I am sorry there was no SR yesterday. I was stuck in the air flying to Turkey, and I am now writing this from inside a cave hotel, literally a hotel built into a cave in Cappadoci. It has been 48 hours since I got anything more than a sitting up catnap, and it is time, past time, to crash. However, I will try to write my impressions on this extraordinary country tomorrow.
Jonathan Bamber scans his audience – a mix of young scientists-in-training and graybeards – and asks: ‘If I melted the West Antarctic Ice Sheet tomorrow, how much would sea level rise? The answer he typically gets, he continues, ranges from 5 to 7 meters (16 to 23 feet). After all, this has become a kind of canonical range well-grounded in the scientific literature, right? Not so much, it turns out. And therein lies some of the backstory to a study by Dr. Bamber and his Dutch and British colleagues that appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Monitor colleague Moises Velasquez-Manoff has summarized the results here. But if you want to give your web browser a rest, here are the bullet points: ¢ If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) melts, global average sea levels would rise by 3.3 meters. That’s down significantly from the typical estimates. But it still represents an immense creeping disaster, direct and indirect, for more than than 3.2 billion people worldwide who live within 200 miles of a coastline. ¢ The East and West Coasts of North America would see increases 25 percent higher than the global average, Bamber […]
President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending ‘unsustainable, warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries. ‘We can’t keep on just borrowing from China, Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. ‘We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt. Holders of U.S. debt will eventually ‘get tired of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. ‘It will have a dampening effect on our economy. Earlier this week, the Obama administration revised its own budget estimates and raised the projected deficit for this year to a record $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the February estimate. The revision for the 2010 fiscal year estimated the deficit at $1.26 trillion, up 7.4 percent from the February figure. The White House Office of Management and Budget also projected next year’s budget will end up at $3.59 trillion, compared with the $3.55 trillion it estimated previously. Two weeks ago, the president proposed $17 billion in budget cuts, with plans […]
PRINCETON, NJ — A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves ‘pro-life’ on the issue of abortion and 42% ‘pro-choice.’ This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995. The new results, obtained from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002. The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion. Gallup also found public preferences for the extreme views on abortion about even — as they are today — in 2005 and 2002, as well as during […]
That genius is unusual goes without saying. But is it so unusual that it requires the brains of those that possess it to be unusual in others ways, too? A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic-depression on the other, is widely debated. However another link, between savant syndrome and autism, is well established. It is, for example, the subject of films such as ‘Rain Man, illustrated above. A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry in re-interpreting the lives of geniuses in the context of suggestions that they might belong, or have belonged, on the ‘autistic spectrum, as the range of syndromes that include autistic symptoms is now dubbed. So what is the link? And […]
