After high school, Arnett joined the U.S. Marine Corps, in 1999. His unit, the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines—the storied Suicide Charley—took him to the other side of the world: South Korea, Japan, Thailand. In the spring of 2003 he was an infantryman in the invasion of Iraq, spending five months […]
Doug Main , - Scientific American
Stephan: Here is one of those stories where we thought we knew everything only to discover... well, we didn't.
Sedimentary rocks, such as those in the Grand Canyon, contain surprisingly high levels of nitrogen.
Credit: Paul Rojas/Getty Images
Experts used to think nearly all nitrogen in soil came directly from the atmosphere, sequestered by microbes or dissolved in rain. But it turns out scientists have been overlooking another major source of this element, which is crucial to plant growth: up to a quarter of the nitrogen in soil and plants seeps out of bedrock, according to a study published in April in Science.
Apart from a few scattered studies, “the [research] community never thought to look at the rocks,” says lead study author Benjamin Z. Houlton, a global ecologist at the University of California, Davis. This discovery has implications beyond understanding the planet’s nitrogen cycle; it could also alter climate models. It suggests plants in certain areas may be able to grow faster and larger than previously thought and could thus absorb more carbon dioxide, Houlton says.
As global temperatures rise, calculating how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide plants soak up […]
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Stephan: The leaders of christofascism want their minions to be ignorant and easy to manipulate; that's why they are trying to privatize elementary and secondary education, and to undercut university programs. The problem with willful ignorance is that it has very direct negative consequences. If you have a movement that stresses distrusting science is it any surprise it results in increased death. This article explains. Christofascism is a religion of profit and power.
US baby from a uterus transplant
Credit: Baylor University Medical Center
Counties that are more religiously conservative have higher rates of infant mortality, according to a new studypublished in the May issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Researchers analyzed rates of infant deaths and cross-checked that data with whether an area had a greater number of conservative Protestants, or leaned towards mainline Protestants and Catholics.
Sociologist Ginny Garcia-Alexander, a lead author of the study, examined the number of deaths from four weeks through the first year. She explained in a Portland State University research update that babies who die during that period of development die because of birth defects, which tend to be prevented by advances in medical knowledge. Previous studies have shown that communities that lean towards religious fundamentalism might be more likely to reject scientific advances.
Later in life child mortality is linked to outside factors like poverty.
“This is continuing to show us that there are things that we can do in our communities to improve health outcomes,” Garcia-Alexander said.
“And to the extent […]
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Wednesday, May 30th, 2018
Stephan: This is why China is in the process of becoming the dominant culture in the last half of the 21st century. America is now headed by what in my opinion amounts to a mafia family of grifters. And like all grifters they care only for themselves.
China in contrast thinks in half centuries and has learned pragmatically that social wellbeing is the most efficient, healthiest, most productive and by far the cheapest way to run a nation. We, on the other hand, are being run by a congress and president who seem incapable of thinking beyond their own ideological fantasies and self-interest, and it is destroying us as as a nation, as anyone can see who has the courage to look unflinchingly at the social outcome data.
The Great Hall of the People Beijing
Credit: Juan Cole
The Guardian reports that air pollution in 62 Chinese cities fell by 30 percent between 2013 and 2016, according to the World Health Organization. Beijing, the capital, fell from a global fourth-place ranking on polluted air to 187th. (emphasis added)
I was in Beijing in March 2015 for a conference, and did a jaunt out to the Great Wall, bringing my camera. I needn’t have bothered. That day, at least, you couldn’t see more than 50 feet away from your face, and my dreams of photographs of the wall stretching out into the distance were dashed. I was there for a week and my throat got sore from just breathing the air. Things are quickly improving, though. The smog in those 62 cities was largely being caused by burning coal, for household heating and industrial purposes. Coal is the worst emitter of carbon dioxide among the hydrocarbon fuels, but it also puts out, when you burn it, lots of particulate matter that causes lung problems, […]
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A new commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.
