Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Thursday, January 30, 2013.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Almost Home by Moby
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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Uncle Sam's Retirement Largesse Goes Mostly to the Affluent
By Kevin Drum
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On Tuesday, President Obama proposed a "starter" retirement account for folks who don't have IRAs or 401(k)s. Like a lot of people, I was pretty unimpressed. Today, Matt Bruenig reminds us of another reason to be unimpressed: we already spend a helluva lot of money on tax-favored retirement accounts, and nearly all of the benefit goes to the well off:
The richest fifth pulled down 66 percent of them, while the poorest fifth pulled down just 2 percent of them....Needless to say, this system of retirement tax subsidies is totally ridiculous and is just another of the submerged ways that we funnel huge sums of money to the rich in this country. If we really want to pump up the retirement savings of the poor, one obvious way to start is to take the next decade's $1.4 trillion of retirement tax expenditures and distribute them in a different way than the manner detailed in the graph above.
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That said, one thing is pretty easy to agree on: our pension system is, and always has been, miserly toward the poor. That's true of Social Security; it's true of old-school pensions; and it's true of 401(k)s. If we want to reform our pension system, we should reform Social Security in a way that increases benefits for the folks at the bottom of the scale who are trying to scrounge a living on $1,100 a month. That probably means cutting benefit growth for those above the median, and it also means phasing in higher Social Security revenues over the next two or three decades. Unfortunately, although that would be the decent thing to do, it might mean that America's best off have to pay slightly more in taxes by the time 2030 rolls around. And we can't have that, can we?
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Republicans vote to deny climate change
By John Upton
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The House Energy and Commerce Committee wasted a good chunk of time Tuesday on yet more anti-environmental legislation that doesn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in climate-changed hell of becoming law. H.R. 3826, The Electricity Security and Affordability Act, would suspend the EPA’s proposed climate rules for power plants.
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This isn’t the first time House Republicans have rejected amendments stating the reality of climate change. In 2011, House Republicans voted down amendments that called on Congress to accept that climate change is real, man-made, and a human health threat.
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How could the Republicans on the energy committee be so unfathomably stupid as to continue to claim that climate change is some kind of dystopian fantasy, despite all the science to the contrary?
Maybe they aren’t stupid. Maybe there’s another explanation. “In total,” ClimateProgress reported, “the Republicans who voted to deny climate change have accepted about $9.3 million in career contributions from the oil, gas, and coal industries.”
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Cell cycle speed is key to making aging cells young again
By (ScienceDaily)
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A fundamental axiom of biology used to be that cell fate is a one-way street -- once a cell commits to becoming muscle, skin, or blood it always remains muscle, skin, or blood cell. That belief was upended in the past decade when a Japanese scientist introduced four simple factors into skin cells and returned them to an embryonic-like state, capable of becoming almost any cell type in the body.
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When the cell cycle accelerates to a certain speed, the barriers that keep a cell's fate on one path diminish. In such a state, cells are easily persuaded to change their identity and become pluripotent, or capable of becoming multiple cell types.
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Guo's team studied blood-forming cells, which when dividing undergo specific changes in their cell cycle to produce new blood cells. Blood-forming progenitor cells normally produce only new blood cells. However, the introduction of Yamanaka factors sometimes -- but not always -- help these blood-forming cells become other types of cells. The new report finds that after this treatment blood-forming cells tend to become pluripotent when the cell cycle is completed in eight hours or less, an unusual speed for adult cells. Cells that cycle more slowly remain blood cells.
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The study has other implications than explaining the bottleneck in reprogramming that makes it difficult to produce individualized pluripotent stem cells for research and therapy. Shangqin Guo noted that many human diseases are associated with abnormalities in establishing proper cell identity as well as abnormalities in cell cycle behavior.
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20,000 people in Syria's Yarmuk camp face starvation
By (AFP via globalpost.com)
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Besieged since June, nearly 20,000 people in Damascus' Yarmuk Palestinian camp are so desperate for food that many eat stray animals, and some women have resorted to prostitution, according to residents reached via the internet.
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While regime and opposition representatives are meeting in Geneva for peace talks and to negotiate aid access for Homs in central Syria, it appears Yarmuk's fate is not being addressed.
PFLP-GC spokesman Anwar Raja blamed the rebels, whom he described as "terrorists," for the camp's plight.
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For his part, Wissam Sbaaneh, a member of the Palestinian Jafra Foundation, blamed the PFLP-GC and the army.
