Sunday, September 19th, 2010
Stephan: It is always important to remember that people in the past, even the deep past were just as smart as we are today, just as ambitious. Their worldview constrained them in some ways, just as ours does today. There are many ways to be a successful human being.
A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.
The research, led by Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
‘We tend to associate drugs that cure diseases with modern medicine,’ Armelagos says. ‘But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this prehistoric population was using empirical evidence to develop therapeutic agents. I have no doubt that they knew what they were doing.’
Armelagos is a bioarcheologist and an expert on prehistoric and ancient diets. In 1980, he discovered what appeared to be traces of tetracycline in human bones from Nubia dated between A.D. 350 and 550, populations that left no written record. The ancient Nubian kingdom was located in present-day Sudan, south of ancient Egypt.
Armelagos and his fellow researchers later tied the source of the antibiotic to the Nubian beer. The grain used to make the fermented gruel contained the soil bacteria streptomyces, […]
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Sunday, September 19th, 2010
REBECA MOWBRAY, - NOLA.com
Stephan: It will be interesting to see how this plays out and, maybe, we will get some clarity, finally.
At the packed opening hearing of the massive litigation over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier scheduled a key proceeding in the litigation — a trial to determine the proportion of fault among the corporate defendants — more than a year from now, in October 2011.
The initial gathering of hundreds of attorneys from across the country filled the largest room at federal court in New Orleans, plus two overflow courtrooms. It was supposed to be largely administrative, but in debating how to manage the hundreds of cases pegged to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and subsequent oil leak, disputes were already taking shape over the interaction of maritime law with the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the preservation of evidence with the blowout preventer, and how quickly other evidence can be gathered.
While Barbier put off questions of when test trials will occur on indirect economic damage, wrongful death, personal injury and psychological injury cases, he scheduled an all-important maritime proceeding known as a limitation of liability trial.
‘The good thing about setting the limitation of liability for trial is that it will be our goal for concluding discovery on […]
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Saturday, September 18th, 2010
LAURA COLONTRELLE, - The Investor Relations Group/Newswise
Stephan: Here is some good news about an esoteric industry that most of us never think about. From small beginnings great things can grow.
So-called green chemists use all the tools and training of traditional chemistry, but instead of ending up with toxins that must be treated after the fact, they aim to create industrial processes that avert hazard problems altogether. The result is new materials that are not only safer to use but less expensive to make. Yet a decade after the phrase ‘green chemistry
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Saturday, September 18th, 2010
MATT TAIBBI, - Rolling Stone
Stephan:
It was sickening enough when British oil giant BP set new standards for corporate scumbaggery in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, turning the Gulf of Mexico into its own personal toilet and imperiling entire species of wildlife in an attempt to save a few nickels. But with the Gulf geyser finally capped, there’s still a way for BP to cause an even more unthinkable disaster: an AIG-style, derivative-fueled financial shitstorm. If the company decides to declare bankruptcy – a very real possibility with these bastards – it could trigger chaos in our casino system of finance, underscoring the insane levels of leverage and systemic risk we have left in place, even after the global economic crash of 2008.
The first serious whiff of trouble came on June 15th, when Barack Obama manned up and went on national TV to tell the nation that he wasn’t going to let BP worm its way out of this one. ‘We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused,’ he declared, vowing to push BP to set aside $20 billion to clean up its mess and compensate victims.
Get your dose of Matt Taibbi’s commentary on the Taibblog.
That sound you heard the […]
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Saturday, September 18th, 2010
Stephan: Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Things once of little value can suddenly become incredibly valuable; and things once valuable can become obsolete and of little interest. How many remember the gutta-percha industry? Fifty years from now the value of coal may be near zero. The lightning rods on the Washington monument, put on in the 1860s, were made of platinum, because it was a good conductor, easy to work, and not considered very valuable.
As these new technologies take hold we, who care about the Earth and its systems, must work to see that as these rare elements are developed it is done without the despoilment of, say, the mountains of West Virginia by the coal industry.
LOS ANGELES — On a hazy summer afternoon, before the giant thunder clouds have had chance to unleash their fury, one of the most breath-taking sights you can witness is the Painted Desert of northern Arizona looming iridescently out of the mist. Even after swooping among the spectacular outcrops, mesas and buttes of Sedona, or nosing along the rim of the Grand Canyon, from the cockpit of a light aircraft 4,000 feet (1,200 metres) above the ground nothing can compare with the Painted Desert’s palette of multi-coloured rock formations stretching off to the horizon.
The blues, grays and lavenders come from the geologically rapid formation of sediments when water covered the land over 200m years ago. The reds, ochres and pinks hail from the much slower deposition during the Triassic’s dryer periods, when erosion and oxidation had time to work their magic. The pigments that give the fine-grained rocks their hues come largely from the iron and manganese compounds they contain. Other colours found along the desert’s southern fringe stem from the fossilised remains of a prehistoric coniferous forest. How such naked beauty could ever be labeled ‘badlands
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