EV charging station in Europe
Credit: Inhabitat
E-mobility companies E.ON and CLEVER are teaming up to build a new charging station network that will start in Norway and end in Italy. 180 charging stations will be installed over the next 3 years, with each station having a capacity of 150 kW.
To facilitate the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), consumers need to know it’s just as easy to recharge EVs as it is to pump gas into a petrol or diesel car. We’ve seen companies like Tesla install hundreds of supercharger stations around the world — from the United States, to Australia and Europe, and even China. Automakers like BMW, Ford, and Volkswagen have come together for the pan-European charging network called IONITY, to install 400 charging stations in Germany, Norway, and Austria by 2020. In both cases, the stations are deliberately placed on highways or within populated urban areas to provide a convenient and reliable way for EV owners to […]
Using a giant dataset, researchers have found that the month you were born in can determine the risk factor of you developing certain diseases across your lifetime
Credit: oksun70/Depositphotos
One of the wonderful aspects of living in the age of Big Data is the way scientists are able to discover new, previously undiscovered patterns in gigantic datasets. A team at Columbia University has studied the health records of over ten million people across three different countries and discovered some compelling links between a person’s lifetime disease risk and the month they were born in.
Numerous researchers have tackled the strangely interesting correlations between birth month and disease risk over the years. The true goal of this research is to fundamentally understand what specific seasonal and environmental factors faced by a mother during pregnancy can affect an offspring’s lifelong susceptibility to certain disease.
These links are undeniably tricky to study. A conventional medical study involving groups of subjects would not be especially ethical, after all, we couldn’t exactly withhold a certain environmental factor from […]
The fantasy of Joseph and Jesus
After allegations broke last week that Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore had pursued relationships with several (and sexually assaulted at least one) teenage girls some 40 years ago, when Moore was in his early 30s, Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler reached for one of the most reliable weapons in the religious right’s defensive arsenal: the Bible. “Take Mary and Joseph,” Ziegler told the Washington Examinerwhen he defended the morality of Moore’s conduct on November 9, just hours after the Washington Post story broke. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”
But those who ascribe to Ziegler’s reading of Scripture—and many of Moore’s evangelical supporters could be among them—should read more carefully. The Bible offers no evidence that Joseph was older than Mary. “We know virtually nothing about Joseph, and no age is mentioned for either Joseph or Mary in the Gospels,” says Paula Fredriksen, professor emerita of scripture at Boston University, and author of Jesus of Nazareth, King of […]
The arc of prehistory bends towards economic inequality. In the largest study of its kind, researchers from Washington State University, the Santa Fe Institute, and 12 other institutions saw disparities in wealth mount with the rise of agriculture, specifically the domestication of plants and large animals, and increased social organization.
Their findings, published this week in the journal Nature, have profound implications for contemporary society, as inequality repeatedly leads to social disruption, even collapse, said Tim Kohler (Washington State University), lead author and an SFI External Professor. The United States, he noted, currently has one of the highest levels of inequality in the history of the world.
“Inequality has a lot of subtle and potentially pernicious effects on societies,” Kohler said.
The study gathered data from 64 archaeological sites or groups of sites. Comparing house sizes within each site, researchers assigned Gini coefficients, common measures of inequality developed more than a century ago by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini. In theory, a country with complete wealth equality would have a Gini coefficient of 0, while a country with all the wealth concentrated in one household would get a 1.
The researchers found that hunter-gatherer societies typically had low wealth disparities, with a median Gini […]
Tuna
Credit: Shutterstock
Pacific Island nations are expected to lose 50 to 80 percent of fish species by the end of the century. (emphasis added)
The alarming number was published in a study by the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program in Marine Policy. The oceans in the Pacific Islands in particular, according to the study, are expected to be the most severely affected by climate change in the next century. These waters are already the warmest of the global ocean, and with less seasonal variability, animals in this area may be more shocked by changing conditions.
“Under climate change, the Pacific Islands region is projected to become warmer, less oxygenated, more acidic, and have lower production of plankton that form the base of oceanic food webs,” Rebecca Asch, lead author of the study and assistant professor of in the biology department at East Carolina University, said in a statement. “We found that local extinction of marine species exceed 50 percent of current biodiversity levels across many regions and at times reached levels over 80 percent.”
People who live in the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