"People are asking for milk powder for children and vaccines. What on earth would the fighters want milk powder for?" said Sbaaneh, mocking a PFLP-GC claim that the civilians are being held "hostage" by the armed opposition.
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International |
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Snowden revelations of NSA spying on Copenhagen climate talks spark anger
By John Vidal and Suzanne Goldenberg
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Developing countries have reacted angrily to revelations that the United States spied on other governments at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored communication between key countries before and during the conference to give their negotiators advance information about other positions at the high-profile meeting where world leaders including Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel failed to agree to a strong deal on climate change.
Jairam Ramesh, the then Indian environment minister and a key player in the talks that involved 192 countries and 110 heads of state, said: "Why the hell did they do this and at the end of this, what did they get out of Copenhagen? They got some outcome but certainly not the outcome they wanted. It was completely silly of them. First of all, they didn't get what they wanted. With all their hi-tech gizmos and all their snooping, ultimately the Basic countries [Brazil, South Africa, India and China] bailed Obama out. With all their snooping what did they get?"
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Members of the Danish negotiating team told the Danish newspaper Information that both the US and Chinese delegations were "peculiarly well-informed" about closed-door discussions. "They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if they knew about our document," one source told Information.
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Civil society groups from around the world condemned the US. "The UN climate talks are supposed to be about building trust – that's been under threat for years because of the US backward position on climate action – these revelations will only crack that trust further," said Meena Raman, negotiations expert from the Malaysian-based Third World Network.
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The EU's Ukraine dilemma
By Paul Ames
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With violence rising and demonstrations spreading across the country, Ukraine's former president Leonid Kravchuk warned Wednesday that the country of 45 million was on "the brink of civil war."
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Although officials from EU members closer to Ukraine's borders and wary of instability on their doorstep have been urging a more active approach, including sanctions, the bloc's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, argues the softer line could be beginning to pay off.
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"Yanukovych needs to be forced into a genuine dialogue,” she added in an interview. “Many of Ukraine’s political elites and oligarchs have considerable financial assets in Europe. These could be frozen. By not taking stronger measures, it sends out a negative signal to those in streets who are protesting under the EU flag."
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While the EU dithers over sanctions, Putin acted forcibly this week to crank up pressure on the Ukrainian opposition, warning that he'll withhold $15 billion in cheap gas and credit desperately needed by Ukraine's battered economy until there's a stable government back in place in Kyiv.
Ukrainian exporters are also reporting their goods are getting held up on the Russia border — a tactic used by Moscow late last year to push Yanukovych into rejecting the EU deal.
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Central African Republic: 'Scene of absolute horror'
By (BBC)
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About a million people in the Central African Republic - 20% of the population - have fled their homes during months of communal violence after Seleka rebels seized power last March.
In recent weeks there have been more reports of atrocities committed by rival militias in an atmosphere of increasing insecurity.
Peter Bouckaert, director of emergencies for Human Rights Watch, told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme he saw French peacekeepers do nothing while corpses were mutilated at the airport at the capital Bangui on Wednesday. The French defence ministry has not commented.
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There is no more safe part of the city for Muslims. We see them being killed everywhere in Bangui, and Christians as well.
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Syrian troops 'deliberately destroy homes'
By (Al Jazeera)
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The Syrian government has been deliberately and systematically razing homes, buildings and entire rebel-held neighbourhoods to the ground with bulldozers and explosives, according to a rights group.
A new report, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday, accused the regime troops of entering opposition strongholds and destroying the buildings.
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The total area demolished is about 200 soccer fields, according to the group, and is seen as punishment for Syrian civilians supporting rebel forces. The demolitions were supervised by military forces and took place in the wake of violence.
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The report said: "Human Rights Watch has not been able to find any government statement or decree explaining the reason for the demolitions in Qaboun. The first wave appears to have been directly related to intensive clashes between government and opposition forces in mid-July, 2012."
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Justice Department looks to commute sentences for some drug offenders
By Dan Roberts
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America's war on drugs took a major step toward ceasefire on Thursday, as a bipartisan group of senators voted to move forward with the first substantial cut in mandatory minimum sentences, and as the Justice Department made it known that President Obama is looking to commute the sentences of more existing prisoners.
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The support of a number of right-wing Republicans, including Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz – who joined as a last-minute co-sponsor – gives significant momentum to a full Senate vote on the bill, which is mirrored by a House proposal from Republican Raul Labrador and Democrat Bobby Scott.
