Deaths of People Related to Flint Water Crisis
April 25th, 2016Flint Water Plant Continues to Reel with Sudden Death of Foreman
Via: Mlive:
Already reeling from the news of criminal charges against one of its workers in the wake of the Flint water crisis, city workers are now dealing with the sudden death of a foreman at the plant.
Water Treatment Plant Foreman Matthew McFarland, 43, of Otter Lake died suddenly on on Saturday, April 16, according to his obituary.
The Lapeer County Sheriff’s Department said a friend found McFarland unresponsive at a home in Otter Lake. There were no signs of foul play.
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Woman in Leading Flint Water Crisis Lawsuit Slain in Twin Killing
Via: Mlive:
A woman at the center of a bellwether Flint water crisis lawsuit was one of two women who were shot to death inside a townhouse earlier this week.
Sasha Avonna Bell was one of the first of a growing number of people to file a lawsuit in connection to the Flint water crisis after she claimed that her child had been lead poisoned.
Bell was found dead April 19 in the 2600 block of Ridgecrest Drive at the Ridgecrest Village Townhouses. Sacorya Renee Reed was also found shot to death in the home.
An unharmed 1-year-old child was also found inside of the Ridgecrest home when Bell’s body was discovered and was taken into custody by child protective services. Police declined to confirm if it was Bell’s child discovered in the home.
Foreign ‘Dirty Bomb’ Responders Will Start Training in Nevada
April 25th, 2016Via: Las Vegas Review Journal:
In today’s world it could be called the University for Dirty Bomb Studies.
Founded in 1998, it was a niche at what was then the Nevada Test Site for emergency responders to learn how to deal with disasters caused by weapons of mass destruction.
Since then, about 180,000 firefighters, police officers, public safety officials and hazardous materials technicians from all corners of the United States have completed courses that teach them how to detect, prevent and react to an unthinkable act involving radioactive or hazardous materials to harm civilian populations.
In a few months this Center for Radiological/Nuclear Training will enter a new, international dimension as police officers from eastern Europe and elsewhere outside the U.S. descend on a one-of-a-kind training facility in Area 1 at the Nevada National Security Site, 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Prescription Meds Get Trapped in Disturbing Pee-to-Food-to-Pee Loop
April 24th, 2016Via: Ars Technica:
If you love something, set it free… so the old adage goes. Well, if the things you love are pharmaceuticals, then you’re in luck. Through vegetables and fruits, the drugs that we flush down the drain are returning to us—though we’ll ultimately pee them out again. (Love is complicated, after all)
In a randomized, single-blind pilot study, researchers found that anticonvulsive epilepsy drug carbamazepine, which is released in urine, can accumulate in crops irrigated with recycled water—treated sewage—and end up in the urine of produce-eaters not on the drugs. The study, published Tuesday in Environmental Science & Technology, is the first to validate the long-held suspicion that pharmaceuticals may get trapped in infinite pee-to-food-to-pee loops, exposing consumers to drug doses with unknown health effects.
While the amounts of the drug in produce-eater’s pee were four orders of magnitude lower than what is seen in the pee of patients purposefully taking the drugs, researchers speculate that the trace amounts could still have health effects in some people, such as those with a genetic sensitivity to the drugs, pregnant women, children, and those who eat a lot of produce, such as vegetarians. And with the growing practice of reclaiming wastewater for crop irrigation—particularly in places that face water shortages such as California, Israel, and Spain—the produce contamination could become more common and more potent, the authors argue.
“The potential for unwitting exposure of consumers to contaminants via this route is real,” the authors wrote, adding that their study provides real world data that proves exposure occurs.
Research Credit: alvinroast
Japan’s Next Generation of Farmers Could Be Robots
April 23rd, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
As the average age of farmers globally creeps higher and retirement looms, Japan has a solution: robots and driver-less tractors.
The Group-of-Seven agriculture ministers meet in Japan’s northern prefecture of Niigata this weekend for the first time in seven years to discuss how to meet increasing food demand as aging farmers retire without successors. With the average age of Japanese farmers now 67, Agriculture Minister Hiroshi Moriyama will outline his idea of replacing retiring growers with Japanese-developed autonomous tractors and backpack-carried robots.
‘Scientists Can Now Make Lithium-Ion Batteries Last a Lifetime’ *
April 22nd, 2016* Using gold.
(sigh)
In, ARPA-E Batteries to Challenge Tesla?, I wrote:
If you’re interested in energy generation and storage technologies that will actually be for sale in the near to medium term, you can safely ignore most press releases about new energy technologies working only in labs. That stuff might as well be on a different planet when one considers how far away it is from being ready for end users.
In typical fashion, this applies perfectly to the story below.
All of that said, my guess is that this is still a big deal.
Via: Computer World:
Who says playing around is a waste of time?
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) said that’s exactly what they were doing when they discovered how to increase the tensile strength of nanowires that could be used to make lithium-ion batteries last virtually forever.
Researchers have pursued using nanowires in batteries for years because the filaments, thousands of times thinner than a human hair, are highly conductive and have a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons.
