Scotland’s renewable electricity output has reached record-high levels, according to official statistics released today.

The figures, published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, show that renewables met a record-breaking 40.3 per cent of gross electricity consumption in 2012, confirming that Scotland is on track to meet its interim target of 50% by 2015.

This is important progress towards the Government’s 2020 target of the equivalent of 100 per cent of Scotland’s electricity needs met from renewable electricity, as well as more from other sources.

Scottish renewable electricity made up 36 per cent of the UK’s renewable energy generation in 2012. Scotland continues to be a net exporter of electricity, exporting over 26 per cent of generation in 2012.

Also, quarterly data up to Q3 2013 shows that renewable generation in 2013 is on track to beat the record year set in 2012.

Energy Minister Fergus Ewing said: ‘These figures show that renewable electricity in Scotland is going from strength to strength, confirming that 2012 was a record year for generation in Scotland and that 2013 looks set to be even better. We can already see from the first 9 months of 2013 that generation is 4 per cent higher compared to the same […]

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Greenland has been hiding a lot of melt water that may or may not end up contributing to rising sea levels. The discovery of liquid water hiding inside layers of glacier-top snow in southern Greenland came as a shock to the scientists drilling the ice.

‘It was a complete surprise,

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Catholic hospitals have been on a merger spree over the last few years, as Mother Jones reported earlier this year. Ever-expanding swaths of the country are now served only by a Catholic hospital, where patients have no choice but to receive care dictated by Catholic bishops whose religious edicts don’t always align with what’s best for a patient.

Catholic hospitals generally follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care, which restrict abortion even in cases where a fetus isn’t viable, for instance, a practice that has resulted in hospitals denying proper care for women suffering from miscarriages. The ACLU recently filed suit against the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on behalf of a Michigan woman who was suffering a second-trimester miscarriage and was sent home twice by a Catholic hospital, developing a serious infection because the hospital refused to even talk to her about the possibility of an abortion. Her baby died two hours after she miscarried.

Despite this heavy mixing of theology and health care, Catholic hospitals in 2011 received $27 billion-nearly half of their revenues-from public sources, according to a new report put out today by the American Civil Liberties Union and MergerWatch, a reproductive rights advocacy […]

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The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman’s toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Population geneticist Montgomery Slatkin, graduate student Fernando Racimo and post-doctoral student Flora Jay were part of an international team of anthropologists and geneticists who generated a high-quality sequence of the Neanderthal genome and compared it with the genomes of modern humans and a recently recognized group of early humans called Denisovans.

The comparison shows that Neanderthals and Denisovans are very closely related, and that their common ancestor split off from the ancestors of modern humans about 400,000 years ago. Neanderthals and Denisovans split about 300,000 years ago.

Though Denisovans and Neanderthals eventually died out, they left behind bits of their genetic heritage because they occasionally interbred with modern humans. The research team estimates that between 1.5 and 2.1 percent of the genomes of modern non-Africans can be traced to Neanthertals.

Denisovans also left genetic traces in modern humans, though only in some Oceanic and Asian populations. The genomes of Australian aborigines, […]

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The debate over voting rights has gone to college.

Two University of Massachusetts Boston academics — Keith G. Bentele, an assistant professor of Sociology, and Erin O’Brien, an associate professor of Political Science — recently published a paper looking at the proposal and passage of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006 to 2011. In the paper, titled ‘Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies,’ the authors conclude that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.

‘We looked at proposed and passage over this period, and we looked at just 2011 specifically,’ Bentele told TPM in an interview this week. ‘And you have this consistent emergence — over and over and over — these partisan and racial factors are the most strongly associated with these outcomes.’

The paper focused on a range of restrictive voter access legislation. That means not just voter ID bills, but also the regulation of groups who register voters, the shortening of early voting periods, and other issues. And these efforts were not limited geographically. Restrictive voter access legislation was proposed in nearly every state in the country during the six-year period looked at, and at least one restrictive change passed […]

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