Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Stephan: This is what is great about science. Men and women who like solving these kinds of problems just beaver away at them and, eventually, explanatory data is refined, and you get real insight. Taken as a whole it is an amazing saga of exploration, generation upon generation.
The timing and pattern of the migration of early modern humans has been a source of much debate and research. Now, a new study uses genetic analysis to look for clues about the migration of the first modern humans who moved out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago. The research, published January 26 by Cell Press in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the official journal of the American Society of Human Genetics, provides intriguing insight into the earliest stages of human migration and suggests that modern humans settled in Arabia on their way from the Horn of Africa to the rest of the world.
‘A major unanswered question regarding the dispersal of modern humans around the world concerns the geographical site of the first steps out of Africa,’ explains senior study author, Dr. LuÃsa Pereira from the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology of the University of Porto in Portugal (IPATIMUP). ‘One popular model predicts that the early stages of the dispersal took place across the Red Sea to southern Arabia, but direct genetic evidence has been thin on the ground.’
The work, led by Dr. Pereira at IPATMUP and Professor Martin Richards at the University of Leeds in the […]
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Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Stephan: SR reader Rex Weyler has written an excellent take on what is going on in Canada, a country being taken over by corporate interests. He told me, 'Canada has gone for fascist right wing, Bush-Reagan-Thatcher style strong-arm corporate government. this is because Canada became a petrol-state .. like Nigeria .. the oil companies now run Canada -- Shell, Sinopec, Imperial, etc . -- mostly Chinese dollars to dig up tar sands to run china's power plants for next century.
'But we are making huge progress in stopping ALL THREE major pipeline projects from the tar sands: Keystone, Enbridge, and Kinder Morgan. We're working closely with the First Nations in Canada. Oil companies have a lot of money, but not much soul.'
This is an example of what people can and must do if they wish to preserve a society focused on wellness instead of profit.
At the dawn of the 21st century a new political regime has transformed Canada from global hero – once standing up for peace, people, and nature – to global criminal, plunging into war, eroding civil rights, and destroying environments.
What happened to Canada? Oil. And not just any oil, but the world’s dirtiest, most destructive oil. Canada’s betrayal at the Durban climate talks – abandoning its Kyoto Accord commitments – is the direct effect of becoming a petro-state.
By the late 20th century, oil companies knew that the world’s conventional oil fields were in decline and oil production would soon peak, which it did in 2005. These companies, including sovereign oil powers such as PetroChina, turned their attention to low-grade hydrocarbon deposits in shale gas, deep offshore fields, and Canada’s Alberta tar sands. Simultaneously, inside Canada, oil companies began promoting the political career of the son of an Alberta oil executive, the conservative ideologue Stephen Harper.
Shell Oil opened operations in the tar sands in 2003. In 2004, the same year Canada signed the Kyoto Accord, committing to reduce carbon emissions, oil companies began to form ‘think tanks
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Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
ELLEN NAKASHIMA and LISA REIN, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is further evidence of the paranoia and obsessive control trend which is eating away at our cultural gut. When one set of bureaucrats place another set of bureaucrats under surveillance, mistrust and cover your ass, very quickly becomes the culture under which everyone operates. Nothing innovative can ever happen. This is one of the things the killed the Soviet Union. People don't innovate under surveillance. This is happening just at a time when more than ever we need and should nurture people who innovate.
The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.
The surveillance – detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week – took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.
Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.
Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.
FDA computers post a warning, visible when users log on, that they should have ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy
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Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
JOSH HARKINSON, - Mother Jones
Stephan: A profile of a man who loves Citizens United, and works it for all its worth -- literally.
One evening this past October, I went prospecting for natural-gas man Trevor Rees-Jones at the posh Hilton Anatole in Dallas. He was there to receive the Robert S. Folsom Leadership Award, a philanthropic prize that in recent years has gone to the likes of Laura Bush and former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman. Unlike these prominent Texans, Rees-Jones is not widely known outside his hometown. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he shares it with the British bodyguard who survived Princess Diana’s fatal car crash. The Trevor Rees-Jones that I came to see is the billionaire founder of Dallas-based Chief Oil & Gas and perhaps the fastest-rising star in Republican big-money circles.
The dinner’s PR people had promised me tickets, then changed their minds and, with apologies, yanked them. So I called up my sister, a Dallas debutante of recent vintage, to help me crash the thing. As we strolled through the Hilton’s cave-like lobby in cocktail attire, we saw a troop of young Boy Scouts milling about. One of them inquired about our destination and then helpfully directed us to the event’s open bar. An Eagle Scout himself, Rees-Jones has donated millions of dollars to scouting causes.
A few days […]
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Monday, January 30th, 2012
FELICITY OGILVIE, - The World Today
Stephan: I got a very nasty little note from a climate change denier this morning, telling me I was a fool: Climate change was a fraud cooked up by liberal professors to capture money. It was the same basic line you hear from each of the Republican Presidential Candidates, just in cruder language. Willful ignorance is a very difficult and almost incurable cultural disease because it is impervious to facts.
ELEANOR HALL: And staying with climate change, another international group of scientists says it has new evidence that ocean currents around the world are being affected by global warming.
The scientists said it was not news to them that the East Australian Current was a hot spot but when they examined several other currents near Japan, Africa and North America, they found a worldwide trend of warming waters, as Felicity Ogilvie reports from Hobart.
FELICITY OGILVIE: The scientists have studied and compared five ocean currents that run along the east coasts of Africa, Japan, the USA, Brazil and Australia.
They’ve found that over the past century the water in the currents has warmed two to three times faster than the rest of the world’s oceans.
An Australian scientist who worked on the study is Wenju Cai from the CSIRO.
WENJU CAI: The significance is that we can now link to the changes of these currents to global warming because it is synchronised around the globe, not just an isolated part of the Tasman Sea.
FELICITY OGILVIE: The study is being published in the journal Nature Climate Change and another one of the authors is Michael McPhaden from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the USA.
MICHAEL […]
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