British Survivors of Nuclear Weapons Tests
August 30th, 2018Via: Vice:
China Ignores UK Request to Share Samples of Flu Virus with Pandemic Potential
August 29th, 2018Via: Telegraph:
Requests by UK experts to Chinese authorities for samples of the latest strain of a dangerous and evolving avian influenza virus, known as H7N9 have so far been ignored, the Telegraph has learned.
The news comes on the back of revelations earlier this week by the United States’ government that China has, for over a year, refused its requests to share lab samples of the same strain of avian influenza virus.
To date there have been 1,625 cases of H7N9 – a virus which usually circulates in poultry – in humans including a spike in cases in 2017, which prompted US researchers to request samples of the virus from Chinese authorities.
The virus is thought to be only few mutations away from being able to spread freely in humans and was said by the England’s deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van Tan, earlier this year to be a likely candidate for the next global flu pandemic.
Electric Cars Exceed 1 Million in Europe as Sales Increase by 42%
August 28th, 2018Via: Guardian:
There are now more than a million electric cars in Europe after sales soared by more than 40% in the first half of the year, new figures reveal.
Europe hit the milestone nearly a year after China, which has a much larger car market, but ahead of the US, which is expected to reach the landmark later this year driven by the appetite for Tesla’s latest model.
Between January and June around 195,000 plug-in cars were sold across the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, a 42% increase on the same period a year before.
With growth speeding up, the cumulative total is expected to hit 1.35m by the end of the year, according to industry analysts EV-Volumes.
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The figures include fully electric cars and vans, plus plug-in hybrid ones, which can travel a short distance off a battery before switching to a conventional engine.
While plug-in sales are growing, they still account for only 2% of all new car and van registrations across Europe in the first half of the year. By the year’s end, the share is forecast to hit 2.35%.
Russia: Unidentified Helicopters Delivering Weapons to Taliban, Islamic State in Afghanistan
August 28th, 2018Weapons in, drugs out.
Via: Russian Government / TASS:
Russia has recorded flights of unidentified helicopters delivering weapons to the Taliban (a movement outlawed in Russia) and the Islamic State (a terror group outlawed in Russia) units active in Afghanistan, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on Thursday.
“We would like to once again point to the flights of unidentified helicopters in northern Afghanistan, which deliver weapons and ammunition to local ISIL [the former name of the Islamic State group – TASS] units and Taliban members cooperating with the group. In particular, the Afghan media and local residents say that such helicopters were seen in the Sar-e Pol Province,” the Russian diplomat said.
“This is happening in close proximity to the borders of Central Asian states, while many of the IS militants active in Afghanistan come from those countries,” Zakharova pointed out.
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman also said that the Afghan security agencies, as well as the Command of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, did not react to those helicopter flights. “In this regard, the question arises – who is behind these flights, who provides weapons to the terrorists and secretly creates springboards for them near the southern borders of the CIS and why is it happening at all, given NATO’s actual control of Afghanistan’s airspace,” Zakharova said.
To Understand America’s Neofeudal Economy, Start with Extortion
August 28th, 2018Via: Of Two Minds:
Let’s spin the time machine back to the late Middle Ages, at the height of feudalism, and imagine we’re trying to get a boatload of goods to the nearest city to sell. As we drift down the river, we’re constantly being stopped and charged a fee for transiting one small fiefdom after another. When we finally reach the city, there’s an entry fee for bringing our goods to market.
Note that none of these fees were payments for improvements to transport or for services rendered; they were simply extortion. This was the economic structure of feudalism: petty fiefdoms levied extortionate fees that funded the lifestyles of nobility.
This is why I have long called America’s economy neofeudal: we pay ever higher fees for services that are degrading, not improving. This is the essence of extortion: we don’t get any improvement in goods and services for the extra money we’re forced to pay.
Top Item Bought with Food Stamp Money: Soda
August 28th, 2018Via: ZeroHedge:
The top item purchased by food stamp recipients is likely to raise some eyebrows among those who fret about people using benefits to buy junk food. Spending on soda and other sweetened beverages is “slightly higher for SNAP households compared to non-SNAP households (5 cents versus 4 cents per dollar),” the researchers note. Soda is the second most-purchased commodity among people who aren’t on food stamps.
Related: ‘Mountain Dew Mouth’
The Man Who Was Raised by Wolves
August 28th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Abandoned as a child, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja survived alone in the wild for 15 years. But living with people proved to be even more difficult.
Air Pollution Causes Huge Reduction in Intelligence
August 28th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Air pollution causes a “huge” reduction in intelligence, according to new research, indicating that the damage to society of toxic air is far deeper than the well-known impacts on physical health.
The research was conducted in China but is relevant across the world, with 95% of the global population breathing unsafe air. It found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education.
“Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” said Xi Chen at Yale School of Public Health in the US, a member of the research team. “But we know the effect is worse for the elderly, especially those over 64, and for men, and for those with low education. If we calculate [the loss] for those, it may be a few years of education.”
Previous research has found that air pollution harms cognitive performance in students, but this is the first to examine people of all ages and the difference between men and women.
The damage in intelligence was worst for those over 64 years old, with serious consequences, said Chen: “We usually make the most critical financial decisions in old age.” Rebecca Daniels, from the UK public health charity Medact, said: “This report’s findings are extremely worrying.”
Air pollution causes seven million premature deaths a year but the harm to people’s mental abilities is less well known. A recent study found toxic air was linked to “extremely high mortality” in people with mental disorders and earlier work linked it to increased mental illness in children, while another analysis found those living near busy roads had an increased risk of dementia.
The new work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analysed language and arithmetic tests conducted as part of the China Family Panel Studies on 20,000 people across the nation between 2010 and 2014. The scientists compared the test results with records of nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide pollution.
They found the longer people were exposed to dirty air, the bigger the damage to intelligence, with language ability more harmed than mathematical ability and men more harmed than women. The researchers said this may result from differences in how male and female brains work.
Derrick Ho, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said the impact of air pollution on cognition was important and his group had similar preliminary findings in their work. “It is because high air pollution can potentially be associated with oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and neurodegeneration of humans,” he said.
Japan Wants Flying Cars Within a Decade
August 26th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
Japan is making a push to develop flying cars, enlisting companies including Uber Technologies Inc. and Boeing Co. in a government-led group to bring airborne vehicles to the country in the next decade.
The group will initially comprise 21 businesses and organizations, including Airbus SE, NEC Corp., a Toyota Motor Corp.-backed startup called Cartivator, ANA Holdings Inc., Japan Airlines Co., and Yamato Holdings Co., according to a statement Friday from the trade ministry in Tokyo. Delegates will gather Aug. 29 to help chart a road map this year, it said.
“The Japanese government will provide appropriate support to help realize the concept of flying cars, such as creation of acceptable rules,” the ministry said.
Flying cars that can zoom over congested roads are closer to reality than many people think. Startups around the world are pursuing small aircraft, which were until recently only in the realm of science fiction. With Japanese companies already trailing their global peers in electric vehicles and self-driving cars, the government is showing urgency on the aircraft technology, stepping in to facilitate legislation and infrastructure to help gain leadership.
Skim Reading Is the New Normal, the Effect on Society Is Profound
August 25th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing – a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.
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We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.
