June 2012
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Earth at a Tipping Point
A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.
“It really will be a new world, biologically, at...
May 2012
3 posts
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Nanoparticles heated by radio waves switch on...
Helen Shen
Researchers have remotely activated genes inside living animals, a proof of concept that could one day lead to medical procedures in which patients’ genes are triggered on demand.
The work, in which a team used radio waves to switch on engineered insulin-producing genes in mice, is published today in Science1.
Jeffrey Friedman, a molecular geneticist at the Rockefeller University...
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Romney the Bully isn't the issue
This is a lengthy, well researched piece that Romney supporters are likely to instinctively recoil at, and detractors are likely to find superfluous. I’m far less interested in the alleged bullying than I am the narrative arc of Mitt’s life. He has lived in a cocoon of privilege and, not withstanding his own considerable work ethic, it’s not clear that he has the personal...
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WatchThe Daily Show - Victory Lapse
Republicans accuse President Obama of politicizing the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death.
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Welcome to the Asylum
By Chris Hedges
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall...
April 2012
21 posts
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Global Corporate Capitalism is an Economic...
ARUNDHATI ROY
Though capitalism is meant to be based on competition, those at the top of the food chain have also shown themselves to be capable of inclusiveness and solidarity. The great Western Capitalists have done business with fascists, socialists, despots and military dictators. They can adapt and constantly innovate. They are capable of quick thinking and immense tactical cunning.
But...
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Romney's Fiscal Fantasy
By Lawrence Summers
The Romney campaign has been very clear about what the former governor is promising: $5 trillion in tax cuts on top of extending the Bush tax cuts, with those benefits heavily weighted toward the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Romney himself has acknowledged the lack of details, stating in reference to his tax plan that “frankly, it can’t be scored.” I have been party for...
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“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is...”
– Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
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The Illusion of Choice
Source: Frugal dad
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Inequality may lead to rage against the machines
By Sebastian Mallaby
Citigroup just hired a brilliant consultant called Watson to build out its digital banking. This very same Watson also advises healthcare companies such as WellPoint and, in his time off, took the top prize last year on Jeopardy!, the television quiz show. According to his friends, Watson has other corporate gigs that he is coy about, and will soon earn more than $1bn...
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How Will Romney Pay For Tax Cuts? Wouldn't You...
Mitt Romney has proposed massive new tax cuts and promised to balance the federal budget. How will he achieve these seemingly contradictory goals?
For now, he isn’t saying. And, in fact, his campaign has been sending out vague and somewhat conflicting signals about where the money would come from to finance his rate cuts and other tax reductions.
When Romney rolled out his latest revenue plan...
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Taxed by the Boss
By David Cay Johnston
(Reuters) - Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers - and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.
The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations,...
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Born This Way
By Sasha Issenberg
At the vanguard of this movement is Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist whose best-selling new book,The Righteous Mind, collects his own experiments—testing biases, prejudices, and preferences—and the work of like-minded colleagues to unmask much of our political “thinking” as moral instinct papered over, post facto, with ideological rationalization. We may tell ourselves...
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The Second Economy
by W. Brian Arthur
Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential—it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads. It...
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Why Poorer States Aren't Buying What Romney's...
By Walter Dean Burnham andThomas Ferguson
The county maps and polls testifying to the importance of income in predicting the Romney vote within states (the latter have been oddly missing in some newspaper presentations) all suggest that the Republican Party is now divided fairly sharply along class lines as well as religious ones. In the general election, this may be important. Right now GOP...
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Who ate my job?
It is tempting to think of the globalisation of the labour market as a zero-sum game in which Mrs Kamal in Pakistan is benefiting at the direct expense of Ms Vetter in America. But economists point out that such calculations suffer from the “lump of labour fallacy”—the belief that there is only a fixed amount of work to go round. A better explanation, they say, is the theory of comparative...
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How Wealth Reduces Compassion
Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people...
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“And this is my theory of Romney: He’s not conservative, but he’s not moderate...”
– Michael Tomasky
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What Export-Oriented America Means
TYLER COWEN
It’s not just that Silicon Valley and the Pentagon and our universities give the United States a big edge with smart machines. The subtler point is this: The more the world relies on smart machines, the more domestic wage rates become irrelevant for export prowess. That will help the wealthier countries, most of all America. This logic works on both sides. America is using less...
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Drug-smuggling nanoparticles target tumours
Drug-smuggling nanoparticles could be the latest recruits in the fight againstcancer. The first results from early-stage trials show that cancer drugs couriered by nanoparticles may reduce the size of tumours in humans.
Researchers from BIND Biosciences in Boston filled nanoparticles with the cancer drug docetaxel and injected them into the blood of 17 people who had cancers that are normally...
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“If more Americans sought care abroad, it wouldn’t just save them money; it could...”
– James Surowiecki
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“But even in the emerging world order, the U.S. is likely to have much more...”
– WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
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Print-your-own-robots developed in US
Printed-on-demand robots might be a reality before the end of the decade if a US-based project achieves its goals.
Researchers aim to build a desktop technology that would allow an average person to design and print a machine within 24 hours.
The team says that making it easier to create specialised robots could have a “profound impact on society”.
The effort is being funded by a...
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The End of Creativity?
I sometimes wonder whether our remix, remake culture of po-mo pastiche, self aware and often sarcastically referential, isn’t just the inevitable result of exponential population growth- how much sonic room is still available for innovative rock musicianship? This difficulty runs even deeper though. Technology might be left in Pandora’s box as a means of future innovation, possibly in...
March 2012
92 posts
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Obamacare Is On Trial. So Is the Supreme Court.
