WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Supreme Court Monday declined to consider a Bush-era rule that would have allowed a cap-and-trade approach to mercury, a toxic heavy metal emitted by power plants that burn coal and oil. Power plants are the largest source of mercury in the nation. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case invalidates the U.S. EPA’s so-called Clean Air Mercury Rule, which would have allowed dangerous levels of mercury pollution to persist under a weak cap-and-trade program that would not have taken full effect until after 2020. The Supreme Court in effect denied an appeal, filed last year by a coalition of utilities, seeking reversal of a federal court decision vacating the mercury rule. The original lawsuit that resulted in the February 2008 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the states and environmental groups maintained that EPA illegally removed coal and oil-fired power plants from the list of regulated source categories under a section of the Clean Air Act that requires strict regulation of hazardous air pollutants, including mercury. Left standing is the ruling by the appeals court that upheld the lower court ruling and rebuked the Bush-era EPA […]
CHICAGO — Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, U.S. researchers said on Monday. Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood. ‘It’s definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase,’ said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. ‘Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart,’ Lampert said. She and colleagues studied 62 patients with heart disease and implantable heart defibrillators or ICDs that can detect dangerous heart rhythms or arrhythmias and deliver an electrical shock to restore a normal heart beat. ‘These were people we know already had some vulnerability to arrhythmia,’ Lampert said in a telephone interview. Patients in the study took part in an exercise in which they recounted a recent angry episode while Lampert’s team did a test […]
WASHINGTON — The risk posed to mankind and the environment by even small changes in average global temperatures is much higher than believed even a few years ago, a study said Monday. Published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study updated a 2001 assessment by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change that looked at temperature changes and the risks they pose. ‘Today, we have to assume that the risks of negative impacts of climate change on humans and nature are larger than just a few years ago,’ said Hans-Martin Fussel, one of the authors of the report. The new study found that even small changes of global mean temperatures could produce the kinds of conditions singled out as ‘reasons for concern’ in the 2001 assessment. Those included risks to threatened systems such as coral reefs or endangered species; and extreme weather events like cyclones, heat waves or droughts. Other ‘reasons for concern’ involved the way the impact of climate change is distributed, the aggregate damage caused and the risk of ‘large scale discontinuities’ such as the deglaciation of the Greenland ice sheets. ‘Compared with results reported in the (2001 assessment), […]
Last week, a British man announced he’d found the lost city of Atlantis using Google Ocean — the latest add-on to Google Earth that features 3D bathymetry, which lets you explore the ocean floor. The supposed ‘Atlantis’ image is about 620 miles off the northwestern coast of Africa and south of Portugal. It shows a rectangular grid with what looks like roadways leading away from it at the coordinates 31 15’15.53N 24 15’30.53W. According to The Telegraph, the newspaper that first reported the ‘discovery,’ the pattern is roughly the size of Wales (around 8,000 sq. mi.). Friday’s find sparked intense interest online despite the farfetched claim. Many scratched their heads wondering, what if? After all, this underwater discovery seemed to match the location Plato had described in his writings. Plato said Atlantis was a massive island that was ‘larger than Libya and Asia together,’ and located at a ‘distant point in the Atlantic Ocean…in front of the mouth of the pillars of Hercules’ (the Straits of Gibraltar). Google Quashes Atlantis Buzz Alas, the Atlantis discovery was not meant to be. Google quashed the idea a day later in a statement, ‘what users are seeing is an artifact […]
Vladimir Putin’s social contract has been premised on an authoritarian state delivering rising incomes and resurgent power. But the economic crisis is unraveling all that. And what comes next in Russia might be even worse. For the Western world, 1929 marked the start of the Great Depression. For the Soviet Union, it was a year that Joseph Stalin called the ‘Great Break’-the ending of a short spell of semiprivate economic policy and the beginning of the deadly period of forced collectivization and industrialization. Often mistranslated as the ‘Great Leap Forward,’ ‘Great Break’ is truer to Stalin’s intentions and much more befitting their tragic consequences. The events he set in motion 80 years ago broke millions of lives and changed human values and instincts in Russia. It was, arguably, the most consequential year in Russia’s 20th-century history. Now, 80 years later, and for much different reasons, 2009 could shape up to be a year of similarly far-reaching consequences for Russia’s 21st century. Today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is not Joseph Stalin. But just as historians view 1929 as the end of the revolutionary period of Soviet history, scholars will (and already do) […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
