Chattanooga’s Electric Power Board has automatically upgraded connection speeds for customers at no charge each of the past four years. (photo: Shutterstock.com)

The US telecoms industry called on the Federal Communications Commission on Friday to block two cities’ plans to expand high-speed internet services to their residents.

USTelecom, which represents telecoms giants Verizon, AT&T and others, wants the FCC to block expansion of two popular municipally owned high-speed internet networks, one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the other in Wilson, North Carolina.

‘The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples of failures,” USTelecom said in a blogpost. ‘With state taxpayers on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even prohibiting that activity.”

Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster than the […]

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Reuters / David McNew

Extremely low levels of THC compound, a chemical found in marijuana, may slow down or halt the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, US neuroscientists have found, thus laying the ground for the development of effective treatment in the future.

In recent research published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, scientists from University of South Florida revealed their findings, that may shed light on controversial therapeutic qualities of marijuana.

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most common dementia types in people over 65. It develops alongside malfunctioning or death of nerve cells in the brain, which usually results in changes in one’s memory, behavior, and ability to think clearly. Its history dates back to over a century, but its origins remain largely unknown. Alzheimer’s disease tends to progress from mild forms to moderate and severe cases at different rates, eventually leading to death.

As the team found, extremely low doses of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol chemical, also known as THC, reduce the production of amyloid beta protein, as well as prevent it from accumulating in abnormal amounts. […]

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Hawaii, Oahu, Honolulu And Waikiki, Aerial View Of Royal Hawaiian Hotel. (Photo by Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)

Climate change has its sights on its next victim, and it’s one of America’s favorite vacation spots.

Hawaii is known for its near perfect weather, but a new report from the University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant program states that islands in the Pacific might be unrecognizable in the coming years as climate change makes them hotter, arid, stormy and even disease-ridden.

According to “Climate Change Impacts In Hawaii: A Summary Of Climate Change And Its Impacts To Hawaii’s Ecosystems And Communities,” which was paid for by Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA), the oceans, rainfall, ecosystems and immunity of people who live on islands in the Pacific are all at peril. But what’s more, tourism — an industry responsible for most of the state’s annual revenue — might all but vanish.
Amongst the doom and gloom, the study projects:

Higher average temperatures, stressing native […]

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Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
by Thomas Nagel
Oxford University Press, 130 pp., $24.95

1. The history of science is partly the history of an idea that is by now so familiar that it no longer astounds: the universe, including our own existence, can be explained by the interactions of little bits of matter. We scientists are in the business of discovering the laws that characterize this matter. We do so, to some extent at least, by a kind of reduction. The stuff of biology, for instance, can be reduced to chemistry and the stuff of chemistry can be reduced to physics.

Thomas Nagel has never been at ease with this view. Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is one of our most distinguished philosophers. He is perhaps best known for his 1974 paper, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” a modern classic in the philosophy of mind. In that paper, Nagel argued that reductionist, materialist accounts of the mind leave some things unexplained. And one of those things is what it would actually feel like to be, say, a bat, a creature that navigates […]

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Shutterstock image

With last week [3]’s news that Earth’s resources have slipped into an “ecological deficit” for the rest of 2014, many countries around the world have come under scrutiny for taking more from nature then their own ecosystems can supply.

What exactly is this ecological debt? Essentially, it means we have used up all the planet’s natural resources available for an entire year-think deforestation, soil erosion and carbon dioxide emissions-so now we’re running a deficit. In other words, human consumption has exceeded our planet’s capacity to regenerate. The calculations are based on dividing the amount of ecological resources the planet is able to provide in a year by humanity’s demand and multiplying it by 365.

It is now estimated that 86% [4] of the world’s population live in countries that require more from nature than their ecosystems can provide. According to the Global Footprint Network [4], if everybody were to live like Americans, it would take four Earths to support the global population. The U.S. was ranked 33 on the 2014 environmental performance index […]

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