NUKUS, Uzbekistan — The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet’s most shocking disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday, as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region. The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea’s evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles. Ban toured the sea by helicopter as part of a visit to the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. His trip included a touchdown in Muynak, Uzbekistan, a town once on the shore where a pier stretches eerily over gray desert and camels stand near the hulks of stranded ships. ‘On the pier, I wasn’t seeing anything, I could see only a graveyard of ships,’ Ban told reporters after […]
This statement isn’t new, but for years anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of art understood these artistic manifestations as purely aesthetic and decorative motives. Eduardo Palacio-Pérez, researcher at the University of Cantabria (UC), now reveals the origins of a theory that remains nowadays/lasts into our days. ‘This theory is does not originate with the prehistorians, in other words, those who started to develop the idea that the art of primitive peoples was linked with beliefs of a symbolic-religious nature were the anthropologists’, Eduardo Palacio-Pérez, author of the study and researcher at UC, explains to SINC. This idea appeared at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. Up until then, Palaeolithic art had been interpreted as a simple aesthetic and decorative expression. ‘Initially scientists saw this art as the way that the people of the Palaeolithic spent their free time, sculpting figurines or decorating their tools’, Palacio points out. His investigation, published in the last edition of Oxford Journal of Archaeology, reveals the reasons for the move from this recreational-decorative interpretation of Palaeolithic art to different one of a religious and symbolic nature. The history of the discovery and study of this […]
One of the first big pieces of the federal health-care overhaul to take effect is the creation by late June of temporary high-risk insurance pools for people who can’t get affordable coverage because of a pre-existing condition. On Friday, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent letters to governors and state insurers, laying out the requirements for these pools and asking states to decide whether they’ll participate. States have 90 days from the March 23 signing of the health reform bill to set up a program to cover people with pre-existing conditions who have been uninsured for at least six months. If they can’t or won’t comply, the Department of Health and Human Services will administer one for them. By 2014, the pools will be replaced with insurance exchanges that will let people shop for coverage. Some health care experts are concerned that the 90-day time frame for implementation is too short, and that the $5 billion in federal aid allocated for the pools isn’t enough. But Michael McRaith, director of the Illinois Department of Insurance, said Friday that the state is well-positioned to meet the federal requirements. Illinois is […]
The ‘father of the personal computer’ who kick-started the careers of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen has died at the age of 68. Dr Henry Edward Roberts was the inventor of the Altair 8800, a machine that sparked the home computer era. Gates and Allen contacted Dr Roberts after seeing the machine on the front cover of a magazine and offered to write software for it. The program was known as Altair-Basic, the foundation of Microsoft’s business. ‘Ed was willing to take a chance on us – two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace – and we have always been grateful to him,’ the Microsoft founders said in a statement. ‘The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things.’ Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told technology website CNET that Dr Roberts had taken ‘ a critically important step that led to everything we have today’. ‘Fond memories’ Dr Roberts was the founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), originally set up to sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. The company went on to sell […]
Given enough money, you can create your own reality. Who’s behind a multi-million dollar campaign to seed doubt about climate change? It’s not just Exxon and Chevron-it’s also Koch Industries, an oil and gas giant that most people have never heard of, according to a new report from Greenpeace. Koch’s extensive funding of anti-climate work makes it the ‘financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,’ says Greenpeace. The Kansas-based company and its affiliates and foundations spent almost $25 million on ‘organizations of the ‘climate denial machine” between 2005 and 2008, according to the report. Koch Industries and the Koch family also spent $37.9 million between 2006 and 2009. ‘Although Koch intentionally stays out of the public eye, it is now playing a quiet but dominant role in a high-profile national policy debate on global warming,’ the report concludes. Koch Industries also buys up politicians. Mostly Republicans, not exclusively: The Koch PAC has given more than $10,000 to 21 lawmakers since 2004-four Democrats and 17 Republicans-which is more than any other oil-and-gas sector PAC, the report states. Topping the House recipients: Henry […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
