Age of King Midas Gala" six months ago at Penn Museum where (tax deductible) tickets sold for $50,000 (premier sponsor), $25,000 (prime sponsor), $10,000 (sponsor), VIP ($1,500), $500 (individual).

However, the Rose/DeVries perspective is supported by Athanasia Psalti, director of the 10th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, Delphi, Greece -- even though a web site that seems to belong to the Archaeological Museum of Delphi indicates that the lion tamer it calls "Master of the Beasts," is from a "workshop in Asia Minor, but is the work of a Greek artisan as indicated by the meander on the base (7th century B.C.)."

A. Psalti recently emailed me saying that she stands by what she wrote when the lion tamer was part of the Met show "Assyria to Iberia," that is, she thinks DeVries/Rose "convincingly" make the case that the piece is from a workshop in Phrygia (also, in said Met show was an ivory statuette probably depicting Kybele, that made its American debut on page 2 of our above Connoisseur article, although neither the Met nor Penn Museum cites our story in its literature):

"Dear Suzan, you may consult the catalog entry of the exhibition Assyria to Iberia, at the Dawn of the Classical Age, edited by Joan Aruz, Sarah B. Graff and Yelena Rakic, New York, 2014, p. 308, nr. 180 with previous references as well as the attached article on the same subject. Should you need any further help, do not hesitate to contact me.

Athanasia"

The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue says the following:

"Initially attributed to a Greek artist under strong Near Eastern influence, more recently the figurine has been convincingly suggested to have originated from a Phrygian workshop. It has also been proposed that this unique object was made as a decorative attachment for the magnificent throne of Midas. . . ."

Those experts contesting the Rose/DeVries claim were all once part of the Gordion team: Oscar Muscarella; Ken Sams -- one of three archaeologists who Rose acknowledges as being "responsible in some way for the content" of the current King Midas exhibition and pictured in the Penn Museum show catalog; and Elizabeth Simpson -- a professor at Bard Graduate Center who is director of the Gordion Furniture Project as well as a consultant to Penn Museum.

Muscarella points out in a recent article, "An Ivory Statuette from Delphi---Not from King Midas's Throne," that DeVries's claim that the object was part of the Midas throne was made in January 2002 in articles in the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor (in that chronological order) and in Voice of America, February 2002. DeVries has since died.

Muscarella told me he questions why those news organization would publish the DeVries claim, didn't they do their own assessment of the piece? He's also told me that he contacted the Times about its coverage but got no response.

In his above-mentioned article, Muscarella notes further that the facial features, in particular, of the lion tamer are clearly not Phrygian:

"Although it could be argued that stylistic analysis is in the end largely subjective, even a cursory look at the items compared shows no components of the Delphi figure's face (mouth, eyes, etc.) or hair reflect Phrygian features."

I did spend some time examining the hair on the ivory lion tamer while in Philly because the room was dimly lit. Muscarella is right about the lion tamer's hair not have the interesting texture depicted on other Phrygian art from Gordion and Bayindir.

Ken Sams, who is now a professor of classical archaeology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, recently emailed me commenting:

"The ivory piece from Delphi, currently on display at the University Museum in Philadelphia, is assuredly not Phrygian [emphasis added], in my opinion, but the product of a west Anatolian or East Greek workshop. The meander is found in Phrygian furniture, but it came to be such a widely used motif that one cannot use it to determine origin. It is a strange piece that I have wondered about for years. The lion, for whatever reason has an erection, for which I know of no parallels."

Muscarella further advised by phone regarding the lion:

"That is not an erection!"

Elizabeth Simpson emailed these salient points to me regarding the lion tamer:

"Have you read Brian Rose's 2012 article in The Archaeology of Phrygian Gordion? His comparanda is not convincing[emphasis added], and it is generally acknowledged by colleagues that there is no evidence [emphasis added] that the ivory Lion Tamer statuette is Phrygian in style per se.

The Delphi Museum's posted description [you emailed me] is much more accurate than Rose's contention. Do you know if the Delphi Museum post is official? Is this what the museum label for the Lion Tamer says? Can you please let me know? I am curious.

In terms of the meander design on the base (which is published upside down in Rose's article), this exact pattern is not found on any Phrygian furniture that I know of, and the cross-within-a-square is particularly unusual in that regard.

In terms of form and joinery, the piece was recovered in fragments and has been restored; not all of it is preserved, and I have not seen the bottom of the base. There is a mortise (square cutting) in the back of the figure, but it is shallow, suggesting that the Lion Tamer was not a structural element but decorative. I am not sure how or where the Lion Tamer would have been attached to whatever it once belonged to.

Apart from the style of the ivory figure, the pattern on the base, and its form and joinery, however, one must consider whether the Lion Tamer is from a piece of Phrygian furniture at all -- and whether there is any evidence that it "is" or "may be" from Midas's famous throne.