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The bill, which was introduced by Durbin and judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy, cuts some mandatory minimum sentences by more than half, gives judges greater discretion to exempt individual cases, and will allow parole hearings to redress a gulf between crack and powder cocaine punishments that has often meant harsher sentences for African-American drug users than white ones.
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Conservatives Don't Want You To Eat Pro-Abortion Girl Scout Cookies
By Maddie Oatman
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It's time for the annual Girl Scout cookie freak out! This year, it's not due to the palm oil used to produce the treats, nor the group's policy on transgender members: This time, Girl Scouts are supposedly too pro-abortion.
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And in a Facebook post, the organization linked to a Washington Post list of "Seven American Women Who Made a Difference in 2013," including US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. These links were enough to spur John Pisciotta, who runs Pro-Life Waco, to launch a national boycott. "The Girl Scouts were once a truly amazing organization, but it has been taken over by idealogues of the left, and regular folk just won't stand for it," Pisciotta told Breitbart News. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly also took up the cause with a full-on panel on the offending tweet.
Ultimately, though, the campaign is about more than a couple of social-media postings: On its website, the "CookieCott 2014" campaign argues that the boycott is a protest of the Girl Scouts' "deep and lasting entanglement with abortion providers and abortion rights organizations." This includes, it claims, promoting role models like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Hillary Clinton, Amnesty International, ACLU, and the National Organization of Women, and supporting "youth reproductive/abortion and sexual rights" via its membership in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.
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US Congressman Henry Waxman to retire after 20 terms
By (BBC)
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Leading Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman has announced his retirement after 40 years in office.
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The California politician formerly chaired the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and pushed for clean air initiatives.
He also helped craft President Barack Obama's signature healthcare overhaul, the Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare".
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The Democrat, who was also a force in the expansion of Medicaid, a federal health programme for poor Americans, lost his committee chair seat in 2011 after Republicans took control of the House.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
I’ve seen Richard Melville Hall, better known as Moby, perform in a live band, acoustically or spinning records, a dozen times.
. . . Moby’s eleventh studio album Innocents> is on the horizon, the first album he’s done entirely in Los Angeles, the first with an outside producers, and the most collaborative release yet with musicians like Damien Jurado, Cold Specks, and Wayne Coyne lending their voices. He’s recently released the otherworldly video for the Coyne-collaboration, “The Perfect Life” and was happy to talk with PopMatters about his movie career, politics, and what went in to making .
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I read that you do a lot of work with charities. What are some of the more immediate ones that you are a part of?
Well, on the human rights side, I’m working with Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, different domestic violence prevention organizations, and of course trying to work with things like the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and trying to support progressive political candidates. And then I work a lot with different animal rights organizations. I think the Humane Society is probably the organization I work the closest with just because they are so big and they are so effective on a legislative level. They have a lot of money to put behind legislative initiatives, whereas some of the smaller organizations are really well intentioned, but to pass legislation does require a lot of resources.
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Essentially, you would agree that President Obama is not gonna get a lot done in his second term.
Yeah. It’s tricky. There’s a lot that he can do without the House but certainly the House, like their knee-jerk reaction where they block him on anything. The thing that is really galling is that a lot of his initiatives were originally Republican. Like Obamacare was originally a Republican idea. I think that’s one of the reasons he was so confused. He borrowed a lot of the ideas from Republicans thinking that by borrowing their ideas he would get their support. Then he came to them, with stuff that [Senator] Mitch McConnell and [House Speaker] John Boehner had actually drafted, and he came back to them and they rejected their own proposals. It really is just like this insidious tribal racist, right-wing thought where it’s just obstructionism purely for the sake of obstructionism.
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In prior interviews, like the one with The Quietus, your humility has come up. Growing up you did live a humble lifestyle.
