Medicines Pose Global Environmental Risk
November 14th, 2019Via: AFP:
Residues from billions of doses of antibiotics, painkillers and antidepressants pose a significant risk to freshwater ecosystems and the global food chain, a new analysis said Thursday.
There are growing fears that the unchecked use of antibiotics in both medicine and agriculture will have adverse effects on the environment and on human health.
When animals and humans ingest medicines, up to 90 percent of active ingredients are excreted back into the environment.
Many medicines are simply discarded — in the United States alone an estimated one third of the four billion drugs prescribed each year ends up as waste.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) compared data on concentrations of pharmaceutical residue in water samples worldwide as well as prescribing trends and water purification regulations in various countries.
One study cited in its report estimates that 10 percent of all pharmaceuticals are potentially harmful to the environment — including hormones, painkillers and antidepressants.
The OECD said that antibiotic use for livestock is predicted to rocket by more than two thirds in the next decade, stoking concerns over antibiotic resistance.
Human prescriptions are also set to drastically increase, according to the report.
“We’re seeing constant engineering of new pharmaceuticals and seeing clinical practices evolve to include recommendations of earlier treatment and higher doses,” said the lead report author Hannah Leckie.
Federal Deficit Hits $134 Billion in One Month, Overall Debt $23 Trillion
November 14th, 2019Via: The Hill:
The federal deficit reached $134 billion in October, the first month of fiscal 2020, according to data the Treasury Department released Wednesday.
That figure is about 34 percent higher than last October, a sign of a steadily increasing gap between federal spending and revenue.
As a candidate, President Trump had promised to wipe out the nation’s deficit during his time in office, but deficits have only grown since his inauguration.
The Treasury estimated that the deficit for the 2020 fiscal year would surpass $1 trillion for the first time since 2012. The figure came in just below that milestone in fiscal 2019, hitting $984 billion.
The deficit has spiked following the GOP tax law and multiple bipartisan agreements to increase spending on defense and domestic programs. The nation’s overall debt level surpassed $23 trillion for the first time this month.
Ford Will Unveil Electric Mustang on November 17 in Los Angeles
November 14th, 2019Update: Leaked
—
Via: Electrek:
Ford’s all-new, all-electric SUV will don the iconic pony badge and the name Mustang Mach-E when reservations for the vehicle open after it is revealed this Sunday.
The all-electric Mustang Mach-E will make its debut Nov. 17 at an event in Los Angeles that will be streamed on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Autohome (China).
Top Bolivian Coup Plotters Trained by U.S. Military’s School of the Americas, Served as Attachés in FBI Police Programs
November 14th, 2019Via: The Gray Zone:
The United States played a key role in the military coup in Bolivia, and in a direct way that has scarcely been acknowledged in accounts of the events that forced the country’s elected president, Evo Morales, to resign on November 10.
The So-Called War on Terror Has Killed Over 801,000 People and Cost $6.4 Trillion
November 14th, 2019Via: Common Dreams:
The so-called War on Terror launched by the United States government in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks has cost at least 801,000 lives and $6.4 trillion according to a pair of reports published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
“The numbers continue to accelerate, not only because many wars continue to be waged, but also because wars don’t end when soldiers come home,” said Costs of War co-director and Brown professor Catherine Lutz, who co-authored the project’s report on deaths.
“These reports provide a reminder that even if fewer soldiers are dying and the U.S. is spending a little less on the immediate costs of war today, the financial impact is still as bad as, or worse than, it was 10 years ago,” Lutz added. “We will still be paying the bill for these wars on terror into the 22nd century.”
China Doesn’t Want You To Know About This Place
November 14th, 2019Via: Laowhy86:
Heart Disease in Women: Age of First Period Can Impact Heart Attack Risk
November 14th, 2019Via: Today:
The age when a woman first starts having her period may be much more significant than she or her doctor realize: it can impact her risk of heart attack, stroke and heart failure.
But most women aren’t aware of this risk factor, said Dr. Carl Pepine, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“Not only are the women not aware of it, but their physicians aren’t aware of it. This is not recorded in most medical records — 90%,” Pepine told TODAY. “I just don’t think they were informed about it.”
…
Pepine is the co-author of a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association that found women who started menstruating even a year earlier or later than 12 — which is the average age of menarche, or the first period, for U.S. women — had a higher risk of “major adverse cardiac events.”
Girls who had their first period at 10 or younger had a four-fold higher risk of heart attack, stroke, heart failure and premature death down the road compared to girls who started menstruating at 12, researchers found.
Those who had their first period at 11, 13, 14 and 15 or older had at least a two-fold increased risk of such major cardiac events.
Two-Legged Robot Mimics Human Balance While Running and Jumping
November 13th, 2019It’s always for first responders, fire rescue, etc.
“High-impact tasks in challenging environments.”
