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These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

by JustineBallou Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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By the end of the year, the federal government will likely propose taking the grizzly bear off of the endangered species list. To some, this would mark an unprecedented victory: the resuscitation of perhaps the most iconic large mammal on the continent. In 1975, when it first gained endangered species protection, the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the few areas grizzly bears still exist in the continental United States, dwindled to 130. Today, the population stands at around 750. But despite this resurgence, many scientists, conservationists, and indigenous people say taking away its protection could spell disaster for the species.

This latter camp includes award-winning wildlife photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen, who has lived in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on the edge of Great Teton National Park, since the 1970s. He has captured the return of the grizzlies to Greater Yellowstone with his lens for nearly a decade, since his most famous subject, the mother grizzly bear known as 399, first appeared in Teton Park. The bear quickly became a wildlife star, raising several sets of cubs in close proximity to popular tourist spots within Grand Teton National Park while almost never threatening humans.

Using 399 and her offspring as an entry point, Mangelsen and his longtime friend and journalist Todd Wilkinson explore the controversy surrounding grizzly bears and how humans should treat them in a gorgeous coffee table book, Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek: An Intimate Portrait of 399, that comprises Mangelsen’s photos of 399 and her family (some of which are included here), along with a narrative by Wilkinson.

Mengelsen and Wilkinson recently sat down with Mother Jones to talk about their experiences with 399, the threats she and other grizzlies face, and why we should care about what could happen if the US Fish and Wildlife Service takes away their Endangered Species Act protection.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Mother Jones: Tom, tell me about what it was like when 399 showed up in Grand Teton National Park near to where you live.

Thomas D. Mangelsen: : 399’s arrival was big news in 2006 because up until then grizzly bears hadn’t been seen in Teton Park. I had been there 27 years when she showed up, and I had never seen a grizzly bear in Teton Park, and I had seen very few grizzlies in Yellowstone.

I live on the edge of Teton Park, next to the Snake River, and in 2005 I awoke in the middle of the night because my dog was going crazy. I bolted up, adrenaline rushing, and I look up and I see this bear standing face-to-face thorough the glass, looking at Loup (my dog). I looked and I saw this big hump on his back or her back, and I said hmm, that’s not a black bear, that’s a grizzly bear. But because I had never seen one there (this was before 399 showed up) I still thought it had to be a black bear.

The following year, in 2006, I started hearing stories that a mother with three cubs had been seen a couple of times in Teton Park in Oxbow Bend, which is a famous overlook, and a great place in Teton Park for wildlife. I went up there later in the summer and I saw her and her three cubs feeding on a moose carcass. I didn’t think too much about it, I thought they will be gone soon because it’s turning into fall.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

She grew on me. I watched her a little later in the season chase elk calves in early June in the Willow Flats, which is near Oxbow Bend. She started drawing these crowds of people because she would come there every afternoon and she would play rope a dope with these herds of elk and their calves. She would be out there playing and nursing the calves, not paying attention to the elk, it looked like. Then these elk would come up closer to her to keep an eye on the predator, and all of a sudden she would bolt and run and chase them and split the herd. The elk would run into the willows and then 399 would just turn around and go back like a herd dog and pick off these elk calves.

I was excited because I knew immediately that it was a great opportunity for people to learn about bears and see them in a natural state. I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa over the years, and it was very similar to the Serengeti, seeing a lion or a cheetah chasing wildebeest.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Grizzlies have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since the ’70s, but many are still shot every year. Why?

Todd Wilkinson: There is an elk hunt that’s been in Great Teton National Park, the only sanctioned big game hunt of its kind in the lower 48 in a national park, and that perennially puts bears at risk because elk are getting killed in the park, the grizzlies are feeding on the remains—the gut piles—and then hunters are bumbling into them. So every season that goes by with 399 and her 15 descendants, it’s a miracle in some ways that they remain alive, because she and her offspring are walking through these land mines.

TDM: In the national parks, you can’t leave a coke can on a picnic table—you would get a ticket—but you can leave these gut piles, and you cut the legs, limbs, heads, off and leave them in the field.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Why would it be a bad idea to take away grizzly bears’ Endangered Species Act protection?

TW: The federal government is saying that bears have surpassed their carrying capacity and basically the ecosystem is bursting at the seams in terms of bear numbers, so they are pushing out.

