Archive for the 'Collapse' Category
Sinkhole of Bureaucracy
March 24th, 2014Via: Washington Post: The trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag. Behind the door, a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file […]
When the Rivers Run Black
March 20th, 2014Via: Medium: The most toxic byproduct of coal-fired power isn’t carbon dioxide. It’s the residue that’s left over. When coal is burned in a plant, just like in a home, it produces two kinds of ash: fly ash, which rises, and bottom ash, which sinks to the floor of the furnace. Together, they comprise coal […]
Voracious Worm Evolves to Eat Biotech Corn Engineered to Kill It
March 18th, 2014Via: Wired: One of agricultural biotechnology’s great success stories may become a cautionary tale of how short-sighted mismanagement can squander the benefits of genetic modification. After years of predicting it would happen — and after years of having their suggestions largely ignored by companies, farmers and regulators — scientists have documented the rapid evolution of […]
Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly
March 15th, 2014Via: Smithsonian: Nearly 30 years have passed since the Chernobyl plant exploded and caused an unprecedented nuclear disaster. The effects of that catastrophe, however, are still felt today. Although no people live in the extensive exclusion zones around the epicenter, animals and plants still show signs of radiation poisoning. Birds around Chernobyl have significantly smaller […]
College Grads Taking Low-Wage Jobs Displace Less Educated
March 7th, 2014Via: Bloomberg: Jeanina Jenkins, a 20-year-old high-school graduate from St. Louis, is stuck in a $7.82-an-hour part-time job at McDonald’s Corp. that she calls a “last resort” because nobody would offer her anything better. Stephen O’Malley, 26, a West Virginia University graduate, wants to put his history degree to use teaching high school. What he’s […]
The E-Waste Disaster in Ghana
March 7th, 2014Via: Kevin McElvaney:
Goodbye Academia
March 4th, 2014Via: Yes, Another Science Blog: As a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, I am not even back to earning what I did ten years ago as a junior programmer with no skills or domain-specific knowledge. In a commercial setting, my compensation would have kept pace with my knowledge and skills, but in academia, there seems to […]
Dismantling Fukushima Will Require Robotic Technology That Has Not Been Invented Yet
March 2nd, 2014Via: IEEE: “At Fukushima you have wrecked infrastructure, three melted cores, and you have some core on the floor, ex-vessel,” Barrett says. Nothing like Fukushima, he declares, has ever happened before.
Gallery: “China’s Apocalyptic Hellscape”
March 1st, 2014Via: Time: The smog in Beijing and parts of northern China has grown so bad that some have likened conditions to living through a “nuclear winter.”
$1 Trillion in Student Loan Debt, “Starting to Hurt Everyone”
March 1st, 2014Except the banks… Via: Time: Across the country, students are taking on increasingly large amounts of debt to pay for heftier education tuitions. Figures released last week by the Federal Reserve of New York show that aggregate student loans nationwide have continued to rise. At the end of 2003, American students and graduates owed just […]