Yeah certainly growing up dirt poor in Darien, Connecticut has certainly affected how I perceive myself. It tints my worldview because until I was 18 years old I never met another poor person. My mom and I were on welfare and food stamps. When I first moved to New York, I remember one of the ways I was able to food myself was that my roommates and I had parties. I would wake up early in the morning after the party and fill up garbage bags with the cans and bottles from the party and go to the Food Emporium in Union Square and wait in line with the homeless people to put cans and bottles into the five cent bottle return. And it’s great. I was perfectly happy. Like I like my life now, but I was actually happy waiting in line with homeless people to put cans and bottles into five cent bottle return machine.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Gaza warned of looming water crisis
By Matthew Kalman
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Last November, the World Bank completed construction of a wastewater treatment plant designed to prevent pollution of the underground aquifer that provides fresh water to 400,000 people in the northern Gaza Strip, but it stands idle, silenced by political wrangling. Gaza is dependent on Israel for most of its electricity supply but Israel is refusing to provide the extra three megawatts required to power the plant until Gaza's existing electricity bills are paid. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority cannot agree on who should settle the debt.
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Unicef says that more than 90% of the water extracted from Gaza's sole aquifer is unfit for human consumption. More than four out of five Gazans buy their drinking water from expensive, unregulated private vendors. Most of it is contaminated.
"Some families are paying as much as a third of their household income on water," said June Kunugi, Unicef special representative for the State of Palestine.
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Frackers banned from New York for at least another year
By John Upton
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While neighboring states have allowed oil and gas companies to frack freely in their Marcellus shale deposits, the Empire State declared a statewide moratorium in 2008, saying it needed time to study the impacts to water supplies and human health. The ban has attracted lawsuits from the energy industry, but fracking is so unpopular in New York that dozens of local governments have put their own bans in place, just in case the state’s is lifted.
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Joe Martens, who heads the Environmental Conservation Department, told lawmakers in Albany today that [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo’s proposed $137 billion (ed: 2014) budget doesn’t have any funding for oversight of high-volume hydraulic fracturing.
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Needless to say, the news triggered a fresh burst of histrionics from the energy sector. “The human cost in New York, due to arbitrary delays on this matter, is real,” a New York State Petroleum Council official told Bloomberg.
Human cost? We’re not sure exactly what that means.
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Royal Dutch Shell halts Alaska exploration as profits fall
By (BBC)
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Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is stepping up asset disposals as part of a strategy that will see the company "changing emphasis" in 2014.
The changes will involve Shell stopping its exploration programme in Alaska.
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Last week, a US court ruled that a full assessment of the environmental risk associated with the Alaska exploration had not been carried out by the US government.
Shell had spent around $4.5bn exploring for oil off the coast of Alaska since 2005, but has faced strong environmental opposition.
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Mr van Beurden said: "The landscape the company had expected has changed. Factors such as the worsening security situation in Nigeria in 2013, and delays to non-operated projects in several other countries, have altered the outlook.
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Hydroponics used to grow salad in tunnels under London
By Tim Smedley
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A few hundred metres from Clapham North tube station stands a padlocked gate. Behind the gate is a dark, damp entrance to a spiral staircase leading 33 metres underground. A series of tunnels built as a second world war bomb shelter large enough to fit 8,000 people have remained virtually unused. Until now. At the end of one tunnel comes a pinkish-purple glow from behind white plastic sheeting. The Breaking Bad comparison is obvious. But the produce being grown using hydroponics and LED lights isn't illegal. It's salad. Salad, the taste of which is liked by no less than chef Michel Roux Jnr.
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The project has been in development for the past two years, and has attracted the interest of the mayor of London, naming Dring one of this year's 'London Leaders'. It is, as of today, looking for finance via the crowdfunding website Crowdcube. Only using a small part of one tunnel so far, the space they have leased from Transport for London (TfL) gives them a potential for 2.5 hectares of growing space. The produce including pea shoots, rocket, red lion mustard, radish, tatsoi, pak choi and miniature broccoli will be branded as Growing Underground and aimed at the retail market and high end restaurants.
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If additional heat is needed, there is an obvious local source – diverting thermal flows from the Northern Line. Electricity is currently bought from a renewable energy supplier, but Dring has committed to generating onsite renewables through (above ground) wind and solar, with the intention of being a net exporter to the grid. A costly sump system currently pumps huge amounts of water out of the tunnels, water that the team have had tested and is suitable for growing. Dehumidifiers will also take water from the air expired by the plants, to be recycled. They are even looking into recycled carpet as a sustainable substrate.
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Conventional farming may seem natural, says Dring, but among commercial operations use greenhouses or polytunnels that typically require artificial heating, many also use LEDs in addition to sunlight. Transportation adds a significant cost and carbon footprint to food taken from rural farms to large population hubs such as London. Zero Carbon Foods is barely three miles from Covent Garden market, the wholesaler those same farm lorries are trying to reach. Growing Underground can be there within two to eight hours of being picked, giving it a longer shelf life, transported by electric vehicle.
