Most of us think very little about water knowing mostly that it comes in two types: salt and fresh. For instance few people seem to realize that water covers over 70% of the earth’s surface and 97% of it is salt. Two per cent is frozen into glaciers and icecaps, although much of that is rapidly melting. Only 1% is liquid and drinkable, and half of that comes from below the earth’s surface. Somewhere in our memory we may remember high school science where we learned water has two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, and is written H2O.
We know water is crucial for life. How could it be otherwise: up to 60% of the human body is water, the brain is composed of 70% water, and the lungs are nearly 90% water. Lean muscle tissue contains about 75% water by weight; body fat contains 10%, and bone is 22% water. About 83% of our blood is water. Each day humans must replace 2.4 l/2.5 quarts of water, some through drinking and the rest taken by the body from the foods […]
Stephan: 3-D printing is proving to be one of those leverage point technologies that produce changes in a wide range of trends. Here is one of the most creative, and the latest.
Bridging the gap between the ends of a torn nerve is the latest biomedical trick performed with the help of a 3-D printer.
Additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing, makes it possible to build more customized biomedical implants, and has become a popular way to make dental implants and even windpipes. A new 3-D printed structure meant to “guide” the regrowth and reconnection of the loose ends of an injured nerve suggests that the technique could appeal to neurosurgeons as well.
Peripheral nerve injuries, caused by a variety of things including disease and trauma, are fairly common—doctors perform more than 200,000 nerve repair procedures each year in the United States alone. The most common surgery entails using nerve tissue taken from another spot in the body to fill the gap. But this requires an additional surgery to harvest that tissue, and can lead to chronic pain, sensory loss, or other problems at the site from which it was cut. An alternative approach involves using an artificial scaffold, generally tube-shaped, that sits between the two ends of the broken nerve and serves as a conduit for regeneration, often with the help of biochemical cues known to prompt nerve growth.
Andrew Kaczynski and Molly Ward, Reporter and Staff - Buzzfeed
Stephan: I am absolutely appalled at the willful ignorance that is the central hallmark of many national political figures. Even more alarming is that these people are in public office or have reason to aspire for office because they represent and reflect the views of enough people in their district or state to win office. That the Republican Party is putting forward as Presidential candidates people like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and the rest I take to be a clanking alarm bell telling us that our democracy is dying.
And I think all this has to be seen in the context that nine Republican billionaires actually auditioned these people, and that that was simply absorbed into the political body and is now business as usual. It reminds me of the Roman empire where rich people purchased gladiator slaves so they could fight them until they were killed in coliseums that were sited across the empire. It must be an enormous ego trip to have enough money buy elections in the most powerful country in the world.
The Koch brothers/Scott Walker coupling, and his failure as a candidate, is being generally parsed by the corporate media as a cautionary tale that even with money you may not win. I don't see it that way. I read it as: with enough money you can buy influence so the leverage point is no longer money but taste.
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson
In a speech delivered in 2012, Ben Carson said the big bang theory was part of the “fairy tales” pushed by “highfalutin scientists” as a story of creation.
Similarly, Carson, a noted creationist, said he believed the theory of evolution was encouraged by the devil.
“Now what about the big bang theory,” said Carson at speech to fellow Seventh-day Adventists titled “Celebration of Creation,” about the theory for the origin of the universe.
“I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they’re saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now these are the same scientists that go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization.
“So now you’re gonna have this big explosion and everything becomes perfectly organized and when you ask them about it they say, ‘Well we can explain this, based on probability theory because if there’s enough big […]
Stephan: Marsha Blackburn is in office thanks to the voters of Tennessee's 7th District. That they would elect a person with these views tells us something very sad about the country. And it is not an abstraction. Public officials like Senator James Inhofe, and Representative Blackburn are doing untold damage, damage that will only be fully comprehended in the future. Untold millions will suffer because of them.
Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn)
House energy committee Vice Chair Marsha Blackburn took global warming denial to the next level this week by suggesting that humans were not even causing carbon emissions.
The same week that Pope Francis was scheduled to speak in Washington on the need to address climate change, Blackburn spoke to the BBC as part of a Radio 4 documentary, “Climate Change – Are we Feeling Lucky?”
Blackburn declared to BBC Radio 4 that the “jury is still out saying man is the cause for global warming, after the earth started to cool 13 years ago.”
After an interviewer pointed out that scientific data showed a substantial rise in temperature on the surface of the Earth, Blackburn countered that “we’ve cooled almost 1 degree (F)” in the last 13 years.
Blackburn said that she based her arguments after speaking to “different researchers,” but she declined to name them.
“There are some that feel like human activity is the cause for carbon emissions and because of that we need to revert to […]
Stephan: What struck me about this story, and the reason I am running it, is not the point the article makes but the fact that while the amount to each recipient might vary from country to country, and might not change their life, in each instance the richest person had enough wealth to spread it across all the poor of their country. That's an example of wealth inequity.
Would the world be a better place if the wealthiest gave their fortunes away to the bottom billion? We tried to answer the question by creating the Robin Hood Index.
We took a spattering of 42 countries with radically different demographics and economies, then compared the wealthiest individuals to the percentage of the populations living in poverty. By the way, only in Chile, the Netherlands, France and Australia is the richest person a woman.
The index shows how the net worth of each country’s wealthiest person compares to the livelihood of his fellow countrymen by calculating the lump sum in dollars each person living in poverty would get if the assets of the richest citizen were liquidated and redistributed. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the CIA World Factbook were our reference points.
The net worth of Bill Gates would turn into a one-off payment of $1,736 if distributed to the neediest 15 percent of Americans.
India’s large population means Mukesh Ambani’s $19.2 billion net worth amounts to the smallest payout to the poor of any other country analyzed. His net worth is 13.6 million times more than the gross domestic […]