In the book, we talk about a scientist named David Mattson, who is a veteran of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, the premier large mammal research unit in the world. He has advanced a counter narrative, which is that, as a result of declines in their four main food groups, grizzly bears are having to range wider to find their food.

One of those key foods is whitebark pine seeds. Within the last decade, the 18-million-acre whitebark pine forest ecosystem has collapsed—it’s functionally extinct as a reliable food source. Climate change has exacerbated insect infestation so we’re now getting two beetle reproductive cycles in the course of a single year when in the past we might get one.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

The second thing that’s happened is 25 or 30 years ago, someone introduced lake trout into Yellowstone Lake, and that has beaten back native cutthroat trout that spawn in the streams that come out of Yellowstone Lake. The bears seize upon the fish, it’s a great source of protein. Because cutthroat has been decimated that has impacted a huge number of bears, 60 to 80 bears.

And then on top of that, there is a third food source called the army cutworm moth (also known as the miller moth). They are treated as an agricultural pest, and so you have lots of pesticides thrown at the moths in farm country. Those moths migrate hundreds of miles to the high mountain talus slopes to drink the nectar of high mountain flowers. We know from climate change that those high alpine and subalpine areas are in danger, so if the flowers go away, what’s going to happen to the moths? Or if the moths get hammered by pesticides, they disappear. They are high fat sources, grizzlies eat tens of thousands of them in a sitting.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

As a result of bears losing those key foods and having to forage further, not only are females being forced to feed on carcasses, but they are also having negative encounters with cattle in the area—we have seen a spike in the number of encounters with livestock.

The one thing we know about climate change is that it is making the wild apron of ecosystems shrink. You have climate change that is asserting its impact on Greater Yellowstone at the same time you have record visitation to the national parks and a record inundation of lifestyle pilgrims moving to the ecosystem, pressing in on the outside edges. So you got this constricting ecosystem, and on top of it you have climate change. The future of grizzly bears is really uncertain.

TDM: People in the scientific community, private citizens, and conservationists are saying what’s the rush (to take away Endangered Species Act protection from the grizzly bears), let’s see how this plays out.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: What’s in store for 399 while we wait to see if grizzly bears’ protection is taken away?

TW: 399 is 19 years old. She’s been seen with male bears this summer, and so very likely when she comes out of the den late winter next year, she’ll have a new set of cubs as a 20-year-old mother.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

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These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

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These Bats Look Exactly Like Teddy Bears and Cute Little Piggies

by RudolphMott Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Despite the fact that Dr. Merlin Tuttle, 74, has saved millions of bats around the world through his research and advocacy, and has taken hundreds of thousands of pictures of bats (sometimes shampooing them beforehand), he won’t judge you if you are afraid of them.

He won’t even get mad if you’ve tried to hurt one. In his more than fifty-year-long career, Tuttle has encountered just about every sort of reaction one could have toward a bat, and witnessed every horrible thing you could do to one. His reaction? To try to be understanding and then calmly list, as he did with me below, all the ways bats are amazing critters who will, in fact, make your life better.

Since he first discovered bats as a teenager in a cave close to his house in Tennessee, he has devoted his life to them, founding Bat Conservation International, the world’s leading bat advocacy group (which he has since left to found Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation); publishing more than 50 research articles on bats; and lending his work to several National Geographic features. Last week, he a released a charming memoir: The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World’s Most Misunderstood Mammals. In it he recounts his amazing adventures saving the stigmatized species from moonshiners in Tennessee caves, poachers in Thailand, politicians in Austin, Texas, and on and on.

He recently talked to Mother Jones about what makes bats so important, how he started photographing them, and why he is optimistic for their future despite the continuing threats facing the species.

On why people fear bats: It’s human nature and animal nature that we fear most what we understand least, and bats, because they are active at night, dart around unpredictably, it’s easy to fear them. But the more we learn about them the easier it is to like them. And most people are just amazed when they find out that there is this incredible variety and that they have highly sophisticated social systems, similar to those of primates and dolphins, and then they find out how valuable they are and probably most importantly learn that the bats just don’t go around attacking people and looking for trouble—even a sick bat is extremely unlikely to ever attack anyone. We all love our dogs and yet dogs are vastly more dangerous in terms of human mortality than bats are. Bats have one of the finest records of living safely with people of any animal in our planet.

