Credit: Reuters/Joshua Lott
Men in boots and camouflage sit on what appear to be armored tanks. Lightning flashes in the distance. The opening setting of the documentary Do Not Resist looks like Fallujah, but it’s Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of the 2014 fatal officer-involved shooting of Michael Brown. Protesters chant “No justice, no peace” as the officers push toward them with a wall of tactical vehicles and flashing lights. They keep their guns up and fire tear gas into the crowd.
The directorial debut of filmmaker Craig Atkinson, Do Not Resist premiered in April at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won best documentary feature. Now in theaters and opening in more locations in November, the film explores the militarization of American police and how law enforcement sometimes uses former and surplus military equipment it says it acquired to fight terror for more routine police work.
On an afternoon in September, Atkinson explains that watching news coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing inspired him to make the film. […]
Credit: Zero Mass
Our atmosphere contains approximately 3,100 cubic miles of water — enough to cover the entire planet in one inch of water.
That water surrounds us in the form of vapor — water’s gaseous, evaporated state. We’re usually only reminded of this on especially humid days, but our air can actually be considered a water source.
Zero Mass Water, a sustainable water startup, is trying to create an easy, off-grid way for anyone to harvest that liquid with its first product, Source.
Each Source unit looks like a solar panel resting on top of a metal box. Company CEO Cody Friesen, a material scientist and engineering professor at Arizona State University, says the device essentially uses sunlight to produce electricity and heat, and which allows a set of proprietary materials to passively catch the humidity in the air.
Friesen won’t say how those materials are engineered or what they’re made of, but explains that they’re designed to have an ideal binding energy for water vapor.
He compares the process to the grains of rice you’ll sometimes find inside salt […]
Genetic Heirlooms People from Papua New Guinea (shown) and Australia carry small amounts of DNA from extinct human relatives. New research suggests that the DNA may not come from Neandertals or Denisovans, but from a third, previously unknown extinct hominid.
VANCOUVER, B.C. — Traces of long-lost human cousins may be hiding in modern people’s DNA, a new computer analysis suggests.
People from Melanesia, a region in the South Pacific encompassing Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands, may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species, Ryan Bohlender reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. That species is probably not Neandertal or Denisovan, but a different, related hominid group, said Bohlender, a statistical geneticist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. […]
Even in Era of Disillusionment, Many Around the World Say Ordinary Citizens Can Influence Government
Signs of political discontent are increasingly common in many Western nations, with anti-establishment parties and candidates drawing significant attention and support across the European Union and in the United States. Meanwhile, as previous Pew Research Center surveys have shown, in emerging and developing economies there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way the political system is working.
As a new nine-country Pew Research Center survey on the strengths and limitations of civic engagement illustrates, there is a common perception that government is run for the benefit of the few, rather than the many in both emerging democracies and more mature democracies that have faced economic challenges in recent years. In eight of nine nations surveyed, more than half say government is run for the benefit of only a few groups in society, not for all people.1
However, this skeptical outlook on government does not mean people have given up on democracy or the ability of average citizens to have an impact on […]
A supporter of Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump waits for his campaign rally to begin at the Richmond Coliseum in Richmond, Virginia, U.S., June 10, 2016.
Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts
If you ever had the sneaking suspicion that “Make America Great Again” was code for “Turn America’s clock back to the 1950s,” a new poll suggests you were absolutely right.
Not surprisingly, these findings are also sharply divided based on racial lines. While 56 percent of white Americans say America has changed for the worse since the 1950s, 62 percent of African-Americans and […]