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Science and Health |
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New Hybrid Solar Device Exploits the Best of Both Worlds
By Geoffrey Giller
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To overcome the various drawbacks of photovoltaic and solar-thermal systems, a team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a new device that combines elements of both, which they describe in a January 19 paper in Nature Nanotechnology. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Their invention is known as a solar thermophotovoltaic device. Whereas other researchers have built them before, the new device is the most efficient one yet, says Evelyn Wang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T. and the paper’s senior author. Despite that advance, though, the device only achieves about 3 percent efficiency. “There is really much more potential in this technology,” Wang says. “This is just a starting point.”
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Because the carbon nanotubes are such efficient absorbers of sunlight, they don’t waste any of the spectrum, converting nearly all of it into heat energy. And because the sunlight is also transformed into heat, that energy can be stored more easily than the direct electricity that photovoltaic cells produce, Wang says. “You can store the energy using thermal or chemical means,” she adds, such as by using a chemical such as molten salt that liquefies when heated and then gives off that heat when it later solidifies.
Andrej Lenert, a PhD student at M.I.T. and the lead author of the paper, notes that “anytime you go through this thermal conversion process, it lends itself to the possibility of storing that energy as heat.” This capability allows solar energy stored as heat to later be converted to electricity, say at night or when the sun isn’t shining. Storing electricity from conventional photovoltaic cells requires batteries, which are impractical at rooftop scales and expensive at larger scales.
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World's first butterfly bacteria sequenced: Suprising events found during metamorphosis
By (ScienceDaily)
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For the first time ever, a team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has sequenced the internal bacterial makeup of the three major life stages of a butterfly species, a project that showed some surprising events occur during metamorphosis.
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The results showed the internal bacterial diversity of the red postman was halved when it morphed from the caterpillar to the chrysalis, or pupal stage, then doubled after the pupae turned into active adult butterflies. The study is important because communities of bacteria inhabiting other insects have been shown to affect host nutrition, digestion, detoxification and defense from predators, parasites and pathogens, said Hammer of the ecology and evolutionary biology department.
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"The main question raised by this research is what these microbes are doing inside caterpillars and butterflies to influence their health and behavior," Fierer said. "Now we know that the dramatic shift that occurs as caterpillars turn into active butterflies is matched by large changes in their microbial communities."
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Also, it appears that red postman caterpillars, which acquire nutrients from leaves they consume, are able to divert more resources toward making compounds that are toxic to some predators, Hammer said. Adult red postman butterflies are filled with the same compounds, which release cyanide when the butterfly is eaten.
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Excessive mistrust of others builds from one's own inferiority
By (UPI)
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The study, published in the journal Psychiatry Research, demonstrated making a person's height lower than normal in the virtual reality simulation could make them feel worse about themselves and more fearful that others were trying to harm them.
"Being tall is associated with greater career and relationship success. Height is taken to convey authority, and we feel taller when we feel more powerful. It is little wonder then that men and women tend to over-report their height," Freeman said in a statement.
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These negative thoughts translated into an increase in paranoia towards the other passengers. The participants were more likely to think that someone in the carriage was staring in order to upset them, had bad intentions towards them, or were trying to make them distressed, Freeman said.
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How the Architecture of Our Buildings Shapes the Germs Around Us
By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
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We design buildings to make human lives better—but should we also design them to make bacteria healthier? A new study posits just that, suggesting that the microbial communities that live amongst us are deeply influenced by the design of our buildings. Wait—but aren't microbes bad? Not exactly.
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It turns out that there are incredible complex, sensitive ecologies floating around in our buildings—and they're tightly knit, based on where they occur in space.
So, that's all well and good, but isn't modernity—and modern architecture, in particular—founded on the idea that cleaner spaces make healthier humans? That's the traditional understanding of bacteria, yes. But, as the study notes, that notion is changing very quickly. Many microbes can actually make us healthier in all sorts of ways—and killing them all isn't necessarily the greatest idea.
We might even want to encourage certain microbes, and design is one way to do it. In fact, one of the paper's authors, Jessica Green, suggested just that in a talk last year, entitled "We're Covered in germs. Let's design for that." Green and her team are building on the idea with this new data.