I’m sure the Pentagon wouldn’t have any use for this…
*wink*
Via: MIT News:
Rescuing victims from a burning building, a chemical spill, or any disaster that is inaccessible to human responders could one day be a mission for resilient, adaptable robots. Imagine, for instance, rescue-bots that can bound through rubble on all fours, then rise up on two legs to push aside a heavy obstacle or break through a locked door.
Engineers are making strides on the design of four-legged robots and their ability to run, jump and even do backflips. But getting two-legged, humanoid robots to exert force or push against something without falling has been a significant stumbling block.
Now engineers at MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a method to control balance in a two-legged, teleoperated robot — an essential step toward enabling a humanoid to carry out high-impact tasks in challenging environments.
The team’s robot, physically resembling a machined torso and two legs, is controlled remotely by a human operator wearing a vest that transmits information about the human’s motion and ground reaction forces to the robot.
Through the vest, the human operator can both direct the robot’s locomotion and feel the robot’s motions. If the robot is starting to tip over, the human feels a corresponding pull on the vest and can adjust in a way to rebalance both herself and, synchronously, the robot.
In experiments with the robot to test this new “balance feedback” approach, the researchers were able to remotely maintain the robot’s balance as it jumped and walked in place in sync with its human operator.
Nimitz UFO Encounters: Enlisted Sailors Insist Data Was Confiscated by “Two Unknown Individuals”
November 13th, 2019Erase everything, including the blank media. Nice.
In other words, make sure all the tapes were wiped in case anything interesting was left behind after the “unknown individuals” walked off with the bulk of the evidence.
Then they hung out in the Admiral’s quarters with a guard posted outside.
Swamp gas, obviously.
Again, I think it’s black world:
Even assuming that there is no prosaic explanation for what we’re seeing, I think there’s at least better than even odds that an American is at the controls (possibly by remote) of the craft shown in the videos.
Additionally, my guess is that it was a test to determine how the crew and the radar systems would perform.
Via: Popular Mechanics:
Miles away from Voorhis, Day, Turner, and Weigelt, on the deck of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, Petty Officer Patrick “PJ” Hughes was unaware of the unidentified objects the Carrier group had been dealing with for the past several days. Instead, as an aviation technician, one of Hughes’ jobs was to secure the hard drive data recorders from the airborne early-warning aircraft, the E-2 Hawkeye.
“We call them bricks, but they contain the software to run the airplane and they also record or can record a lot of the data that the air crew sees during the flight,” said Hughes in a YouTube interview.
On November 14, as Hughes performed this routine task, he was unaware that the E-2 hard drives he was securing away in a classified safe had just come from the Hawkeye that Day first tried to use to intercept the mysterious UFOs.
Shortly after securing the data bricks, Hughes said he was visited by his commanding officer and two unknown individuals. “They were not on the ship earlier, and I didn’t see them come on. I’m not sure how they got there,” said Hughes of the two men.
According to Hughes, his commanding officer told him to turn over the recently secured harddrives. “We put them in the bags, he took them, then he and the two anonymous officers left,” Hughes said.
Inside the Princeton, Voorhis had a similar encounter. “These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn’t uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS system,” says Voorhis.
In addition to turning over his data tapes, Voorhis says he was told by this chain of command he needed to reload the recorders for the ship’s advanced Combat Engagement Center (CEC) because it had also been wiped clean, along with the optical drives with all the radio communications. “They even told me to erase everything that’s in the shop—even the blank tapes.” Voorhis says the only other time he can recall having to turn over his tapes like this was after an aircraft crash during one of his combat deployments.
Up on the Princeton’s flight deck, Weigel says the two men initially arrived on the Princeton via helicopter, wearing generic flight suits. According to Weigelt, the men boarded one of his detachment’s SH-60B helicopters and flew off for a time before returning with “a bunch of bags.” Weigelt says the two men retired to the “Admiral’s Quarters”on the Princeton and a guard was staged outside of the door.
AI Clones Your Voice After Listening for 5 Seconds
November 13th, 2019Must listen examples at the link.
Via: Google:
We describe a neural network-based system for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that is able to generate speech audio in the voice of many different speakers, including those unseen during training. Our system consists of three independently trained components: (1) a speaker encoder network, trained on a speaker verification task using an independent dataset of noisy speech from thousands of speakers without transcripts, to generate a fixed-dimensional embedding vector from seconds of reference speech from a target speaker; (2) a sequence-to-sequence synthesis network based on Tacotron 2, which generates a mel spectrogram from text, conditioned on the speaker embedding; (3) an auto-regressive WaveNet-based vocoder that converts the mel spectrogram into a sequence of time domain waveform samples. We demonstrate that the proposed model is able to transfer the knowledge of speaker variability learned by the discriminatively-trained speaker encoder to the new task, and is able to synthesize natural speech from speakers that were not seen during training. We quantify the importance of training the speaker encoder on a large and diverse speaker set in order to obtain the best generalization performance. Finally, we show that randomly sampled speaker embeddings can be used to synthesize speech in the voice of novel speakers dissimilar from those used in training, indicating that the model has learned a high quality speaker representation.