1. First, a large collection of Phrygian royal furniture survives from the tombs at Gordion, and none of it has carved figures as elements, let alone ivory figures of this sort. You can see what the Gordion furniture looks like from my publications, particularly my 2010 Brill book on the furniture from Tumulus MM (in the MMA library, the Bard Graduate Center library, and elsewhere). A brief summary and bibliography can be found in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordion_Furniture_and_Wooden_Artifacts

Although there are no "thrones" from the Gordion tombs, there was a small chair in Tumulus MM, but it has no carved human figures -- only a crest with small animals in panels carved in relief.

There were ancient Near Eastern thrones that had carved human figures (or deities) as elements, but there is no evidence of this from Phrygia. Such figural elements occur initially in the third millennium B.C., and they are found later in Assyria, Urartu, and elsewhere in the first millennium B.C.

Ivory attachments of various types are well known from the second and first millennia in the ANE [Ancient Near East], but ivory attachments are not found on the royal furniture from the Gordion tombs. Several small, square ivory plaques were excavated in association with wood fragments from Megaron 3 on the City Mound at Gordion, but the figures carved in relief on these plaques are Phrygian in style, like those on the crest rail of the chair from Tumulus MM -- and bear no stylistic resemblance to the Lion Tamer from Delphi. You can read about ANE furniture in my article, "Furniture in Ancient Western Asia," here attached.

Rather, the design and decoration of Phrygian royal furniture involved the abstraction of three-dimensional forms, and elaborate inlaid geometric patterns with complex symmetry, including mazes, apotropaic and religious symbols, and "genealogical patterns." Phrygian furniture seems to be completely different from its eastern counterparts. The examples we have are made of wood, typically boxwood inlaid with juniper and walnut, which survived in relatively good condition in several tombs at Gordion.

So, the ivory Lion Tamer is in no way characteristic of Phrygian furniture, in terms of extant evidence. In fact, it looks completely unrelated in this regard.

2. Second, might the Lion Tamer have come from the throne that Midas dedicated in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi? Although I suppose it is remotely possible, there is absolutely no evidence for this contention. As already discussed, there is no evidence that the statuette is actually Phrygian, although it may have been made somewhere in Anatolia. And carved figures of this type are not found on Phrygian royal furniture as we know it.

But let's just imagine that Midas did have a throne with carved figures on it. Maybe he imported it from Urartu or Assyria. Even if that were the case, there is no evidence that this particular carved figure came from it [emphasis in original]. Indeed, the Lion Tamer does not look either Assyrian or Urartian, and it is hard to tell exactly where it was made or what it was once attached to.

I do not doubt that Herodotus saw a throne at Delphi that he believed was dedicated by King Midas [Herodotus 1.14). Unfortunately, he does not describe it.

I gave a lecture on April 2, 2016, at the Penn Museum at the conference, "The World of Phrygian Gordion," in which I said all these things. Brian Rose was in attendance, as the convener of the conference. He heard what I said and appeared to acknowledge the cogency of my argument. Nonetheless he continues to stand by his 2012 article.

Oscar[Muscarella]'s source article on the Lion Tamer is very good on the various issues. I also plan to write an article on "Midas's Throne," as it is important that Rose's article not stand unchallenged."

Following is one bronze object found at Bayindir in Tumulus C and now at Antalya Museum that has been suppressed, except for mention on page 2 of our above Connoisseur story, where we describe it as "a ring of phallus-shaped knobs probably made as a fertility symbol":

"2016-08-04-1470269758-3429103-PhrygianfertilityringAntalyaMuseum.jpg"

Phrygian or East Greek?

-- 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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http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/05/488669276/remembering-a-thinker-who-thought-about-thinking?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology
Remembering A Thinker Who Thought About Thinking

Seymour Papert was a pioneer in artificial intelligence and learning with technology. He died this week at 88.

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http://www.npr.org/2016/08/04/488670348/prominent-cybersecurity-leader-favors-clinton-despite-email-debacle?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology
Prominent Cybersecurity Leader Favors Clinton, Despite Email Debacle

Despite a server breached at the DNC and the controversy over Hillary Clinton's private email server, a prominent cybersecurity expert say she's the better choice for president.

technology

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http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/04/488649661/daily-fantasy-sports-may-soon-be-coming-back-to-new-york-state?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology
Daily Fantasy Sports May Soon Be Coming Back To New York State

DraftKings and FanDuel suspended operations there after the state's attorney general argued they were essentially gambling sites. A new state law declares fantasy sports to be games of skill.

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http://www.npr.org/2016/08/04/488637600/cybersecurity-conference-includes-hackers-for-hillary-fundraiser?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology
Cybersecurity Conference Includes 'Hackers For Hillary' Fundraiser

A Hillary Clinton fundraiser will take place at BlackHat in Las Vegas. Cybersecurity experts there say they support her over Donald Trump despite all the controversy over her email server.

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http://www.npr.org/2016/08/04/487349890/in-this-museum-its-ok-if-the-displays-collect-dust?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology
In This Museum, It's OK If The Displays Collect Dust

The Vacuum Cleaner Museum in St. James, Mo., houses more than 750 vacuums, including some that date back to just after the Civil War. Curator Tom Gasko is a former door-to-door vacuum salesman.

technology

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