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Technology |
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Finally, a legal challenge to US warrantless wiretapping that beats the Catch-22
By Cory Doctorow
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Last October, the Justice Department made a seemingly cosmetic change to its procedures related to NSA surveillance: requiring prosecutors to tell defendants when the evidence against them originated with a warrantless wiretap . . .
. . . Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't sue the government over warrantless wiretapping unless you had direct evidence that you'd been spied on. The catch? The only way to get evidence that you'd been spied on was to sue the government, which you couldn't do without evidence.
The first defendant to be notified that the case against him was built on warrantless wiretaps is an Uzbek human rights activist who lives in Colorado, named Jamshid Muhtorov. Under the new rules, Muhtorov now has the evidence he needs to challenge the government's program of warrantless surveillance -- and that's just what he's doing. The ACLU has taken his case, and have filed a motion challenging the evidence against him.
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Cameron says he failed to make case for mass surveillance after Snowden leaks
By Patrick Wintour
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In a two-hour session in front of the select committee on national security strategy, the prime minister said that after the next election parliament would need to develop a cross-party consensus in favour of fresh legislation to modernise the way the intelligence services and police monitored communications data.
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Discussing the communications legislation, Cameron said: "Over time we are going to have to modernise the legislative framework and practice when it comes to dealing with communications data. It is a politically contentious topic. I am not sure we are going to make progress on it in the coming months in terms of legislation, but there may be things short of legislation that we could do.
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He expressed satisfaction that the public was "unmoved" by the Guardian revelations, saying: "I sense the public reaction, as opposed to some of the media reaction, is: 'Look, we have intelligence services because it is a dangerous world and there are people that want to do terrible things.' "
He added: "I am very worried about the damage that Snowden is doing to our security and I would encourage the newspapers that are endlessly dallying in this to think before they act because we are in severe danger of making ourselves less safe as a result.
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Cultural |
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China's love affair with "Country Roads Take Me Home"
By Cory Doctorow
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Jeffrey sez, "The nice responses to my essay on 'Hotel California', has emboldened me to send a follow up on the curious life in China of another American song from the 1970s. Namely, the one that finds John Denver waxing nostalgic about West Virginia."
This is a particularly apt moment to post something about the Chinese love affair with John Denver's music, which I alluded to in passing in that same BOOM article, since the romance began exactly 35 years ago. The starting point for it, which paved the way for Denver touring China later, was his performance of "Rocky Mountain High" at a January 29, 1979, gala held in Deng Xiaoping's honor, during the Chinese leader's famous trip to America in 1979. (This performance can be seen just over a minute into this documentary, which also includes clips of the Harlem Globetrotters playing ball and an American children's chorus singing in Chinese at the same event.)
U.S.-Chinese relations have ebbed and flowed since 1979, a year that opening with ties between the two countries being formally "normalized" (setting the stage for Deng's visit to the U.S.), but the popularity of John Denver and especially his song "Country Roads" across the Pacific has stayed constant. This is demonstrated by the episode of the Chinese version of "The Voice" shown above. . . |
Archbishops criticise Nigerian and Ugandan anti-gay laws
By (BBC)
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The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have written to the presidents of Nigeria and Uganda, after being asked about laws there penalising gay people.
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Nigeria and Uganda have both passed legislation targeting people with same-sex attraction.
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In their letter, the archbishops reiterated their support for a document known as the Dromantine Communique, published in 2005 by the primates of the Anglican Communion.
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"The victimisation or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us.
"We assure homosexual people that they are children of God, loved and valued by Him and deserving the best we can give - pastoral care and friendship."
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Asia's global travel boom
By (BBC)
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Rapid urbanisation, increased disposable income and a relaxing of travel restrictions have enabled more people to travel and budget airlines are opening up routes from India and other parts of Asia.
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The COTRI China Outbound Tourism Research Institute says the "New Chinese Tourists" are travel-savvy, well-educated and mostly under 45 years of age. COTRI's latest estimate is that Chinese travellers will spend a total $129 billion in the next 12 months, despite a slight slowdown in outbound travel compared with 2011/12.
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Among the most popular destinations for Asian travellers are other Asian countries.
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Travel to the United States has increased dramatically over the past six years from around 397,600 trips a year to 1.4 million, but travel to Japan and the UK has fallen slightly.
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Euromonitor International says the South-east Asian destinations have been promoted aggressively by online travel agents and other via social media websites such as Facebook. Cheap deals meant outbound trips became more affordable to more Indian consumers, many of whom had never previously travelled outside the country.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |