Thursday, January 22nd, 2015
Stephan: Even the greediest corporation dealing with GMOs has begun to realize that like the Sorcerer's Apprentice this technology can very easily get out of control. It is already happening. So I see this new research to contain genetic mutations as good news
NEW YORK — A year after creating organisms that use a genetic code different from every other living thing, two teams of scientists have achieved another “synthetic biology” milestone: They created bacteria that cannot survive without a specific manmade chemical, potentially overcoming a major obstacle to wider use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
The advance, reported on Wednesday in Nature, offers what one scientist calls a “genetic firewall” to achieve biocontainment, a means of insuring that GMOs cannot live outside a lab or other confined environment.
Although the two labs accomplished this in bacteria, “there is no fundamental barrier” to applying the technique to plants and animals, Harvard Medical School biologist George Church, who led one of the studies, told reporters. “I think we are moving in (that) direction.”
If the technique succeeds, it could be used in microbes engineered for uses from the mundane to the exotic, such as producing yogurt and cheese, synthesizing industrial chemicals and biofuels, cleaning up toxic waste, and manufacturing drugs.
Microbes are already used for those applications. In some cases they contain genes from an unrelated […]
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Thursday, January 22nd, 2015
Britta Sandberg, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: This is what America has become, what we are known for. When I was a young man we used to read stories like this about Soviet prisons, and the commentators always made a point of saying how morally bankrupt the USSR was, and this was proof. Now such stories, this one that has been republished all over the world, are about us. I cannot convey how much I dislike that. That's not the shining city on the hill, that's the torture chamber in the Caribbean.
Mauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantanamo for 12 years now without trial and despite a dearth of evidence. A diary he kept of his torture is now being published around the world. SPIEGEL presents some excerpts.
Credit: Matthias Gebauer/SPIEGEL ONLINE
Mauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantanamo for 12 years now without trial and despite a dearth of evidence. A diary he kept of his torture is now being published around the world. SPIEGEL presents some excerpts.
Country roads and dirt tracks lead to Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s former home in a small village near the capital city of Nouakchott. Children play football in front of the house, using two empty cola bottles as makeshift goals. Goats rummage through the trash foraging for anything edible. There […]
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Thursday, January 22nd, 2015
Stephan: One of the most fascinating aspects of the end of Marijuana Prohibition is the research that has begun to surface. Here is an aspect I had never considered.
In Colorado it is illegal to smoke Marijuana on the slopes. The rules are not always followed, and some maintain it improves there game.
When Olympic snowboarder Ross Rebagliati tested positive for a small amount of marijuana in his blood at the 1998 Japan games, his first-place finish was temporarily called into question.
But THC, the main mind-altering chemical in marijuana, wasn’t even included in the International Olympic Committee’s banned-substances list at the time (it is now, but at a much higher level than the one he tested at). Rebagliati was allowed to keep his victory and medal. (He is now in the medical-marijuana business.)
Even though it’s on the banned list now, does anyone really think of marijuana as a performance-enhancing drug in the first place?
After all, as Robin Williams later joked, “the only way it’s a performance-enhancing drug is if there’s a big f—ing Hershey bar at the […]
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Thursday, January 22nd, 2015
Gregory Korte, - USA Today
Stephan: President Obama I think now is concerned with his legacy. How will history think of him? And I think his wife is also urging him in that direction. And he is determined to leave a legacy that shows the first Black president, in the person of Barrack Obama, was a success and something of an economic savior. If I am optimistic I think the Theocratic Right ultimately will be an historical curiosity like the 19th century No-Nothings. That when the emotional gestalt changes data will prevail. So I take this Executive Order as very good news. Because it is an Executive Order it is not guaranteed after January 2017, when the Presidency changes but, by then, even the dimmest bulb will be able to see climate change, and the public gestalt will have shifted.
WASHINGTON — At least 23 different federal agencies are responsible for implementing the Obama administration’s policies in the Arctic Ocean, from the Office of Science and Technology Policy to the State Department to NASA.
So President Obama signed an executive order Wednesday to better coordinate all those efforts, creating an Arctic Executive Steering Committee to eliminate overlapping areas of responsibility.
“Over the past 60 years, climate change has caused the Alaskan Arctic to warm twice as rapidly as the rest of the United States, and will continue to transform the Arctic as its consequences grow more severe,” Obama said in the executive order. That warming, he said, has resulted in widespread glacier retreat, coastal erosion, acidic oceans, earlier spring melting, insect outbreaks and wildfires.
Record! 2014 was Earth’s warmest year
The executive order comes the day after a State of the Union Address in which Obama said climate change posed the greatest threat to future generations. And while he didn’t announce any new climate initiatives, he said he was “determined to make sure that American leadership drives international action.”
In April, the United States will take over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council […]
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
Nick Timiraos, - Wall Street Journal
Stephan: I haven't done much about the trend covered in this report because there hasn't been much new data. But now there is. The fact is that no advanced technology nation has a sustainable birth rate. This is a huge deal in a number of ways (See the next story). This report concentrates on just one aspect. The decline of population will mean a declining pool of labor, and that is going to have a very big effect on global growth. That is not entirely bad because unlimited growth is destroying the environment, at least as it is currently practiced. But it also means decreasing standards of living, again unless we change our economic model and make wellness the first priority with profit made within that paradigm.
Declining population growth that shrinks the pool of available labor over the next 50 years will reduce by 40% the rate of growth in global economic output for the world’s 20 largest economies compared to the past 50 years, according to a new study.
The report from the McKinsey Global Institute says that to compensate for the drop in the growth of the labor force, productivity needs to accelerate 80% from its historical rate to keep global growth in gross domestic product from slowing.
Over the past 50 years, global growth increased six-fold, and average per capita income nearly tripled. McKinsey researchers estimate that around half the increase stemmed from gains in productivity and half from the growing labor force.
Now, the workforce isn’t going to grow nearly as fast, and it could peak in most of the 20 countries analyzed in the report over the coming 50 years. Employment growth averaged 1.7% since 1964 and is set to drop to 0.3% in the coming decades. “In a world in which we can no longer rely on…the supply of labor to drive GDP […]
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NEW YORK — A year after creating organisms that use a genetic code different from every other living thing, two teams of scientists have achieved another “synthetic biology” milestone: They created bacteria that cannot survive without a specific manmade chemical, potentially overcoming a major obstacle to wider use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
