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These Animals Are Adorable But Still Very Dangerous
Whether you are an animal lover or not we have all at some point in our lives longed to own an animal that can only be found in the wild. As kids, many of us had the opportunity to go visit the local zoo or animal shelter and it is there where we developed the love of bears, giraffes, monkeys, pandas and a host of other cute and furry animals.

While these animals melt our hearts it is nearly impossible to ever become an owner of one. In fact, it is illegal in many states to own wild animals and on rare occasions that they are found outside of their habitats officials must call in wildlife removal services in order to make sure these animals are removed before they have time to become a danger to anyone else.

Despite the cute and coziness of these animals, they are still armed and very dangerous:

Hooded Pitohui
Not all birds are created equal and this one is no different. This poisonous bird is related to the Variable Pitohui and the Brown Pitohui. A neurotoxin has been found in this bird's skin and feathers and has been known to cause numbness after touching its skin and feathers.

Giant Pandas
Giant pandas were first discovered in China and have been a favorite across the globe for many years. While these bears are a grand attraction at many zoos they are still considered rare because only 1,600 exist and out of that 1,600 only about 100 of them can be found in the local zoo.

Dingo
Most dogs are a man's best friend but not this one. The dingo is a wild dog that can be found in Australia.

Anteater
This large animal can be from five to 7 feet long making it longer than most humans. It can weight up to 100 pounds and can be very dangerous because this animal has impeccable smell but poor vision. This only means the animal can smell his target even when he can't see it.

Blue Ringed Octopus
This beautiful and very small animal can catch you by surprise. She is far from being intimidating but can cause lots harm to your body when you touch her. An innocent pet on this animal can lead to your lips going numb, you lose your speech and feel your bowels beginning to move. This blue ringed octopus literally moves in silence.

Poison Dart Frogs
Poison frog dart frogs are beautiful but as the name says they are also very poisonous. Despite how you have viewed frogs in the past these frogs can have you sick for days if you're not careful.

What animals have you seen that are adorable but dangerous? Leave your comments below.

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15 ways you know you're in the Anthropocene
1. We've created enough concrete to make a full-scale replica of Earth 2mm thick.

"2016-04-23-1461443161-1271872-earthconcreteworld.jpg"

2. We've manufactured enough plastic to wrap Earth in a layer of clingfilm. On current trends, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050. These and other manmade materials are creating "technofossils".

"2016-04-24-1461517843-854575-ScreenShot20160424at19.08.18.png"

3. We use an area the size of South America to grow our crops and an area bigger than Africa for our livestock. Humans and our livestock make up over 90% of all mammals on Earth by weight*.

"2016-04-23-1461441810-1881022-worldmapofcroplandandpasturelandsage0.png"

4. We are at the start of the 6th mass extinction. Species are going extinct at mass extinction rates - we've only had 5 mass extinctions on Earth and the last ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

5. We move more sediment and rock than all natural processes.

6. The nitrogen cycle hasn't changed this much in 2.5 billion years - and we are the cause - we've doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in circulation. And we are radically altering the carbon and water cycles causing the climate to change.

7. We're making Earth wobble a little. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting because of climate change caused by humans. This is changing Earth's wobble - Earth's spin axis drifts slowly around the poles - GPS signals are inaccurate if this is not included in the calculations.

8. Our first radio and television broadcasts have now reached 115 light years from Earth zooming past stars we now know have planets orbiting them, perhaps like our own. The signals will be too weak to detect, which is just as well because the first live television broadcast was the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games presided over by Adolf Hitler.

9. All recorded history - from agriculture to our global civilization - happened in the Holocene. This is what geologists call the last 11,700 years since the end of the ice age. The Holocene's climate has been remarkably stable, going up or down no more than about 1°C. In 2000, Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen looked at the evidence (the Great Acceleration) and declared Earth is no longer in the Holocene. He was at a loss for words for what we were in before deducing the "Anthropocene". (The link is to Crutzen's first article on the idea.)

10. As a scientific concept, the Anthropocene is as significant as Copernicus' discovery that Earth orbits the sun and Darwin's evolution.