The problem they have encountered, however, is that nanowires are also extremely fragile and don’t hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, known as “cycling.” For example, in a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking.
UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai solved the brittleness conundrum by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination, they said, is reliable and resistant to failure.
Britain: Bulk Personal Datasets
April 22nd, 2016Via: Ars Technica:
The UK’s intelligence agencies (MI5, MI6, and GCHQ) are spying on everything you do, and with only the flimsiest of safeguards in place to prevent abuse, according to more than a thousand pages of documents published today as a result of a lawsuit filed by Privacy International.
The documents reveal the details of so-called “Bulk Personal Datasets,” or BPDs, which can contain “hundreds to millions of records” on people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.
These records can be “anything from your private medical records, your correspondence with your doctor or lawyer, even what petitions you have signed, your financial data, and commercial activities,” Privacy International legal officer Millie Graham Wood said in a statement. “The information revealed by this disclosure shows the staggering extent to which the intelligence agencies hoover up our data.”
Nor, it seems, are BPDs only being used to investigate terrorism and serious crime; they can and are used to protect Britain’s “economic well-being”—including preventing pirate copies of Harry Potter books from leaking before their release date.
BPDs are so powerful, in fact, that the normally toothless UK parliament watchdog that oversees intelligence gathering, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), recommended in February that “Class Bulk Personal Dataset warrants are removed from the new legislation.”
These data sets are so large and collect so much information so indiscriminately that they even include information on dead people.
Firms that Paid for Clinton Speeches Have U.S. Government Interests
April 22nd, 2016Well holy shit. Thanks, Captain!
Via: AP:
It’s not just Wall Street banks. Most companies and groups that paid Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to speak between 2013 and 2015 have lobbied federal agencies in recent years, and more than one-third are government contractors, an Associated Press review has found. Their interests are sprawling and would follow Clinton to the White House should she win election this fall.
The AP’s review of federal records, regulatory filings and correspondence showed that almost all the 82 corporations, trade associations and other groups that paid for or sponsored Clinton’s speeches have actively sought to sway the government — lobbying, bidding for contracts, commenting on federal policy and in some cases contacting State Department officials or Clinton herself during her tenure as secretary of state.
Presidents are not generally bound by many of the ethics and conflict-of-interest regulations that apply to non-elected executive branch officials, although they are subject to laws covering related conduct, such as bribery and illegal gratuities. Clinton’s 94 paid appearances over two years on the speech circuit leave her open to scrutiny over decisions she would make in the White House or influence that may affect the interests of her speech sponsors.
Rival presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican critics have mocked Clinton over her closed-door talks to banks and investment firms, saying she is too closely aligned to Wall Street to curb its abuses. Sanders said in a speech in New York that Clinton earned an average of about $225,000 for each speech and goaded her for declining to release transcripts.
“If somebody gets paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be an unbelievably extraordinary speech,” Sanders said at an outdoor rally at Washington Square Park last week in advance of the New York primary. “I kind of think if that $225,000 speech was so extraordinary, she should release the transcripts and share it with all of us.”
Dr. Jack Wolfson: Cholesterol is King
April 20th, 2016He promotes his own products near the end, but this covers a large amount of very interesting information.
Book: The Paleo Cardiologist: The Natural Way to Heart Health by Jack Wolfson
Via: The Drs. Wolfson:
Cisco’s Latest Attempt to Dodge Responsibility for Facilitating Human Rights Abuses: Export Rules
April 19th, 2016Via: EFF:
Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its marketing pitch to China and in an effort to meet its customers needs, Cisco built a special Falun Gong module into the Golden Shield that helped the Chinese authorities identify, locate, and ultimately persecute practitioners of that religion by, for example, creating profiles of them that could be used during interrogations and forced conversions (i.e., torture).
Five years ago, victims sued Cisco for the human rights abuses they suffered as a result of the Falun Gong module. The case, Doe I v. Cisco Systems, is currently pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The plaintiffs are Falun Gong practitioners who allege that the company knowingly and purposefully designed and sold specific technologies to the Chinese government that aided and abetted human rights abuses, including torture, against them. We filed an amicus brief in January in favor of the plaintiffs.
Cisco recently submitted its responsive appellate brief (and the plaintiffs filed their reply) and one of its arguments made us do a double-take. Cisco claims that because U.S. export law doesn’t ban it from selling its equipment to China, the company is immune from civil liability for the human rights abuses it facilitated. Cisco even went so far as to argue that the U.S. government’s recent dropping of overbroad proposed rules for regulating surveillance technologies under the Wassenaar Arrangement—rules that EFF strongly argued should be dropped—establishes that Cisco should be immune.
Specifically, Cisco argues that since Congress and the Department of Commerce regulate exports to China of guns and other “crime control and detection” equipment but do not ban the export of the “Internet infrastructure” products that Cisco sells, Cisco should be held completely immune for aiding and abetting human rights abuses.
Defaults Hit Highest Level Since ’09 Bust
April 19th, 2016Recovery!
Via: USA Today:
Get ready to step over some landmines, investors. The number of companies defaulting on their debt is hitting levels not seen since the financial crisis, and it’s not just a problem for bondholders.
