Stephan: Think about what this piece is saying: Big Pharma and the Illness Profit System have turned over two-thirds of the American population into drug users, producing incomes for them of $250 billion. Twenty five per cent of American women are taking anti-depressants.
ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA — Researchers find that nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half receive at least two prescriptions.
Mayo Clinic researchers report that antibiotics, antidepressants and painkiller opioids are the most common prescriptions given to Americans. Twenty percent of U.S. patients were also found to be on five or more prescription medications.
The study is uncovering valuable information to the researchers about U.S. prescription practices.
‘Often when people talk about health conditions they’re talking about chronic conditions such as heart disease or diabetes,
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MARTHA HEIL, - UNiversity of Maryland
Stephan: Here is some good battery news.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — A sliver of wood coated with tin could make a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery.
But don’t try it at home yet – the components in the battery tested by scientists at the University of Maryland are a thousand times thinner than a piece of paper. Using sodium instead of lithium, as many rechargeable batteries do, makes the battery environmentally benign. Sodium doesn’t store energy as efficiently as lithium, so you won’t see this battery in your cell phone – instead, its low cost and common materials would make it ideal to store huge amounts of energy at once, such as solar energy at a power plant.
Existing batteries are often created on stiff bases, which are too brittle to withstand the swelling and shrinking that happens as electrons are stored in and used up from the battery. Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and their team found that wood fibers are supple enough to let their sodium-ion battery last more than 400 charging cycles, which puts it among the longest lasting nanobatteries.
The inspiration behind the idea comes from the trees,’ said Hu, an assistant professor of materials science. ‘Wood fibers that make up a tree once held […]
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Stephan: Here is some good news and, as I read it, I couldn't stop thinking: 'If we poured the kind of money we spend on war, on research like this, how extraordinarily different our world could be.
The efficient conversion of sunlight into useful energy is one of the challenges which stand in the way of meeting the world’s increasing energy demand in a clean, sustainable way without relying on fossil fuels. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants and some bacteria, have mastered this process: In less than a couple of trillionths of a second, 95 percent of the sunlight they absorb is whisked away to drive the metabolic reactions that provide them with energy. The efficiency of photovoltaic cells currently on the market is around 20 percent. What hidden mechanism does nature use to transfer energy so efficiently?
Various research groups around the world have shown that this highly efficient energy transport is connected to a quantum-mechanical phenomenon. However, until now, no one had directly observed the possible impacts of such a quantum transport mechanism at work at room temperature.
In an article published in the journal Science, researchers from ICFO- Institute of Photonic Sciences, in collaboration with biochemists from the University of Glasgow, have been able to show for the first time at ambient conditions that the quantum mechanisms of energy transfer make phyotosynthesis more robust in the face of environmental influences. The quantum phenomenon responsible, known as […]
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Stephan: This is just an amazing story if you stop to think about it. An excellent example of the wellbeing of the many being made sacrificed to profits for the few.
The latest domestic energy boom is sweeping through some of the nation’s driest pockets, drawing millions of gallons of water to unlock oil and gas reserves from beneath the Earth’s surface.
Hydraulic fracturing, or the drilling technique commonly known as fracking, has been used for decades to blast huge volumes of water, fine sand and chemicals into the ground to crack open valuable shale formations.
But now, as energy companies vie to exploit vast reserves west of the Mississippi, fracking’s new frontier is expanding to the same lands where crops have shriveled and waterways have dried up due to severe drought.
In Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming, the vast majority of the counties where fracking is occurring are also suffering from drought, according to an Associated Press analysis of industry-compiled fracking data and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s official drought designations.
While fracking typically consumes less water than farming or residential uses, the exploration method is increasing competition for the precious resource, driving up the price of water and burdening already depleted aquifers and rivers in certain drought-stricken stretches.
Some farmers and city leaders worry that the fracking boom is consuming too much of a scarce resource, while others see the […]
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Stephan: You all remember JP Morgan, one of the banking and investment giants that brought us 2008's financial collapse, and got away essentially scot free? They couldn't make their intentions any clearer could they? This is what happens when governments allow financial institutions to be above the law.
In a document released at the end of May, the American banking and investment giant JP Morgan Chase calls for the overturning of the bourgeois democratic constitutions established in a series of European countries after the Second World War and the installation of authoritarian regimes.
The 16-page document was produced by the Europe Economic Research group of JP Morgan and titled ‘The Euro Area Adjustment-About Half-Way There.
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