11. In 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) included the word "Anthropocene" for the first time. Other notable additions that year included "hashtag" and "wardrobe malfunction". But geologists aren't as wildly impulsive as the OED. The decision rests with the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is the largest and oldest bit of the International Union of Geological Sciences created in 1961. In 2009, the commission set up an Anthropocene Working Group to investigate whether the evidence warrants a new epoch. The group has met a few times, published some papers in academic journals and now they've taken a vote and, yes, according to them, we are in the Anthropocene.

12. Enough with the "We". Who is this "We" anyway? Good point. Some are driving this change more than others. Historically, we cannot disentangle this enormous growth from the European empires, slavery, resource exploitation, globalization and inequality. "Our" most significant impacts, known as the Great Acceleration, occurred in the last half of the 20th Century - driven by wealthy nations. Some say the Anthropocene really the Capitalocene? It has also been called the Eurocene, the Manthropocene, the Misanthropocene or even the Obscene.

13. The precise moment Earth entered the Anthropocene, according to some, may be determined with pinpoint accuracy: 16 July 1945 05:29:45 am (local time) - when first atomic bomb was detonated in a remote corner on the Alamagordo Bombing Range known as the Jornada del Muerto, or "Journey of Death," 340 kilometres south of Los Alamos in New Mexico, United States. This detonation released radioactive material into the atmosphere that will leave traces in rocks for millions of years. Anyone born after this date will never have lived in the Holocene. This seems a reasonable marker for future geologists and the Anthropocene Working Group is making the case that the 1950s mark a turning point in the trajectory of the Earth system. But not everyone agrees - some think 1964 makes more sense, just after the atmospheric test ban on nuclear weapons when atmospheric radiation levels peaked. And yet others say the dawn of agriculture marks the start, or maybe even 1610 when the collision between old world and new reached its most destructive height. Whichever date is picked, it will be politically, economically and culturally loaded.

14. Can we navigate the Anthropocene? There's room for optimism: we've reached peak child - birthrate is no longer rising, the ozone hole has stabilised and looks likely to recover, and in 2015 emissions growth of greenhouse gases seems to have stalled. Now we have the Paris Agreement on climate change to stabilise the climate well below 2°C. We have about 30 years, or one generation, to go from peak emissions of greenhouse gases to more or less zero. And the rest: we need to protect forests, halt biodiversity, use fertilisers more effectively and protect our oceans, ice sheets, atmosphere, land and diversity of life.

15. The remaining carbon budget for humanity to reduce risk of very dangerous climate change will run out in couple of decades. This is not a budget for the next few decades or centuries. It is the budget for humanity's remaining time on Earth. Subsidies to the fossil fuel industry are essentially crowd-sourcing catastrophe.

Members of the Anthropocene Working Group discussed their conclusions at the 35th International Geological Congress in Cape Town 27-4 September 2016.

Check out Anthropocene.info

Or, The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration (2015)

*South America: 18 million square kilometres
Permanent crops: 14 million square kilometres
Africa: 30 million square kilometres
Pastures: 33.5 million square kilometers

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Why is American Political Science Blind on the Right Eye?

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This Thursday thousands of (mostly) American political scientists will descend upon Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). A plurality, if not a majority, of those scholars works exclusively on American politics. While the rise of Donald Trump will undoubtedly be heatedly debated in the hallways and panels, only a few papers are actually devoted to explaining the most important development in US politics this year. This (again) begs the question: why is American political science blind on the right eye?

Three of the most discussed political phenomena in American politics this century are of a radical right nature: neoconservatism, the Tea Party, and Trump(ism). All three developments took US political scientists by surprise and the discipline is still struggling with finding a convincing and comprehensive explanation for them- I could also include far right terrorism, which is considered to be "the most severe threat of political violence" by US law enforcement agencies, but is hardly studied by US political scientists. To be fair, while the situation is not much better with regard to the radical left, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter and particularly Occupy Wall Street have drawn much more interest from American political scientists (while they are much less relevant to American politics).

In 2008 I set out to write a review article on the political science literature on neoconservatism for the Journal of Politics. It was a response to the received wisdom that "neoconservatives" had dominated the Bush administration, most notably in pushing through the Iraq invasion. But while this alleged neoconservative influence was noted in many academic accounts, I was unable to find any political science study of neoconservatism. In the end, I had to broaden my review article to also include conservatism in general and rely almost exclusively on books by conservative activists and historians. Even today the main book on the US neoconservative movement is written by a French bureaucrat, and previous think tanker, Justin Vaïsse, and was translated from French!

