Wednesday, May 20th, 2015
Megan Rowling , Reporter - Reuters
Stephan: Perhaps because electricity seems a given in the world of everyone reading this, we don't fully comprehend how spotty the 21st century technology actually is around the world. For instance, as this article points out, nearly 15 per cent of humanity lives without electricity.
One of the great benefits of leaving the carbon age will be that solar installations are going to become so reasonable that one way or another the entirety 0f humanity will have electricity, thus light, connectivity, and water pumps. And many countries will skip the entire grid-based monopolistic utility financial model in favor of a dispersed local, regional or personal source. It will produce an existential shift in world consciousness.
Students in the village of Tahipur in Bihar used kerosene lanterns for studying.
Credit: opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
BARCELONA — Around one in seven people across the globe still live without electricity, despite some progress in expanding access, and nearly three billion cook using polluting fuels, the World Bank said on Monday. (emphasis added)
The global electrification rate rose to 85 percent in 2012 from 83 percent in 2010, pushing the number of people without access to electric power down to 1.1 billion from 1.2 billion.
India made significant advances, but progress in sub-Saharan Africa was far too slow, said a report tracking the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative, launched by the U.N. Secretary-General in 2011.
Almost no headway was made in switching people from biomass cooking fuels such as kerosene, wood and dung, the report added.
“We are heading in the right direction to end energy poverty, but we are still far from the finish line,” said Anita Marangoly George, a senior director for energy […]
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2015
James Gallagher, Health Editor - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: This is a game changer. If heroin can be brewed like beer, it will be. There will be no way to control this, and this in an already rising trend of opiate drug use. So we stand at a cross roads. We can continue the losing model we have followed for decades, an approach that is oh so profitable for corporations, law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, everyone whose budget lives on drugs, which has proven to be an an abject failure as social policy. Or we can take an entirely new compassionate and life-affirming tack, and recognize that drugs like heroin are taken by people who have issues that are so painful, drugs are the only thing offering surcease. That's the problem, not the drugs.
Opium will soon be able to be brewed
Until now the only way to get morophine was opium poppies
Scientists have figured out how to brew morphine using the same kit used to make beer at home.
They have genetically modified yeast to perform the complicated chemistry needed to convert sugar to morphine. The findings, published in Nature Chemical Biology, raise promise for medicine but also concerns about “home-brewed” illegal drugs. Experts have called for tight control of organisms genetically modified to produce narcotics.
Brewing bad
If you brew beer at home, then you are relying on microscopic yeast that turns sugars into alcohol. But by borrowing DNA from plants, scientists have been genetically engineering yeasts that can perform each of the steps needed to convert sugar into morphine.
One stage of the process – the production of an intermediary chemical called reticuline – had been a stumbling block. That has been solved by a team at the University of […]
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2015
, - Acoustical Society of America
Stephan: At one level this is a story about how an already artificial environment can be subtly tuned by mimicking nature.
But it is also a confirmation that spending time in nature as untouched by humans as you can handle is desirable. It recalibrates one.
Our houses are cages of electrical wires, and we live in an electromagnetic field that pulses from them. I have spent a lot of time backpacking and canoeing, and in my experience, and experiences of others that I have witnessed, some time on the the third day in nature one goes through a window, there is a very subtle shift. Colors become brighter, everything is clearer. Your hearing improves,
Once I understood it, I looked forward to it, and realized that until about 150 years ago there was no electrical field pervading the environment. It is a different state of consciousness to be outside the field.
Credit: nicholashan/depositphotos.com
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 19, 2015 — Playing natural sounds such as flowing water in offices could boosts worker moods and improve cognitive abilities in addition to providing speech privacy, according to a new study from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They will present the results of their experiment at the 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held May 18-22, 2015 in Pittsburgh.
An increasing number of modern open-plan offices employ sound masking systems that raise the background sound of a room so that speech is rendered unintelligible beyond a certain distance and distractions are less annoying.
“If you’re close to someone, you can understand them. But once you move farther away, their speech is obscured by the masking signal,” said Jonas Braasch, an acoustician and musicologist at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Sound masking systems are custom designed for each office space by consultants and are typically installed as speaker arrays discretely tucked away in the ceiling. For the past 40 years, the standard masking signal employed is random, […]
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Brian Barth, - Modern Farmer
Stephan: There is an alternative to corporate industrialized chemical mono-culture agriculture. Here is a description of what it would look like. This approach works with the Earth's meta-systems, instead of trying to dominate them.
Out on the horizon of agriculture’s future, an army 40,000 strong is marching towards a shimmering goal. They see the potential for a global food system where pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers are but relics of a faded age.
They are not farmers, but they are working in the name of farmers everywhere. Under their white lab coats their hearts beat with a mission to unlock the secrets of the soil — making the work of farmers a little lighter, increasing the productivity of every field and reducing the costly inputs that stretch farmers’ profits as thin as a wire.
‘Producing more food with fewer resources may seem too good to be true, but the world’s farmers have trillions of potential partners that can help achieve that ambitious goal. Those partners are microbes.’
The American Society of Microbiologists (ASM) recently released a treasure trove of their latest research and is eager to get it into the hands of farmers. Acknowledging that farmers will need to produce 70 to 100 percent more food to feed the projected 9 billion humans […]
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DANIEL J. MCGRAW, - Politico
Stephan: I think this is an accurate assessment of one of the principal trends shaping the Republican Party. To this report I would add another trend in the party: It is increasingly a party of the old Confederacy, and overwhelmingly made up of aging Whites.
What this article does not address is the fact that the House has been so gerrymandered that for the foreseeable future it seems probable that it will remain in the hands of the Republicans. Nor does the article address the corruption of American politics. The net-net of this, I think, is going to be a party controlling one house of the Congress, owned by a small group of uber-rich individuals, and the corporations they control, increasingly religious, racist, and fearful. They may be dying off, but their exit stage right is not going to be easy of pleasant. And the effect it will have on climate change may be catastrophic.
Elderly Republicans
Credit: telegraph.co.uk
It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.
There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.
The party’s core is dying off by the day.
Since the average Republican is significantly older than the average Democrat, far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. To make matters worse, the GOP is attracting […]
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