Jonathan Cohn
Rarely in American history has the Court struck down laws in decisions that would have such quick, widespread impact. In the modern era, only two cases come to mind: Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Both were acts of ambitious, even audacious judicial activism. But, in two key repsects, they were different from a potential ruling against the Affordable Care Act.
...
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Marx, Population and Plenitude
John Lanchester
A final challenge to Marx’s model, and also to his picture of the future, comes from something he did see very clearly and prophetically, the extraordinary productive power of capitalism. He saw how capitalism would transform the surface of the planet and impact on the life of every single person alive. There is, however, a crack or flaw close to the heart of his analysis. Marx...
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Dirt Don't Hurt
Exposure to germs in childhood is thought to help strengthen the immune system and protect children from developing allergies and asthma, but the pathways by which this occurs have been unclear. Now, researchers have identified a mechanism in mice that may explain the role of exposure to microbes in the development of asthma and ulcerative colitis, a common form of inflammatory bowel disease.
...
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“This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the...”
– Dahlia Lithwick
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Obamacare is Unconstitutional? Now They Tell Us
By Michael Kinsley
Now, maybe the court has been wrong all this time. Maybe the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause is much narrower. Maybe that authority doesn’t extend to requiring individual citizens to have health insurance or pay a fine. But if so, it is not only the future of Obamacare that will suddenly be shaky. Every piece of legislation for about the last 70 years...
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The Brain on Love
By DIANE ACKERMAN
A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.
All relationships change the brain — but most...
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A LOT OF GAS
Elizabeth Kolbert
Like almost anything that the Republican candidates can manage to agree on, the Obama Administration gas-price-hike conspiracy theory is nearly a hundred-per-cent hokum. The fakery begins with the theory’s premise: that the President could, if he wanted to, reduce the price of oil. Oil, as it is well known, is a global commodity traded on a global market. Gasoline prices...
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“Hitting the favorite button on the first episode of “Mad Men” is a remarkably...”
– DAVID CARR
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Stag Party
By Frank Rich
It’s not news that the GOP is the anti-abortion party, that it panders to the religious right, and that it’s particularly dependent on white men with less education and less income—a displaced demographic that has been as threatened by the rise of the empowered modern woman as it has been by the cosmopolitan multiracial male elites symbolized by Barack Obama. That aggrieved class...
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Research wrests partial control of a memory
Scripps Research Institute scientists and their colleagues have successfully harnessed neurons in mouse brains, allowing them to at least partially control a specific memory. Though just an initial step, the researchers hope such work will eventually lead to better understanding of how memories form in the brain, and possibly even to ways to weaken harmful thoughts for those with conditions such...
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Health Insurance Is for Everyone
By FAREED ZAKARIA
The centerpiece of the case against Obamacare is the requirement that everyone buy some kind of health insurance or face stiff penalties—the so-called individual mandate. It is a way of moving toward universal coverage without a government-run or single-payer system. It might surprise Americans to learn that another advanced industrial country, one with a totally private...
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Should Science Pull the Trigger on Antiviral...
By Carl Zimmer
We do currently have “antiviral” drugs, but they’re a pale shadow of their bacteria-fighting counterparts. People infected with HIV, for example, can avoid developing AIDS by taking a cocktail of antiviral drugs. But if they stop taking them, the virus will rebound to its former level in a matter of weeks. Patients have to keep taking the drugs for the rest of their lives to...
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“The three words Buchheit came up with would become the most well-known corporate...”
– FARHAD MANJOO
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Trickle-down consumption
Chrystia Freeland
We know now that trickle-down economics doesn’t really work – the past decade in the United States has seen incomes at the very top soar, while the earnings of the middle class stagnated or declined. But a growing body of academic research is suggesting that this benign force’s wicked stepsister, a phenomenon two economists have dubbed ‘‘trickle-down consumption,’’ is having a...
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Looking Back on the Limits of Growth
Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.
Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several...
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WatchBill Moyers counsels President Obama not to look at America through the rose-colored glasses of people — like Robert Kagan — led by political opportunity and wishful thinking, but by those — like Andrew Bacevich — who see the world as it truly is, and are best poised to make it better.
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Romney’s defense budget target is lofty
It is one of Mitt Romney’s most striking anecdotes. The US Navy, he says, has fewer ships today than in 1917, and the US Air Force is smaller than it was in 1947. Notwithstanding that today’s fleets are far beyond the capability of those from yesteryear, Romney says it is evidence that America’s military dominance is at risk.
Romney’s solution is one of the most far-ranging, expensive, and...
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“One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front...”
– The Pirate Bay
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'Big Government' Isn't the Problem, Big Money Is
Robert Reich
Conservatives love to rail against “big government.” But the surge of cynicism engulfing the nation isn’t about government’s size. It flows from a growing perception that government doesn’t work for average people but for big business, Wall Street and the very rich—who, in effect, have bought it. In a recent Pew poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of...
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Nokia is looking into haptic tattoos to help you...
Nokia wants to take haptic feedback to a level you haven’t previously encountered. Haptic tech is employed, for example, when your phone vibrates as you type on its touchscreen. Haptics deal with appealing to your sense of touch by applying forces or vibrations to your skin.
Which is exactly what Nokia wants to do, proposing the application of tattoos with ferromagnetic inks, that will vibrate...
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“The crucial thing to understand about Ryan is that he is not a fiscal...”
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Matt Miller
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How to Mend a Broken Heart
Four-year-old Angela Irizarry was born with a single pumping chamber in her heart, a potentially lethal defect. To fix the problem, Angela is growing a new blood vessel in her body in an experimental treatment that could advance the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine. Doctors at Yale University here implanted in Angela’s chest in August a bioabsorbable tube that is designed to...
