Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have crossed a new threshold, the UN's weather agency saidon on Monday, highlighting the urgency of curbing manmade, climate-altering greenhouse gases.
In April, for the first time, the mean monthly CO2 concentration in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million (ppm) throughout the northern hemisphere, which pollutes more than the south, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said.
'Time running out' as CO2 levels hit new high: United Nations
Transgender travelers singled out in TSA screenings, docs show
Department of Homeland Security documents obtained last month reveal details of incidents in which transgender travelers were subjected to heightened scrutiny when passing through airport security checkpoints.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests netted civil rights complaints, incident reports and internal memos and emails from DHS's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Transportation Security Administration. They show that trans people have been required to undergo pat-down searches by officers of the opposite gender, reveal or remove items such as chest binders and prosthetic penises and defend challenges to their gender identities and their right to opt out of body scans, among other problems.
Alex Baer: Pains & Fears, Lessons & Gifts
The thing about unexpected lessons is that you never know what it is you'll learn, or that you had anything at all to learn in the first place.
In a quintzillion years, I never thought I would say this, but Donald Rumsfeld had a point, albeit a circuitous one, when he reeled off his screed about known knowns and unknown unknowns, and so forth, through every last permutation, down to the potentially uncertain but likely quite improbably unknown, but still completely possible, percentagewise, knowns. Or something.
Lessons are difficult, even if you're open and ready for them, and they involve small-beans issues like going to a different movie than you'd planned, or having to break down and order an alien beer or pop when your fav has been pumped dry at Drac's Stake-N-Steak or Burger Queen or Pasta Palace or whatever.
Dead Babies and Utah's Carbon Bomb
What is going on in Utah's Uinta Basin to explain newborn babies dying? An abrupt surge in teenage mothers, drug, alcohol use? No evidence of that. Is there a genetic explanation? Genes don't change that quickly. Is there a sudden onset of medical incompetence by the area's health-care providers?
No reason to think so. That leaves one other possibility. Is there something happening in the environment? As a matter of fact, yes.
Trial Drug Reverses Alzheimer’s Disease in Mice
A drug in early animal trials has shown promising results, appearing to reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice.
Additionally, in mice, the treatment reduced inflammation in parts of the brain that are associated with memory and learning, according to a study led by Susan Farr of Saint Louis University School of Medicine, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
The mice were engineered to produce a mutant form of human beta amyloid, one of the proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease. In a previous study, the researchers had tested mice that naturally overproduced mouse beta amyloid; this step was to see if the drug would work with the human version. Both types of mice showed impaired learning as they aged, much like humans with Alzheimer’s disease.
Alex Baer: Put Your Lips Together and Blow
My Muse, lately, has been feisty, haughty, and downright bumptious. Churlish and surly, too, but that is surely an outgrowth of my ignoring it as much as possible. It hates that. Kicks up a fuss something fierce.
It's been unavoidable, though. It's yard work season. Out here in the country-ish places, Nature never stops trying to take back the small encampment it's allowed us for an assortment of the old, small, odd-shaped buildings we call home -- a place where all of the structures and sheds compete against one another to see which one can return its raw materials and minerals to the earth firstest with the mostest.
The NRA’s All-Out Assault on Accurate Information About Gun Deaths
As a shooting spree leaves seven dead in California, the gun lobby is trying to thwart attempts to study gun deaths and officials who see gun violence as a public health crisis.
Yet another massacre occurred last night at an institution of learning, this time the University of California, Santa Barbara. The price we paid for the National Rifle Association’s “freedom” was seven people murdered and seven injured at nine different crime scenes.
RNC files lawsuit to raise unlimited cash
The Republican National Committee on Friday sued the Federal Election Commission for the ability to raise unlimited cash from individual donors.
The central committee, chairman Reince Priebus and Louisiana Republicans filed a joint lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking for permission to set up an independent account that could raise and spend potentially enormous sums of money to help federal candidates. Under the current rules, the RNC may only accept $32,400 each year from donors, and local-level parties are capped at $10,000.
This Ice Sheet Will Unleash a Global Superstorm Sandy That Never Ends
If you want to truly grasp the scale of Earth's polar ice sheets, you need some help from Isaac Newton. Newton taught us the universal law of gravitation, which states that all objects are attracted to one another in relation to their masses (and the distance between them).
The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland are incredibly massive—Antarctica's ice is more than two miles thick in places and 5.4 million square miles in extent. These ice sheets are so large, in fact, that gravitational attraction pulls the surrounding ocean toward them. The sea level therefore rises upward at an angle as you approach an ice sheet, and slopes downward and away as you leave its presence.
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