Similarly, the rise of the Tea Party movement took the discipline by total surprise. This was even more surprising as the previous major right-wing social movement, the Christian Right, had been the subject of study of American political scientists, including some prominent scholars like Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. And while the Tea Party movement did inspire some original scholarship, including from prominent scholars like Theda Skocpol, its lessons seem to have been quickly forgotten, as they (and the Tea Party movement in general) hardly feature in the discussion of the third right-wing surprise: the rise of Donald Trump.

The rise of Donald Trump took almost everyone by surprise, and I was no exception. That said, I was more surprised by the rise of Trump than of Trumpism. After all, radical right politics have a long history in the US, dating at least back to the nativist Know Nothings of the mid-19th century, and recent developments, including the Tea Party and the right turn of the GOP, had awakened fires that the vast network of right-wing media were happy to stoke with more fuel. But as journalists looked for political scientists to explain the "Trump phenomenon" they found few scholars of the US radical right and instead turned to those of the European radical right.

Only in the past months, a year after Trump declared that he was running for president and more than half a year after he started to dominate the GOP primaries, are we seeing an increasingly lively debate on the reasons for Trump's success among American political scientists - importantly, this debate is largely taking place in the media. Still, little of the research is rooted in the study of the US radical right. Most is a reflection of well-established fields of study, i.e. on authoritarian personalities, "losers of modernization", or racial prejudice.

How can scholars of American politics time and again be taken by surprise by the rise of radical right movements? Moreover, why do scholars of American politics ignore the radical right, while those of European politics obsess over it? There is no doubt that the specific two-party system in the US plays a role - there are no clear radical right parties like the French National Front (FN) or the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) to be studied. In fact, even the United Kingdom, which also has a two-party system, has some (more or less) radical right parties, like the British National Party (BNP) and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), that contest elections and have been studied in detail. But this is only part of the story.

A more important, and troubling, part of the problem is inherent in US political science in general, and the study of American politics in particular. Over the past decades US political science has become more and more (meta)theoretically and methodologically homogeneous, particularly at the more prestigious top research universities, which train a majority of the political scientists at other research-intensive universities.

At the (meta)theoretical level Rational Choice Theory (RCT) dominates much of the research, which (very simply stated) assumes that all politics is driven by individuals who are exclusively driven by economic self-interest. In this highly sanitized and simplistic world, ideologies and identities are secondary at best, and irrelevant at worst. In fact, politics as a whole is often reduced to a "logical" consequence of economic and sociological developments - in more academic terms, the focus is exclusively on the demand-side of (electoral) politics, while the supply-side is ignored.

At the methodological level, statistical methods are the gold standard, and the more advanced the method, the better the research. This has made the study of American politics, in particular, extremely data-driven. But data suitable for complex statistical analyses have at least two fundamental problems. First, they simplify the complex social and political world - think about one of the most used datasets of political regimes, by Freedom House, which has just three categories: free, partly free, and not free. Second, most elaborate datasets are only developed after a phenomenon becomes politically relevant, and hence significant funding can be secured. This means that quantitative political scientists are often many years behind the curve.

Finally, the study of American politics is significantly weakened by a very strong parochialism. While American politics is part of comparative politics in all other countries, it is almost completely separated from it in the US. Not only do many scholars of American politics study the US in isolation - yet consider their findings relevant to the whole world - but they don't even draw upon scholarship of similar phenomena in other countries.

Perhaps the rise of Trump will finally lead to some critical introspection and, wishful thinking, structural change within US political science in general, and the study of American politics in particular. It has already led scholars to draw upon examples of European politics, most notably Silvio Berlusconi and Marine Le Pen. It has also led to critical reflections on dominant thesis within the study of American politics, such as the crucial importance of money (Citizens United) or "the party" in US politics. Still, without a more methodologically and theoretically pluralistic approach, as well as a more comparative perspective, US political science will continue to struggle to anticipate and explain key developments in US politics.

(In a next post I will highlight the few important studies of the US radical right that can help better understand the rise of Trump and, particularly, Trumpism.)

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Scientists at work: Public archaeologists dig before the construction crews do

Nina M. Versaggi, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Armed with my sharpened trowel, 3-meter tape, shovel, shaker screen and peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I joined my first dig as part of Binghamton University's Public Archaeology Facility back in 1975. Crews of archaeologists were shovel testing the proposed route of Interstate 88 from Binghamton to Albany, New York. I was so excited at the prospect of discovering archaeological sites, and hoping one would become the basis for my master's thesis.

After eight weeks wrapped up with no significant discoveries, panic set in - I would never finish my degree! Then, on an overcast and hot day, with a mass of mosquitoes swarming around my bandana-clad head, I descended with my crew into a glade adjacent to a pristine bog. I rammed my shovel into the ground, poured the soil into the shaker screen and heard what sounded like coins hitting the metal mesh. It was hundreds of pieces of chert debitage, the flake by-products of stone tool manufacturing. I had discovered my first prehistoric site. Our whole team was elated, and I had my thesis topic.

The author among just some of the thousands of artifacts found by Binghamton University's Public Archaeology Facility digs.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

Fast-forward to now: I'm the director of the Public Archaeology Facility, a research center specializing in cultural resource management. Our mission is to identify, evaluate and preserve significant sites, train students to be professional archaeologists and share our results with the public. We can work on up to 100 projects a year. Since our inception in 1972, the center has discovered more than 3,500 archaeological sites.

Back when my 10-year-old self announced to my parents that I wanted to be an archaeologist, I was met with incomprehension and a little fear - what kind of career prospect was that? But thanks to the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, federal agencies must consider the impact of construction and development projects on significant cultural resources, and take measures to avoid those impacts. Developers with federal funding or permits hire legions of cultural resource management archaeologists to help them satisfy the law's requirements.

Binghamton University's Public Archaeology Facility staff working with community members on a dig.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

An archaeological specialty

People often ask how cultural resource management differs from traditional archaeology. There's quite a bit of overlap. Academic archaeologists train with mentors, specialize in a cultural region either in the United States or abroad and participate in grant-funded research. They pick the places where they work.

Cultural resource management archaeologists do not pick the places where we dig. Instead, we conduct archaeology in spots where developments or other ground-disturbing projects are planned. We never know where our next project will be. We could be on a nearby bridge replacement project one day checking for sites, travel 50 miles the next day to excavate a 5,000-year-old camp where a housing development is proposed, finish the week with client meetings, then head out the next week to an urban excavation of a 19th-century neighborhood.

Traditional archaeology usually tests a theory or method, or tries to replicate previous scientific findings. A cultural resource management investigation needs to answer questions like: Will this construction project damage or destroy a significant part of our nation's heritage? This heritage can take the form of archaeological sites hidden below ground, above-ground historic architectural gems and landscapes that hold special religious or ceremonial significance to Native Americans and other communities.

And this isn't just a small offshoot of mainstream archaeology. For instance, in 2013, more than 102,000 federal undertakings required some form of compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act. This doesn't include the thousands of state-permitted projects that fall under the jurisdiction of state historic preservation laws. That year more than 135,000 cultural resources were discovered and evaluated for their historical significance as part of federal projects alone. Each of these sites or properties represents new knowledge about how people lived, worked and viewed their world hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Cultural resource management archaeologists go where they're needed - for instance, on the shoulder of Route 434 in Binghamton where a walking trail is planned.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

Finding objects from past cultures

Even though the origins of our projects are different, cultural resource management archaeologists make exciting discoveries just like our colleagues. For instance, the sites we found during that I-88 project (which I wove into my doctoral dissertation) showed us how seasonally nomadic hunter-gatherers from thousands of years ago lived in communities, moved across the landscape and used a changing assortment of stone tools for their everyday tasks. I-88 data continue to produce new knowledge even 40 years after my first dig; I've just published a new article on some of the sites.

Cultural resource management archaeology does not guarantee that you will make discoveries all the time. Probably less than half the projects we survey will locate a site. That's not a bad thing. After all, modern developments need to happen, and it is best that they are built where there are no significant sites.

But when you do make a discovery, you can almost feel the presence of people who lived here and called this place home thousands of years ago. There is a sense of humility in being allowed to meet the ancient ones through the artifacts they left behind, and this gift needs to be treated with respect. Cultural resource management archaeologists are tasked with finding ways to preserve the sites we find by working with developers and agency officials to see if there are ways to redesign a project to go around the site, thus leaving it undisturbed.

For instance, a proposed commercial development on the Chenango River near Binghamton, New York led to our finding a rare, information-rich camp with scores of stone bowl fragments and cooking hearths. We worked with a cooperative developer and the town board to shorten the width of proposed parking spaces. They also repositioned planned "green space" to allow for preservation of parts of the site. A nice balance resulted - the development moved forward and the site is preserved for future research.

Skills of a Ph.D. and an MBA

My job today is less about digging than it is about working with people in the present to build an understanding of the people who created the sites we find.

The author and staff talking with reenactors at the Newtown Battlefield, Chemung County, New York.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

My academic knowledge is essential to my professional life; I could not analyze and interpret what I find within meaningful contexts without it. But I also needed experience in business management, negotiation, diplomacy and the ability to share our discoveries with the communities in which we work.

Much of my job today involves working with Native American Nations. I was fortunate to have a Native American chief mentor me in how to build mutual respect with First Nation peoples. What started as a conflict over a natural hill with no artifacts turned into a lifelong lesson on sacred places that are invisible to an untrained person. Once I realized that the past is not just about objects but about people (then and now), a whole new picture of heritage archaeology emerged for me.

I assist clients and federal or state agencies in complying with laws requiring that the descendants of the ancient peoples who created sites be involved in decisions about the preservation of sites in jeopardy of being destroyed. There is satisfaction in knowing that you can not only make discoveries that yield new knowledge, but that you have the ability to help protect these sites and share the reasons why preservation is important.

Cultural resources are fragile nonrenewable resources. Once they are destroyed, they cannot be recreated. This is not only a loss for our nation's heritage but a more personal loss for the living descendants of these past peoples. Cultural resource management is a specialized industry that employs thousands of archaeologists who are not just diggers but interpreters and preservation experts. The discoveries we make are windows through which we view the people who came before us. It's our responsibility to respect that heritage and the people who are connected to the sites we discover.

Nina M. Versaggi, Director of the Public Archaeology Facility and Associate Professor,Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Botswana “Prevailing” in Struggle Against Weeds Threatening Okavango

Click the image to download a PDF of the paper

Three decades after the first reports of the arrival in Botswana of Salvinia molestaa free-floating, mat-forming water fern native to Brazil scientists from the southern African country's Department of Water Affairs say they are at last prevailing in the struggle against a weed that has come to close to threatening the entire Okavango, Africa's largest wetlands that is a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to some of the world's most endangered species.

A research article by Dr. C. N. Kurugundla and others, published recently in The Open Plant Science Journal, describes how teams of scientists and laborers from the Department of Water Affairs undertook the decades-long challenge to combat invasive weeds in the Okavango Delta and also the wetlands off the Kwando-Linyanti-Chobe River and the Limpopo River that borders South Africa and Zimbabwe. “Continuous monthly surveys and monitoring of rivers, lagoons and other wetlands resulted in success and shall serve as inspiration in aquatic weeds management,” Bentham Science Publishing (publisher of the journal) said in a news statement.

The review paper “Alien Invasive Aquatic Plant Species in Botswana: Historical Perspective and Management” describes the species biology, distribution, historical spread, negative impacts, and control achieved right from their discovery in Botswana. (Download a pdf)

"TOPSJ-9-1_F4b"

The review presents success stories of control of salvinia, Salvinia molesta, by its biocontrol weevil, Cyrtobagous salviniae. (Photo above courtesy of Dr. C. N. Kurugundla)

"This — This one-tenth-inch-long South
American weevil, *Cyrtobagous*
*salviniae*, is highly effective
in reducing giant salvinia
infestations to acceptable levels.
(Image and caption courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture)

No fresh releases of the weevil were undertaken after mass releases in 1999 and 2000, which established the insect within three years of their introduction, the authors say.

The review also presents the successful eradication of water lettuce, Pistia stratiotes, in the transboundary Kwando River wetlands by 2005. Management of the growth of water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes, from 2012 in the transboundary Limpopo River jointly with neighboring South Africa is also discussed.