In 55 years of studying bats on every continent where they exist, dealing with hundreds of species, sometimes surrounded by thousands, even millions at a time in caves, I’ve never once been attacked by a bat, I’ve never seen an aggressive bats, and I’ve never contracted any disease from a bat.

On why bats are valuable to humans: Bats contribute billions of dollars annually in protecting farmers against crops pests, reducing the need for pesticides that already threaten nearly every aspect of our lives. If you go to a tropical fruit market you’ll find that some 70 percent of the fruit on sale are pollinated or seed dispersed by bats. The whole tequila liquor industry is based on agave that is highly dependent on bats for pollination. Many of our most valued timber trees are dependent on bats for pollination or seed dispersal. If you go to the East African savannas, the famous baobab tree is highly dependent on bats for pollination. You go to Southeast Asia and the durian is so dependent on bats for pollination that you can’t even grow it in an orchard without bats to pollinate the flowers. And take the banana: all commercial bananas come form wild ancestors that continue to rely heavily on bats for pollination.

On the change in attitude towards bats since he started studying them decades ago: When I began devoting my life fulltime to bats back in 1982, just about everybody knew that bats were just ugly, dirty, rabid vermin that were dangerous, and now that is improved rather dramatically. At that time the most frequent call zoos got about bats was ‘Oh my god, I saw a bat in my yard last night, I’ve got children, what can I do,’ thinking that the bat was going to attack their children. And yet today those same institutions report that they are much more likely to get a call asking how to put up a bat house and attract bats to the yard. In fact, since the three decades since I introduced the idea of bat houses to North America there are now hundreds of thousands of bats living in people’s bat houses.

On how he got into bat photography: Back in 1978, because of my research on bats, National Geographic asked me to write a chapter in their new book Wild Animals of North America on bats. I worked real hard to write a chapter explaining to people that they didn’t have to be afraid of bats, that bats were actually quite valuable to have around. And then I went to Washington DC to meet with the editors and see the layout for my chapter in their book. All the pictures were just horrible! They were bats that were caught and tormented into snarling, and then photographed with their teeth bared.

I was rather shocked to find that after all my efforts to get people over their fear, they were going to put that kind of picture with my story. They agreed that that wasn’t a good thing and sent one of their staff photographers to go to the field for month with me to get some good picture of bats to go with the chapter. But bat photography is difficult, it’s definitely not easy. And in that month he just got three pictures that were really useful for the chapter, and by that time he realized there was as much involved with knowing bats as with knowing photography, and while he was with me I had hardly let him rest for a moment without asking him how and why he was doing what he was doing. So when he left he said look, you know what I know about photographing animals now, I’ve got some spare leftover film, let me leave it with you and why don’t you go out and buy yourself a little bit more equipment and see what you can contribute for the book. And I ended up being the second most used photographer in the book.

On the power of photographs to convince people of bats’ value: I began my photography strictly out defense of bats. It dawned on me that these pictures were incredibly powerful at changing people’s perception and so I got excited about photography. Without photography there would have been no real conservation progress in my opinion.

It’s so easy to change people’s minds about bats when you are armed with pictures. For kids that love dinosaurs, the dinosaurs all died out, there are bats still alive that are just as fascinatingly strange as any dinosaur, and yet if you like panda bears or something else that’s cute, there are bats that’ll run them stiff competition, too.

On other methods he used to convince people of bat’s benefit: I asked a Tennessee farmer one time for permission to go in his cave to study bats, and he said ‘Oh yeah, you’re very welcome, and just kill all you can while you’re there.’ He just assumed if i was a scientist i knew bats were bad and I would try to kill them. I came out and I said, ‘You know i really appreciate your letting me go in and look at your bats, I’m interested in learning exactly what all they are eating. You ever seen anything like these beetles?’ And he looks and goes, ‘Oh my god them suckas eat potato bugs?’ I said, ‘Well a colony the size of yours can probably ear 100 pounds in a night.’

I came back a month later to do some more research and he on his own decided each of his bats was worth 5 bucks and by George, anyone got near to doing anything bad to his bats was going to have a big problem with him.

