Saturday, June 30th, 2018
LEVI SUMAGAYSAY , - Mercury News
Stephan: Another day, another leak. One of the major trends we are experiencing is that no personal information entered into the web knowingly, or unknowingly, is private, and it is all on offer.
Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr., left, interim Chief Executive Officer of Equifax, Inc., sitting with Richard Smith, center, former Chief Executive Officer of Equifax, Inc., and former Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer, right, speaks as he testifies before the Senate Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2017, during a hearing on “Protecting Consumers in the Era of Major Data Breaches” after the 2013 data breach at Yahoo! that affected 3 billion user accounts. Credit: AP/Susan Walsh
A new data leak could affect hundreds of millions of Americans, perhaps more than the nearly 150 million affected by the Equifax breach.
Exactis, a Florida-based marketing and data-aggregation firm, leaked detailed information on individual adults and businesses, a security researcher says. While the exact number of individuals affected isn’t known, the leak involved about 340 million records on a publicly available server.
Wired was the first to report that the exposed information included phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses and personal characteristics for every name, such as interests and habits, plus the number, […]
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Saturday, June 30th, 2018
Christine Todd Whitman, Former Governor of New Jersey - CNBC
Stephan: The car companies of Europe and China are moving quickly into electric vehicles. In the United States where governmental and corporate lying has become the accepted norm, corruption has become the way to do business, and facts have become fungible, the emphasis is not on the future, but on immediate profit. The result is we are becoming second class.
When technological innovation threatens to upend the status quo, the status quo fights back. Every time. I try to keep that in mind when observing oil industry-backed efforts to discredit electric vehicles (EVs) and dismantle progress on transportation electrification by peddling misinformation through industry-funded studies.
To give you a sense of the absurdity of these efforts, imagine Bell Communication publishing a report suggesting cell phones are less convenient than landlines. Or Blockbusters paying for an analysis showing Netflix makes watching movies more difficult.
The vast majority of research institutions and environmental public interest groups support accelerated EV adoption because the science is clear that EVs are much cleaner than conventional vehicles.
Consider this: electric vehicles don’t have tailpipes. They run on electricity, and across the country, our electricity sources are getting cleaner. Even factoring in emissions from electricity used to power EVs today and pollution from battery manufacturing, electric vehicles are already significantly to vastly lower in emissions than conventional vehicles, depending on how the electricity is produced in different regions of the country.
“Here’s the bottom line: transportation electrification is a […]
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Saturday, June 30th, 2018
Robert F. Service, News Reporter - Science
Stephan: Here is the update on a story I first covered in SR a couple of years ago. I see it as good news, and although developed in the U.S. I expect we will see these technologies utilized first in Europe, particularly the Nordic countries, and China.
A solar window created by scientists at Michigan State University in East Lansing reached an efficiency of 5% using organic photovoltaics. Richard Lunt/Michigan State University
Lance Wheeler looks at glassy skyscrapers and sees untapped potential. Houses and office buildings, he says, account for 75% of electricity use in the United States, and 40% of its energy use overall. Windows, because they leak energy, are a big part of the problem. “Anything we can do to mitigate that is going to have a very large impact,” says Wheeler, a solar power expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
A series of recent results points to a solution, he says: Turn the windows into solar panels. In the past, materials scientists have embedded light-absorbing films in window glass. But such solar windows tend to have a reddish or brown tint that architects find unappealing. The new solar window technologies, however, absorb almost exclusively invisible ultraviolet (UV) or infrared light. That leaves the glass clear while blocking the UV and infrared radiation that normally leak […]
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Saturday, June 30th, 2018
Stephan: Here is the latest on the psychophysiology of human behavior.
Researchers believe an antibody that is involved in the human stress response may shed light on what makes some humans turn violent too. They injected mice with a protein that interferes with the production of cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, and observed the mice became more aggressive.
Credit: Getty
People sometimes say that their blood boils when they get angry. It turns out the root of violence might literally be in the blood.
Scientists found that when they injected mice with a chemical from the blood of violent criminals, those rodents were far quicker to start fights with their fellow creatures, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Now researchers believe this chemical, an antibody that is involved in the human stress response, may shed light on what makes some humans turn violent too. While more research is needed, scientists think that these findings could one day lead to a treatment for violent criminals.
“The implication was that this antibody, which differed between violent and nonviolent […]
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Elizabeth Rush, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: There are six million people living in south Florida and, as this report spells out, sea rise is happening quicker and in a more devastating form than anyone had anticipated. Probably in your lifetime Florida from Miami down will disappear beneath the waves.
Where do you think those people will be going? What do you think the financial impact on both their personal lives, and the economy in general will be?
Meanwhile the Trumplican Party is pushing greater carbon energy usage and arguing that climate change is some kind of undefined scheme to help some undefined beneficiary. As it stands approximately half of Americans either don't believe in climate change, those that are Trumplicans, or that even if it exists it won't affect them. Boy are they in for a surprise.
Take the six million people who live in south Florida today and divide them into two groups: those who live less than six and a half feet above the current high tide line, and everybody else.’
Credit: Milkweed Editions
In 1890, just over six thousand people lived in the damp lowlands of south Florida. Since then the wetlands that covered half the state have been largely drained, strip malls have replaced Seminole camps, and the population has increased a thousandfold. Over roughly the same amount of time the number of black college degree holders in the United States also increased a thousandfold, as did the speed at which we fly, the combined carbon emissions of the Middle East, and the entire population of Thailand.
About 60 of the region’s more than 6 million residents have gathered in the Cox Science Building at the University of Miami on a sunny Saturday morning in 2016 to hear Harold Wanless, or Hal, chair of the geology department, speak about sea level rise. “Only 7% of […]
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