The researchers also looks at legislation regarding aquatic weeds. The Government of Botswana “regulates the movement and importation of boats and aquatic apparatus to prevent the importation and spread of aquatic weeds” by the strict implementation of “Aquatic Weed (Control) Act -1986,” the authors say.

“The efforts made by the department have benefited tourism, water resource use, and wildlife. Partly due to the achievement of aquatic weeds control, the tourism sector is now very stable and contributes ca. 25% to the country's GDP,” the news released adds.

“The authors Kurugundla et al. suggest that integrating biological and physical control with public awareness campaigns while working with conservation groups and NGOs would provide sustainable development of wetlands for ecological integrity and livelihoods.”

Reference: Kurugundla. C. N.; et al. (2016). Alien Invasive Aquatic Plant Species in Botswana: Historical Perspective and Management, Open Plant Sci. J., DOI: 10.2174/1874294701609010001

Post prepared from materials provided by Bentham Science Publishing.

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Citizens of the Ocean

The Sea Connects All Things...

How do we build a new global constituency for the ocean? That is, of course, the purpose of the not-for-profit World Ocean Observatory, to relate the ocean to other things that matter to us: fresh water, climate, food , energy, public health, trade, transportation, international finance, policy, planning, governance, economic development, and cultural traditions "all the human involvement inherent in ocean systems that have direct and indirect implication for our future.

Since 2006, the Observatory has done just that: advocated through information and science and provided educational services to an online audience that has doubled every year, a network of some 15,000 ocean-related organizations worldwide and more than 150,000 scientists, educators, policy makers, students, and interested individuals from over 165 countries around the world.

As exhilarating as it is to think that an organization with a tiny operating budget and three person, part-time staff, might effectively engage this growing audience of millions, it is not enough, particularly when I read of things going viral on YouTube and the social networks, things that I may think frivolous but which nonetheless connect and communicate with many, many millions more.

This world is connected, not divided, by the sea. Through the circulation of protein, goods, people, and ideas. Storm impact and sea level rise can threaten anytime, anywhere, in a tumultuous instant, making environmental refugees of us all. The ocean contains an enormous, unexplored inventory of medicinal cures, unlimited energy, and the desalinated drinking water that each of us needs in exactly the same amount each day, rich or poor, north or south, to survive. These are not frivolous things.

How, then, do we connect and unite citizens of the ocean worldwide, a global community whose collective awareness translates into the political will required to change how we understand and use the ocean s bounty? What do you think? What more can we do? Why not let us know with an email to director@thew2o.net? We ll start with one or two, and, who knows, maybe we ll go viral.

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Cherry Picking Science

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Image Credit: Huffington Post Images

If there is anything I have learned this past week, it is that anyone can cherry pick their science.

I presented a story last week, about fish. Since then I've been attacked by lobbyists from groups who are threatened by my message, while being lauded by conservationists who agree with my message.

Did I cherry pick my scientific references?

Not to my knowledge.

I investigated a wide range of sources from the United Nations Environment Programme, to the Food and Agriculture Organization, to the journal Nature to develop my thoughtful argument.

For the record:
It is always possible to find 100 papers on why XYZ is the right. Yet, a second person could find 100 different papers stating why XYZ is wrong.

This is the way science has always been argued; in an evidenced-based manner. With the advent of the internet, it is easy to pick the references from the scientific literature that support whatever argument you are trying to make.

In short, reporting on science should not be the artful manipulation of data that it has become, but instead a discussion of truth.

I am always open to rigorous scientific facts that serve to enlighten my knowledge, but all too often the "facts" that are presented to me by my dissenters, seem to either lack the solid scientific support, or are biased by the industry.

Believe me, I have no conflicts of interest. I receive no funding for what I write. I am therefore not beholden anyone.

I read the literature. I watch the TED conferences. I report on my findings. Nothing more, nothing less

To my supporters, thank you for your generous and thoughtful comments. To my critics, I always appreciate thoughtful discourse, but personal attacks are completely unnecessary and counterproductive to advancing your case.

To all, I promise to evaluate the facts and disseminate what I perceive as a scientific truth. That is all I have ever done, and all I set out to do.