That’s how it works, being able to listen to people no matter how crazy their fears are and trying to stand where they’re coming from, and then instead of getting upset when they tell you they’ve been killing them all their lives, just point out that we’ve all made mistakes in the past and that I’m not worried about what they’ve done in that past, but I assume that now that they understand bats, they’ll probably have a different attitude toward bats in the future.

On white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that’s wiped out nearly 6 million bats in North America: There is no question that the fungus has had terrible consequences, particularly in the Northeast. We definitely need to help them rebuild. We probably never needed conservation action more than we do right now for bats. But the good side of this story is that because of this calamity, millions of people have learned about the value of bats, and learned to care about bats who didn’t know anything about them previously. Now, because of the spread of white-nose syndrome, I’m seeing programs starting up all over the country to monitor the status not just of a few endangered species in a few select locations, but to monitor bats in general and to track them as we do birds, and that’s a very, very important step in the right direction because white nose-syndrome is not the only thing we have to worry about. We can do a whole lot better at protecting bats in the future because of what we’ve learned through white-nose syndrome, and I’m optimistic in that regard.

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These Bats Look Exactly Like Teddy Bears and Cute Little Piggies

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Women Can Boost Their Testosterone Just by Acting Like a Boss

by LurleneHollins Posted on October 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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We often point to testosterone to explain the traits that make men “manly”: competitiveness, horniness, impulsiveness. People have even blamed the testosterone levels of the architects of the Great Recession for the devastatingly awful decisions that led to the financial crash.

But new research shows that the reason men have more testosterone than women may have as much to do with gender socialization as inherent biology. Scientists from the University of Michigan published a study today that found that the act of wielding power increases testosterone levels regardless of gender. The study’s authors went on to hypothesize that the reason women generally have less of the hormone than men may be, at least in part, because of gender norms that prevent women from accessing positions of power and discourage them from being competitive.

To come to this conclusion, researchers hired more than 100 actors to perform an activity during which they held power over someone else: firing a subordinate employee. The actors performed the firing both acting with stereotypically “masculine” traits (using dominant poses, taking up space, not smiling), and with stereotypically “feminine” traits (lifting their voice at the end of sentences, being hesitant, not making eye contact). Researchers also measured the levels of a control group watching a travel documentary.

What they found was fascinating.

Not only did the female subjects acting in a stereotypically masculine way see an increase in testosterone (compared with the control), but those performing in a “feminine” way saw a significant boost, as well. In other words, just the act of wielding power, regardless of whether the wielder is performing maleness, increases testosterone levels. The study found that men did not have much of a testosterone boost during the activity, which, the study’s authors guessed, could be because men’s more frequent engagement in competitions and power-wielding activities “might paradoxically lead to dampened testosterone responses.”

“Our results would support a pathway from gender to testosterone that is mediated by men engaging more frequently than women in behaviors such as wielding power that increase testosterone,” the study says.

What’s that in layman’s terms? Gender inequality, at least in part, may be part of what’s making men manly.

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Women Can Boost Their Testosterone Just by Acting Like a Boss

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

by RandallEZML Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is some video, they are dangerous and venomous, don’t get close to them. Rescued this sea snake today on the beach here at Silverstrand in Oxnard. Prior to this there was only a report of them being seen as far north as Orange County. El Niño has definitely brought a lot of strange and unusual aquatic fish and animals up. Caution these snakes are venomous and should be avoided and not handled. And yes it is alive.

Posted by

Robert Forbes on Friday, October 16, 2015

On Friday, Southern Californians began freaking out after a surfer discovered a venomous sea snake on a beach north of Los Angeles. The species, the yellow-bellied sea snake, normally keeps to tropical waters and has not been reported on the Golden State’s shores for more than 30 years, and never as far north as Ventura County. The snake died shortly after it was found, but not before adding to El Niño apocalypse anxiety. Local wildlife experts have hypothesized that the snake traveled this far north because of unusually warm waters off of the California coast due to El Niño.

If you suffer from ophidiophobia, these reports probably gave you a scare. But we have some good news: While venomous snakes are a significant danger in other parts of the world, the United States is almost certainly not going to see a wave of deadly snake attacks, even with a strong El Niño. Yes, sea snakes might be feeding further north this winter, but that does not mean they are going to be out for human prey; likely the only reason this snake came ashore is because it was injured or sick.

