If changes in the public mood and the party alignment of the U.S. Senate have stalled healthcare legislation, they may have thrown the highly anticipated climate bill under a bus. Even before Republican Scott Brown’s stunning election to the Senate in traditionally Democratic Massachusetts last month, it was proving hard to corral moderate Democrats to support a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions. Now they’re afraid to back anything that could be perceived as harmful to the economy. ‘Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere,’ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told the New York Times. That’s a distressing comment coming from one of the three senators supposedly crafting a compromise climate bill that’s capable of achieving a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. President Obama has backed down too. On Tuesday, he signaled that cap-and-trade could go the way of healthcare reform’s ‘public option,’ saying it could be removed from the climate bill. That would eliminate the market mechanism for pricing greenhouse gas pollution — and without setting such a carbon price, other measures under consideration, such as a national renewable energy standard, won’t go far enough to significantly slow global warming. Global emissions […]
WASHINGTON — Looking for a political and policy victory, President Barack Obama on Wednesday pushed energy proposals designed to attract allies and opponents alike, calling for increased ethanol production and new technology to limit pollution from the use of coal. Facing a Senate with a newly energized Republican minority, Obama has begun tailoring his energy policy to GOP-supported ideas, starting in his State of the Union address last week with calls for offshore oil drilling opposed by environmentalists and a bigger role for nuclear power. The first-term president – politically weakened by the loss of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s seat to Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown – also has begun promoting his energy policy as a job-creating boost to the economy. ‘Now, there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to work together in a bipartisan way to get this done,’ Obama said during a bipartisan meeting with governors in the White House’s State Dining Room. ‘It’s good for our national security and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. It’s good for our economy, because it will produce jobs.’ He spoke as the White House released presidential task force recommendations calling on both Washington and […]
Metabolic syndrome is a group of risk factors, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol levels, and fat in the midsection that increase one’s risk of heart disease and diabetes. Diet, exercise, and medications have been shown to improve metabolic syndrome and lower the risk of these complications. Currently a study called Prevencion con Dieta Mediterranea (PREDIMEDD) has enrolled 9000 high-risk participants aged 55 to 80 years who are assigned to one of three interventions: Mediterranean diet with the provision of 1 L/week of virgin olive oil, Mediterranean diet with 30 g/day of mixed nuts, or a low-fat diet. This is a long-term, multi-center, randomized controlled clinical trial is designed to assess the effects of the Mediterranean diet on the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. (Primary prevention means the prevention of a disease that the person has never had before. Compare this to secondary prevention which means preventing a person who is known to have high cholesterol and blockages in the arteries from having a heart attack). Already data from 1224 participants in the study have shown that adhering to a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts appears to provide benefit to individuals with the metabolic […]
BERLIN — The soaring glass and iron Siemens factory here opened almost exactly a century ago. At first, it churned out electricity turbines, then munitions during World War II before being looted by the Soviets, which required it to be rebuilt at the dawn of the cold war. Today, it is manufacturing turbines again - except these models are among the most advanced in the world, each one able to power all the homes in this city of three million. ‘It’s not a museum; it’s a workshop, said Michael Schwarzlose, a project manager at the plant. The same might be said for much of Europe itself, despite American suspicions to the contrary. European companies may not be as nimble as their counterparts in the United States, but in moving to preserve jobs through the worst global downturn since the end of the war, they have forged a different path toward recovery. They are making old plants more modern and effective rather than watching workers or companies deemed uncompetitive fall by the wayside. European companies have paid a price: lower profits and productivity than their American competitors. But as long-suffering American workers face the prospect of […]
PARIS — The quest to find another world that sustains life has been boosted by a technique that should let less expensive ground-based telescopes join the search, a study said on Wednesday. So far, more than 400 so-called exoplanets — planets that orbit stars other than the Sun — have been spotted since 1995, although none has been a rocky, watery world like our own. The key to finding the habitability of these worlds lies especially with spectroscopy, or the analysis of the spectrum of light reflected by the planet, which gives telltales about its atmosphere. Until now, such work has been the preserve of orbital telescopes, where viewing opportunities are strictly rationed because of the huge cost of the gadget. But astronomers in British and Germany say they have developed a technique in data analysis that should enable relatively small ground-based telescopes to take part in the hunt. In a paper published on Wednesday in the British journal Nature, the team were able to identify a ‘fluorescent’ form of methane in the upper atmosphere of an exoplanet 63 light years away. The target is HD 189733b, a gas giant closely orbiting a star […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
