Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

‘When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,’ says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

‘Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,’ Edelman says.
Political divide

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.

After controlling for differences in broadband […]

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HANCOCK FIELD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. — From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.

The Reaper is among the drones that pilots at Hancock operate, killing insurgents and protecting American troops overseas.

‘I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,

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Jermey Grantham, chief investment strategist of Boston-based money manager GMO and a closely-watched bear, put out a quarterly letter to investors this week focusing on a recent pet topic of his: A long-term and politically dangerous food crisis. In a 17-page-letter kicked off with lyrics from Bob Marley, he lays out the risks facing the world from the strain on basic resources, including water and grains. He points to China as one of the few parts of the world taking the prospects of future resource shortages seriously.

Grantham says:

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Rooftop solar power is growing like crazy in California. But there’s a big problem: About 44 percent of California residents are renters, not homeowners. That means that nearly half the residents of the state can’t purchase solar-generated electricity even if they want to.

Now the solar industry, utilities, environmentalists, financiers and legislative staffers in Sacramento are hashing out an innovative but controversial Senate bill that would allow people to join forces and collectively ‘buy’ solar power from a shared facility.

The bill covers other forms of renewable energy, including wind, biomass, geothermal, and small hydropower. But solar panels, which have seen a dramatic drop in price in recent years,

are expected to make up the lion’s share of new projects. Senate Bill 843 aims to bring an additional 2 gigawatts of renewable energy online within the territories of the state’s three largest utilities: PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. Two gigawatts is nothing to sneeze at: One gigawatt is roughly the output of two coal-fired power plants and is enough energy to power 750,000 homes.

The bill would allow customers of the three utilities to ‘buy’ renewable energy from, say, a solar array on the roof of a church, in […]

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Psychological distress, even at relatively low levels, is linked to an increased risk of death, a large new study shows.

Distress is a measure of psychological health that takes into account symptoms of anxiety or depression.

The study found that people frayed by even slight distress, meaning they sometimes stayed awake at night worrying or had trouble concentrating on tasks, for example, were about 20% more likely to die over a 10-year period compared to people who reported no such symptoms.

That was true even after researchers adjusted their results to account for unhealthy behaviors that often accompany anxiety and depression, like smoking and excessive drinking. They also accounted for things like exercise, weight, and diabetes.

The study can’t prove that being anxious or depressed leads directly to a person’s death. Other studies looking into the connection have been unable to discover which comes first: Does a person get sick because they’re depressed? Or do people get depressed because they’re sick?

In this study, though, researchers discounted all early deaths — those that happened in the first five years of the study. That makes it less likely that illness caused people to become worried and depressed.

‘It is a very impressive study,’ says Glyn Lewis, PhD, […]

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