Sadly lions are becoming extinct. You might think that Simba and friends are still roaming the African savanah, but like many large mammals they have been hunted to minimal populations and their habitat decimated by human encroachment. It was inevitable, given the gross overconsumption of nature by humanity, and we might not really care because …
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Author:astraea
When glacial melting becomes irreversible.
When glacial melting becomes irreversible it’s not good, and it’s happening now. Three teams that have modelled behaviour of Antarctica’s mighty Pine Island Glacier (PIG) tell the journal Nature Climate Change that, even if the region were to experience much colder conditions, its retreat would continue. The glacier is a colossal feature, covering more than …
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Euthanasia’s time is coming.
Death is an unknown and that makes it easy to fear it. Although it is a natural part of the cycle of life, western culture tends to ignore it and treat it as an unfamiliar phenomenon requiring dark rituals. That approach contrasts starkly with the advanced technology we play with every day and the deep …
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Ibuprofen reduces memory loss.
A recent discovery by researchers at the Louisiana University Health Sciences Center has found a way to stop the memory loss side effect of THC based drugs used in cancer treatment, whose use has been cautious owing to neuronal and memory impairments. Lead investigator Chu Chen said that if patients concurrently take a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory …
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Solstice sunrise after a storm.
The thunder rolled and the rain poured in the pre-dawn darkness. At 8 o’clock the sky began to clear and the light broke through. The sky was divided in two. On one side ominous clouds passing away; on the other the sky filled with the bright light of dawn. The moon looked on.
Printer problems … fixed.
After cleaning print head and deep cleaning print heads and still not getting a decent print out, I came across this site PrinterKnowledge, started by Rob Ludlow’s nifty-stuff.com, which helped understand the nature of the problem. (Anatomy of a Canon print head helped a lot – see photo below.) It was the print head, but …
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Watch out for pinkies in your pork.
It was pretty disgusting before, but since the further deregulation of health and safety standards the level of contamination in the US meat delivery system has become even more vile. BloombergBusinessweek features a report on The Truth About Pork and How America Feeds Itself. Their graphic reproduced below gives a glimpse of the problem. The …
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Roundup (glyphosate) seems to encourage ADHD and autism
Children can be a pain. Singing, dancing, playing … all that noise. Sometimes it seems too much, it seems unnatural. That’s when we start to diagnose ADHD (which isn’t really a disorder at all). But what is interesting is that there seems to be a correlation between the increased use of glyphosate in the food …
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GM corn caused cancerous tumors in the test rats …
… so Monsanto lobbied for a retraction of the evidence. In September 2012, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) published the findings of the first long-term study of rats fed genetically modified corn. The study’s authors, led by Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen, France, concluded that the GM corn caused cancerous tumors …
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Obama: The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking
Barack Obama gave a speech in Washington DC which described economic themes for the rest of his term. “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe,” he said. “The idea that so many children …
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