Peace

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A Climate Of Cash In Votes On Global Warming

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has received the most money from the oil and gas and coal mining industries, over $1.6 million since 2010. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By: Alec Goodwin

For years now, the scientific consensus has been that climate change is occurring and is caused mainly by the actions of human beings. So why, during the first month of the current Congress, did nearly half the Senate -- all Republicans -- vote against an amendment stating that human activities contribute significantly to climate change?

We don't know.

But we can say that those who voted for the amendment received less than one-fifth as much in campaign contributions from the oil and gas and coal industries as those who voted against it.

Senators who have publicly denied that humans have had a significant impact on climate change took in an average of $467,022 more from the coal mining and oil and gas industries since 2010 than those who have publicly accepted humans' role in the global rise in temperature.

In connection with a bill focused on the now-failed Keystone XL pipeline in Jan. 2015, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) introduced an amendment that read "climate change is real and human activity significantly contributes to climate change."

The first part of the amendment wasn't controversial; the Senate had passed an amendment earlier that day acknowledging the existence of climate change by a nearly unanimous margin; only Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) voted against it. The stumbling block was the addition of language acknowledging that climate change is caused by people's actions. Nearly half of the Senate opposed the amendment containing that text.

Senators who voted for the amendment received an average of $102,594 from individuals and PACs of the coal mining and oil and gas industries since 2010, while senators who voted against it received more than five times as much: $569,616.

Both the oil and gas and coal mining industries have significant incentives to halt efforts to stop climate change, which is caused in large part by gas-burning vehicles and coal-fueled power plants that produce greenhouse gases; any plans to tackle climate change would mean curbing the output of these gases, cutting into industry profits. Donating to lawmakers in the hope of preventing action on the issue would seem to be a good investment for them.

Much of the controversy that surrounds climate change has been fanned by organizations funded by the oil industry, including ExxonMobil and the billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch. They've helped create the illusion of a debate when in reality few scientists dispute that climate change is real and is caused in large part by human actions.

The American Coal Council, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the National Mining Association and the American Petroleum Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

Campaign contributions from fossil fuel industries are likely not the only incentive for senators to avoid acknowledging man's impact on the climate. Many of those who voted against the amendment, and who also received significant sums from oil and gas and/or coal mining, hail from states with heavy production of either crude oil or coal.

And there are anomalies, highlighting how economic interests, campaign contributions and personal beliefs are hard to tease apart in searching for what motivates a vote in Congress.

For instance, nine senators who voted against the amendment come from states that don't produce significant amounts of coal or oil. They're also not on the Senate Energy Committee. These senators received an average of $341,811 from coal mining and oil and gas between 2010 and mid-2016. (We considered significant production to be more than 5,000 short tons of coal per year, and more than 5,000 barrels of oil, as measured by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in 2014.)

Furthermore, there are 10 senators -- nine Democrats plus Republican Sen. Mark Kirk -- who voted for the amendment though their states produce both coal and oil in significant quantities. They've received an average of $153,176 from the industries between 2010 and June 30, 2016.

Twenty-five of the 51 senators who approved the measure were located in states where there was significant production of either coal or oil.

Besides Kirk, four other Republicans voted for the amendment -- Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Susan Collins (Maine) -- along with Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) plus all the Democrats. The Republicans voting aye received, on average, $276,232 from oil and gas and coal mining industries, which is $266,218 less than the average amount given to Republicans. Alexander is even on the Energy Committee, whose members usually receive much more cash from the oil and gas and coal industries than average.

A separate amendment proposed by Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said that human activities contributed to climate change, but lacked the "significantly" of the Schatz proposal. Hoeven's measure picked up 10 additional Republican votes, but still did not pass. The average amount for senators voting against that amendment was about the same, at $584,799.

Here's the breakdown of these senators, whose votes imply they believe climate change is caused in part by humans, but not significantly.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee that oversees climate legislation, once brought a snowball to the Senate floor as a way to demonstrate his view that climate change is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people," though he later voted for an amendment stating that climate change is real. (Climate change refers to rising average global temperatures, not an absence of all sub-zero temperatures.) Inhofe has received $772,100 from the oil and gas and coal mining industries.

On average, current members of the Environment and Public Works Committee who voted for the amendment received just $39,717 from oil and gas and coal mining since 2010. Members who voted against it, like Inhofe, received an average $458,823.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has received the most money from these interest groups -- over $1.6 million -- since 2010. At the low end is Sanders, with just $3,350 in the same time frame.

