The auto industry said Monday that lawsuits over vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions could eventually force manufacturers to eliminate big SUVs from the market in California, an assertion denied by environmental attorneys and the state air quality board. ‘If we lost (in court),’ said Dave Barthmuss, General Motors’ spokesman for environmental and energy affairs, ‘certain vehicles could not be offered for sale — vehicles that consume more fuel than others. There would be fewer SUVs and we might not be able to offer them for sale in California. It could spell the end of the big SUV in California.’ At the California Air Resources Board, however, spokesman Jerry Martin said the 2002 law in question cannot force the auto industry to reduce the size of its vehicles or to abandon any models it wants to keep selling. The spat over what may happen to SUVs in California stems from a pair of federal court lawsuits that have been going on for years but are back in the news because one of them is scheduled to be argued Wednesday before the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, California, along with 11 other states and several environmental organizations, wants […]
LONDON — The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples’ lives, a controversial climate scientist said on Tuesday. James Lovelock, who angered climate scientists with his Gaia theory of a living planet and then alienated environmentalists by backing nuclear power, said a traumatized earth might only be able to support less than a tenth of it’s 6 billion people. ‘We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don’t see the species dying out,’ he told a news conference. ‘A hot earth couldn’t support much over 500 million.’ ‘Almost all of the systems that have been looked at are in positive feedback … and soon those effects will be larger than any of the effects of carbon dioxide emissions from industry and so on around the world,’ he added. Scientists say that global warming due to carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport could boost average temperatures by up to 6C by the end of the century causing floods, famines and violent storms. But they also say that tough action […]
It is something one half of the population has long suspected – and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men. In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day – 13,000 more than the average man. Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat – and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests. The book – written by a female psychiatrist – says that inherent differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men. In The Female Mind, Dr Luan Brizendine says women devote more brain cells to talking than men. And, if that wasn’t enough, the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high. Dr Brizendine, a self-proclaimed feminist, says the differences can be traced back to the womb, where the sex hormone testosterone moulds the developing male brain. The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are […]
Within the next 25 years, AIDS is set to join heart disease and stroke as the top three causes of death worldwide, with estimates that at least 117 million people will die from the disease by 2030, according to a study published online Monday. When global mortality projections were last calculated a decade ago, researchers had assumed the number of AIDS cases would be declining. Instead, it’s on the rise. ‘It will be increasingly hard to sustain treatment programs unless we can turn off the tap of new HIV infections.’ – London epidemiology Prof. Richard Hays Currently ranked fourth behind heart disease, stroke, and respiratory infections, AIDS is set to become No. 3, say researchers in a new report in the Public Library of Science’s Medicine journal. It accounts for about 2.8 million deaths every year, but could near 120 million by 2030. Overall, the researchers predict that in three decades, the causes of global mortality will be strikingly similar worldwide - apart from the prevalence of AIDS in poorer countries. Most people will be dying at older ages of noninfectious diseases like cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer. The paper was produced by Dr. Colin […]
SYDNEY — For the first time researchers have been able to induce the growth of replacement teeth in mammals. Unlike other vertebrates, mammals normally lose the ability after they replace their milk teeth in infancy. ‘Our results may have implications for organ regeneration and bioengineering of teeth and the understanding of the genetic basis of the evolution of teeth,’ the authors said in a paper published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was conducted at the University of Helsinki, Finland, as well as in Berlin and Kyoto, using mouse tissue. Most vertebrates – famously including sharks – have continuous tooth generation, meaning that lost teeth are replaced with new teeth as needed. Somewhere in their evolution mammals, including humans, lost this capacity, with the sole dental replacement being permanent teeth for milk teeth. ‘Intriguingly, a trend in mammalian evolution has been a reduction of number and renewal of teeth, concomitant with the evolution of progressively more complex…teeth,’ the researchers said. Irma Sesloff, from the University of Helsinki, and fellow researchers stimulated a molecular trigger, called the Wnt pathway, in tooth buds extracted from mouse embryos. Tooth buds […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
