Marijuana is now legal in some form throughout 24 states, and despite the growing use and knowledge of weed, the number of Americans who have fatally overdosed on the drug may still surprise you.
In 2015, the rate of absolutely zero deaths from a marijuana overdose remained steady from the year before, according to figures released in December by the Centers for Disease Control. But while Americans aren’t dying as a result of marijuana overdoses, the same can’t be said for a range of other substances, both legal and illicit.
A total of 17,465 people died from overdosing on illicit drugs like heroin and cocaine in 2014, while 25,760 people died from overdosing on prescription drugs, including painkillers and tranquilizers like Valium, according to CDC figures.
Opioid overdose levels rose so sharply in 2014 — spiking 14 percent from the previous year — the CDC described the levels as “epidemic.”
“More persons died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2014 than during any previous year on record,” the CDC reported earlier this […]
Placed in a wax jaw, fossil teeth belonging to Panamacebus transitus are compared with those of a modern female tufted capuchin, Cebus apella, in this picture courtesy of the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Credit: Florida Museum of Natural History/Kristen Grace/Handout via Reuters
Monkeys resembling today’s capuchins accomplished the astonishing feat of crossing at least 100 miles (160 km) of open ocean 21 million years ago to get from South America to North America eons before the two continents joined together.
Scientists said on Wednesday they reached that conclusion based on the discovery of seven little teeth during excavations involving the Panama Canal’s expansion, showing monkeys had reached the North American continent far earlier than previously known.
The teeth belonged to Panamacebus transitus, a previously unknown medium-sized monkey species. South America at the […]
Credit: Shutterstock
It’s easy to get ridiculously excited about solar power these days. The panels keep getting cheaper as technology improves. Large photovoltaic arrays are sprouting up around the globe. Sure, solar still produces only 1 percent of the world’s electricity, but it’s growing at double-digit rates each year.
So with all this momentum, you’d think the solar industry could kick back and celebrate, right? Domination is only a matter of time!
Well … not so fast. A provocative recent essay in Nature Energy by two solar analysts, Varun Sivaram and Shayle Kann, argues that solar still has some hard economic obstacles to overcome before it can become a major energy source and provide (let’s say) one-third of our power. Overcoming these hurdles could mean the difference between solar leveling off as a niche technology and solar taking over the world.
Thanks to a little-discussed phenomenon known as “value deflation,” the electricity generated by […]
In 2013, researchers from Cambridgeshire ‘downloaded’ all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets on to strands of synthetic DNA (illustrated)
The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive […]
Members of the San Antonio Living History Association commemorate the Texas independence battle at the Alamo.
Credit: Kin Man Hui/San Antonio Express-News/ AP
When Texas Republicans assemble for their state convention next month, it’s possible they will debate whether Texas should secede from the United States.
There’s almost no chance Texas Republicans will actually vote in favor of seceding, mind you — not least because most of the party wants nothing to do with this — but the fact we’re even mentioning secession and the Texas GOP convention in the same sentence suggests that the once-fringe movement has become a priority for at least some conservative grass-roots Texans.
To be sure, that seems to be a relatively small group. The Texas secession movement says 22 out of the 270 county GOP conventions passed some kind of independence resolution this spring. A party official said he’d be surprised if that were the case, and
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