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The Answer to Antibiotic Resistance Might Reside Within Us
At the beginning of my career I was involved in a study that aimed at the discovery of potential new antibiotics, and since then I have always had an interest in the subject.

Antibiotics are drugs that are commonly prescribed to treat bacterial infections. This class of compounds is naturally produced by microorganisms as a weapon against infection, as first observed by Alexander Fleming in 1929: the discovery and characterization of penicillin revolutionized the treatment of infectious diseases.

Penicillin was used for the first time to counteract pneumococcal infections among the military personnel during World War II. After the war, it became available for general use and so did other antibiotics. However, soon the optimism started to fade due to the appearance of bacterial strains with the acquired ability to grow in the presence of antibiotics to which they used to be susceptible. This phenomenon is known as antibiotic resistance.

Once resistance appears, the antibiotic loses its ability to cure the infection, and a different, more powerful antibiotic is needed.

Unfortunately, I believe that not many people not working in this sector understand the imminent threat that antibiotic resistance is to the entire world. As the World Health Organisation (WHO) states on their web page: antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health today. It can affect anyone, of any age, in any country. This is very true.

Even though resistance is a natural phenomenon, the rate at which the current antibiotics available on the market become ineffective is increased by the misuse of these drugs in humans and animals.

It is, therefore, crucial that we continue the quest towards the discovery of new drugs able to treat these resistant pathogens.

A recent paper published in Nature gives us an intriguing hint of where we should be looking to individuate novel effective compounds. The answer is most captivating: apparently, we do not need to look far, because the answer could already be in our body!

Zipperer and co-workers remind us that the majority of systemic bacterial infections by multi-drug resistant bacteria (which means resistant to the majority of antibiotics available on the market) are caused by bacteria that generally colonise human body surfaces. These bacteria are naturally present in a percentage of the population (for nasal Staphylococcus aureus this percentage is, for example, around 30%), and remain quiescent and controlled by our body generally until the human carrier undergoes surgery or suffers from immunosuppression or trauma. In those instances, multi-drug resistant organisms are more likely to take over and give rise to invasive infections.

If this phenomenon is well recognised, it is not yet perfectly understood how our body prevents colonisation of the pathogen in healthy individuals. What scientists know is that factors involved are complex and related both to the genetics of the host and also to his microbiota (commensal microorganisms that share our body space). In their study, Zipperer and colleagues observed that the bacterium Staphylococcus lugdunensis (S. lugdunensis: a friendly bacterium belonging to our nasal microbiota) plays a crucial role in keeping the potentially multi resistant Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) from invading our nose. In fact, S. lugdunensis is able to produce a molecule (which was named lugdunin in the study) that acts as an antibiotic against S. aureus.

This discovery is invaluable for many reasons. Not only lugdonin is on the right path to becoming a novel potent antibiotic, but also and foremost this is the first reported case in which a probiotic bacterium not belonging to the gut is found to be fundamental for the prevention of systemic infections.
Indeed, the authors state: Our study suggests that the probiotics concept should be extended to body sites other than the gut, such as the nasal mucous membranes.

A good answer to the discovery of new potential antibiotic could be much closer than we thought: so close to be likely already within us. We just need to start looking.

References:

1. Zipperer, A. et al. Human commensals producing a novel antibiotic impair pathogen colonization. Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 535, 511-516 (2016).
2. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/antibiotic-resistance/en/
3. Diggins, F. The true history of the discovery of penicillin. Biomedical Scientist, 246-249 (2003).
4. Madigan, M. & Martinko, J. Brock Biology of Microorganisms, 11th edn. (2005).
5. Levy, S. & Marshall, B. Antibacterial resistance worldwide: causes, challenges and responses. Nature Medicine 10, S122-129 (2004).
6. Hopwood, J., Levy, S., Wenzel, R. P. & Georgopapadakou, N. A call to arms. Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 6, 9-12 (2007).

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Untitled by Riki Setiawan

Lejano Adentro copia by Philippe Perrin

From my series " Lointain Intérieur "

An archaeological specialty

Finding objects from past cultures

Skills of a Ph.D. and an MBA

Untitled by Shannon Adams