, - Independent Science News
Stephan: The trend of corporations corrupting American science can be found throughout the disciplines. It is done in a myriad of ways, but always for the same end -- anywhere profit is involved. An entire peer-reviewed literature has grown up reporting on this trend. One can't be in disciplines such as medicine, chemistry, and pharmaceuticals and not be aware of this. I can tell you from personal experience that trying to publish in a medical journal today is an exercise in maneuvering through a Kafkaesque series of forms.
Yet, at both the scientific and governmental levels it is still rampant. Here is an example.
US EPA’s 503 sludge rule (1993) allows treated sewage sludges, aka biosolids, to be land-applied to farms, forests, parks, school playgrounds, home gardens and other private and public lands. According to a recent EPA survey, biosolids contain a wide range of mutagenic and neurotoxic chemicals, which are present at a million-fold higher concentrations (ppm versus ppt) compared with their levels in polluted air and water (1). Biosolids contain all of the lipophilic (fat-soluble) chemical wastes that once polluted our rivers and lakes, but which now settle out at sewage treatment plants and become concentrated in sewage sludges. Most biosolids contain ppm concentrations of heavy metals, including chromium, lead, and mercury. They contain similarly high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and semi-volatiles, such as bis (2-Ethylhexyl) phthalate, Benzo(a)pyrene), and polybrominated diphenyl ether congeners (PBDE flame retardants). Most biosolids also contain pathogenic agents and ppm levels of many common drugs, including ciprofloxacin (Cipro), carbamazepine (Tegretol, Equetro), and fluoxetine (Prozac).
While working at EPA Dr David Lewis published evidence that teenager Shayne Conner (of New Hampshire) died and other neighbors were harmed from living near land applied with sewage sludge (Lewis et al 2002). He furthermore became involved after dairy herds of two […]
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Stephan: Forty six years of doing my own experimental research, plus reading several thousand studies done by others has convinced me -- on the basis of data, not ideology, theology, or simple speculation -- that all living beings have a measure of consciousness, and that they are all interlinked and interdependent, joined in a matrix of life.
In support of that fact here is some new data that may fascinate you as much as it did me. I remember meeting the late Cleve Backster back in the early 70s when my friends Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins, both also now gone, were working on first a Harper's article and, then, the book that grew out of it, The Secret Life of Plants. Cleve was doing research showing that plants reacted through some kind of nonlocal linkage when shrimp across the room with which they had no physical connection, were dumped into boiling water. At the time materialist biologists derided this work as "fantasy" and "nonsense for the gullible." They were wrong as several thousand studies showing nonlocal linkages between organisms across the full spectrum of life have subsequently shown. Of course that doesn't stop materialists who, like climate deniers, and creationists, are not really interested in facts on this subject, however prestigious they may be in other areas. As with the other deniers they hold their views with religious fervor.
An interesting addition to the last article we published about the Mimosa plant and memory. The evidence for plant consciousness seems to be stacking more and more each day. How fascinating.
New research from a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia will change the way you think about the difference between plants and animals. Mimosa pundica plants, they found, can learn and remember, despite not having a brain. Those active little fern-like things always did seem sort of smart, though, didn’t they?
Scientists discover plants that can learn and remember
With a name that literally means ‘shy,” the Mimosa pundica is a particularly unique piece of flora, as it responds to touch by folding inward to protect itself from predators. Wondering if this was just a straightforward reflex, the Australian researchers rigged up an apparatus that would drop water on the plant in both high- and low-light environments. Much to their surprise, they found that the plant stopped opening and closing once it learned that the drops weren’t harmful. More impressively, the plants remembered that lesson several weeks after the initial training.
The scientists are unclear on the exact biology of what makes Mimosa pundica plants learn and remember, but they […]
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KATE TUMMARELLO, - The Hill
Stephan: This is good news. It is too modest, but at least it puts an American marker on the board of climate change remediation. I particularly appreciate President Obama's comments, "In his address, Obama criticized lawmakers who opposed climate change, calling them 'a serious threat to everybody's future.'" It's time political leaders who have enough sense of understand what is at risk to speak out very publicly like this.
President Obama laid out a billion-dollar climate change challenge on Saturday, urging the nation to help combat the effects of natural disasters.
‘Can you imagine a more worthy goal, a more worthy legacy, than protecting the world we leave to our children,” the president said as he delivered the commencement address at the University of California, Irvine.
“U.S. action is critical on climate change, as the world is watching and will follow the U.S.’s lead, he said. ‘This is a fight America must lead.”
Obama announced a $1 billion fund for towns and cities recovering from disasters that would ‘help communities prepare for the impacts of climate change and build more resilient infrastructure across the country.”
‘In some parts of the country, weather-related disasters like droughts, fires, storms and floods are going to get harsher and costlier,” he said.
According to the White House, approximately $180 million will be set aside for relief efforts to address critical housing needs in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 storm that severely impacted New York and New Jersey.
In his address, Obama criticized lawmakers who opposed climate change, calling them ‘a serious threat to everybody’s future.”
‘Today’s Congress, though, is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the […]
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Saturday, June 14th, 2014
NAFEEZ AHMED, PHD, Director Institute for Policy Studies - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is a report validating what I have been saying for several years: the real purpose of the surveillance state is not external threats from Muslim terrorists sneaking into the country; that is just the cover story. The real purpose is to control civil unrest which even a child ought to see is coming driven by climate change, the loss of faith in government, and the historic levels of inequality. This effort to protect the elite, as this report spells out, is also another aspect of the Corruption of American Universities Trend.
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions.” The project will determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagians by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”
Twitter posts and conversations will be examined “to identify […]
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Saturday, June 14th, 2014
, - University of Cambridge (U.K.)
Stephan: Further evidence that Earth's ecosystems constitute an interlocking interdependent fractal matrix of subsystems far more complex than we understand. Here is an example you have probably never heard of. I certainly had not. Until we realize and accept our ignorance our arrogance will keep us from learning. We do not have dominion over the Earth, one of the most toxic Judea-Christian myths. The Earth was here before us, and will be here long after our species is gone. At best we can be sand in the gears or lubricant. And it is yet another arrogance to believe we are the only conscious beings. We have no idea what the consciousness of dinosaurs was, any more than we can truly inhabit a whale's reality -- or a flowers.
Research shows forest debris that drains into lakes is an important contributor to freshwater food chains – bolstering fish diets to the extent that increased forest cover causes fish to get “fat’ and sparse forest leaves smaller, underfed fish.
Debris from forests that washes into freshwater lakes supplements the diets of microscopic zooplankton and the fish that feed off them – creating larger and stronger fish, new research shows.
The researchers warn that, as forests are eroded through human activities such as logging, the impacts will be felt in aquatic as well as terrestrial food chains.
In fact, the study was conducted at a Canadian lake chosen because it had suffered ecological disaster during the mid-20th century: acid rain as a result of the local nickel smelting industry.
Despite moves to reduce environmental impact, many areas of vegetation surrounding the lake are still in recovery. This enabled scientists to study Yellow Perch fish from different parts of a lake that has varying degrees of surrounding forest coverage.
Carbon from forest debris has a different elemental mass than carbon produced by algae in the aquatic food chain. By analysing the young Perch that had been born that year, scientists were able to determine that at least […]
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