Toxic Air Kills 100,000 Americans Per Year, Costs Economy Billions
April 11th, 2019Via: ZeroHedge:
Air pollution is poisoning Americans: A new study links air pollution spewed from industrial factories, motor vehicles, and farmlands to approximately 107,000 premature deaths each year.
The report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the economic toll of air pollution costs taxpayers $866 billion per year.
Austria Considering Requiring User Identities for Online Platforms
April 11th, 2019Via: The Local:
Austria said Wednesday it was considering a law to make it mandatory for big internet platforms to register their users and deprive those behind hate posts of anonymity.
“Unfortunately there have been an increasing number of clear violations, denigrations and humiliations online in the past under the cover of anonymity.
That’s why we need a framework for more responsibility online,” Chancellor Sebastian Kurz wrote on Twitter.
The new law would take effect in 2020 and would make it mandatory for platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to register their users, said Gernot Bluemel, minister in charge of EU affairs, art, culture and media.
U.S. Prisoners Have Lost a Combined 20,000 Years of Life to False Convictions
April 11th, 2019Via: Reason:
In 2018 alone, wrongly convicted prisoners lost more than 1,600 years of life behind bars.
That’s a new record, according to the annual report from The National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks all exonerations from 1989 onward. In 2018, 151 people were freed from serving sentences for crimes they did not commit. They had served 1,639 years altogether, an average of about 11 years per person.
Another record set last year is also worth our attention: More of these exonerations are happening in cases where misconduct by officials played a role. The report documents official misconduct in at least 107 exonerations last year. Official misconduct played a role in 80 percent of the 54 homicide cases in 2018 in which the person convicted was subsequently exonerated.
China: Gene-Editing Techniques Make Monkey Brains More Humanlike
April 11th, 2019You’ll love this one.
Via: Futurism:
For the first time, scientists have used gene-editing techniques to make monkey brains more humanlike.
The monkeys, rhesus macaques, got smarter — they had superior memories to unaltered monkeys, according to recently-published research that’s kicked off a fiery debate among ethicists about how far scientists should be able to take genetic experimentation.
Cognitive Gap
The team of Chinese scientists edited the human version of a gene called MCPH1 into the macaques. The new gene made the monkeys’ brains develop along a more human-like timeline. The gene-hacked monkeys had better reaction times and enhanced short-term memories compared to their unaltered peers, according to China Daily.
Tesla and Panasonic Freeze Spending on $4.5 Billion Gigafactory
April 11th, 2019Via: Nikkei:
Tesla and Panasonic are freezing plans to expand the capacity of their Gigafactory 1, the world’s largest EV battery plant, as concerns mount on Wall Street about weakening demand at Elon Musk’s car company.
The partners had planned to raise capacity by 50% by next year, but financial problems have forced a rethink, Nikkei has learned.
Tesla is a top maker of electric vehicles, and Panasonic one of the biggest producers of the batteries that power them. These companies are shifting their strategy reflects the EV industry’s thin profits.
Russia Revamps Arctic Military Base to Stake Claim on Region
April 11th, 2019Via: AP:
Missile launchers ply icy roads and air defence systems point menacingly into the sky at this Arctic military outpost, a key vantage point for Russia to project its power over the resource-rich polar region.
The base, dubbed Severny Klever (Northern Clover) for its trefoil shape, is painted in the white, blue and red colours of the Russian national flag. It has been designed so soldiers can reach all of its sprawling facilities without venturing outdoors — a useful precaution in an area where temperatures often plunge to –50 C during the winter, and even in the short Arctic summer are often freezing at night.
It’s strategically located on Kotelny Island, between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea on the Arctic shipping route, and permanently houses up to 250 military personnel responsible for maintaining air and sea surveillance facilities and coastal defences like anti-ship missiles.
The Russian base has enough supplies to remain fully autonomous for more than a year.
“Our task is to monitor the airspace and the northern sea route,” said base commander Lt. Col. Vladimir Pasechnik. “We have all we need for our service and comfortable living.”
Julian Assange Arrested by British Police at Ecuadorean Embassy
April 11th, 2019Via: Reuters:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested on Thursday by British police and carried out of the Ecuadorean embassy, where he has been holed up for nearly seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault investigation.
A video posted online showed an agitated, frail-looking man with white hair and a white beard being carried out of the central London building by at least seven men.
“Julian Assange, 47, has today, Thursday 11 April, been arrested by officers from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) at the Embassy of Ecuador,” police said.
Police said they arrested Assange after being “invited into the embassy by the Ambassador, following the Ecuadorean government’s withdrawal of asylum.”
U.S. Budget Deficit Running 15% Higher Than a Year Ago
April 10th, 2019Via: AP:
The federal government reported a $146.9 billion deficit in March, causing annual debt to rise 15% for the first half of the budget year compared to the same period in 2018.
The Treasury Department said Wednesday in its monthly report that the fiscal year deficit has so far totaled $691 billion, up from nearly $600 billion in 2018. The Treasury Department expects that the deficit will exceed $1 trillion when the fiscal year ends in September.
Tax receipts are running slightly higher than a year ago as more Americans are working and paying taxes. But the tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2017 have meant that the $10 billion increase in receipts has failed to keep pace with a roughly $100 billion increase in government expenditures.
Amazon Workers Listening to the Inane Ramblings of Alexa Users to Train AI
April 10th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word—or come across an amusing recording.
New Human Species Found in Philippines
April 10th, 2019Via: BBC:
There’s a new addition to the family tree: an extinct species of human that’s been found in the Philippines.
It’s known as Homo luzonensis, after the site of its discovery on the country’s largest island Luzon.
Its physical features are a mixture of those found in very ancient human ancestors and in more recent people.
That could mean primitive human relatives left Africa and made it all the way to South-East Asia, something not previously thought possible.
The find shows that human evolution in the region may have been a highly complicated affair, with three or more human species in the region at around the time our ancestors arrive.