Furthermore, according to David Steen, a snake expert and researcher at Auburn University’s Museum of Natural History, there are no known human deaths attributed to the yellow-bellied sea snake, and only about five people per year are killed by venomous snakes of any kind in the United States. By contrast, there were 42 reports of dog-bite fatalities in the United States last year.

“Venomous snakes deserve our respect but in many cases the danger they represent is exaggerated,” Steen wrote me in an email, adding that a sea snake would have no reason to attack a human unless it was picked up or harassed. “If you don’t already know that it is a bad idea to pick up snakes that you do not recognize then you probably have bigger problems.”

This story has been revised.

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

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7 Fascinating Facts About Bats

by Reinaldo97I Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Silhouetted against an orange harvest moon, fluttering out of a haunted house, or circling Count Dracula’s cape: We often think of bats as creepy, especially this time of year.

But actually, these maligned creatures are crucial to many ecosystems—and our economy. What’s more, they’re in trouble. A few important facts to know about our winged, insect-munching friends:

Bats flying at sunset Umkehrer/Shutterstock

Bats save us billions of dollars a year. Bats eat their bodyweight in insects every night. In 2011, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville used modeling techniques to calculate how much bats’ amazing insect-eating abilities are worth to US farmers. The estimates included the value of prevented crop damage from pests that bats eat, as well as the amount of money farmers would have to spend on pesticides to do the same job. They came up with a wide—but staggering—range: between $3 billion and $53 billion dollars a year.

A few years later, Josiah Maine, then a graduate student at Southern Illinois University’s Cooperative Wildlife Research lab, decided to test out those estimates on the most important American crop: corn. Maine’s team set up enclosures around corn fields that let in insects but prevented bats from entering and foraging, and then measured how that corn fared compared with corn in fields where bats could eat insects to their hearts’ desire—and found 50 percent more fungal growth and crop damage in the enclosed corn. They then estimated the cost of damage per acre and extrapolated it across all the acres of corn grown in the world. The total price tag? More than $1 billion per year, not including the cost of downstream environmental damage caused by increased pesticide use.

Long-eared bats eat insects that damage crops. De Meester/ZUMAPRESS

Bats prevent disease. A common misconception is that most bats carry rabies and other diseases. In fact, the vast majority of bats don’t have rabies, and out of more than 1,300 species of bats, only three suck the blood of other animals (and only one of other mammals). On the other hand, bats eat insects that spread diseases we really should be worried about. According to David Blehert, who leads the US Geological Survey’s Wildlife Disease Diagnostics Lab, bats play an important role controlling the spread of West Nile virus.

Without bats, there would be no tequila. Many species of bats pollinate plants. After they use their insanely long tongues to feast on the sweet nectar of flowers, pollen collects on their muzzles, which they spread from the male part of the flower to the female part of the flower.

More than 300 species of plants depend on bats to survive in many tropical and desert ecosystems. These include plants that humans eat, like the agave used to make tequila, as well as banana, peach, and mango trees.

Bats help save forests. Fruit-eating bats also play a crucial role in rejuvenating clear-cut rainforests. After a rainforest ecosystem is decimated, the first step toward rebuilding is the spreading of seeds by the poop of fruit-eating birds, bats, and other animals. But bats, which cover large distances to forage for fruit at night, do the best job at spreading “pioneer” plants, the flora that first begin to grow after clear cutting.

In North America, bats are in big trouble. Bats are dying in unprecedented numbers in the eastern United States and Canada, thanks to a terrifying fungal disease. Nearly 6 millions bats have perished in the past decade, including more than 90 percent of the populations of some species.

The recent bat troubles began about a decade ago, when a nasty fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) found its way into caves full of hibernating bats in upstate New York. Unlike bacteria and other pathogens, this fungus thrives in cold temperatures and finds an ideal host in the sleeping bats. It creeps onto their muzzles and spreads on the skin covering their wings, irritating them and causing them to wake and move before they are supposed to. This disrupts their energy conservation and fat storage, causing bats to die before hibernation is over or leave their caves too early and starve outside.

Perhaps most frightening of all, the fungus has spread very quickly: Since 2006 when wildlife biologists first identified it in New York, it has appeared in 26 states and five Canadian provinces. Just last month it arrived in yet another state, Wyoming, although it has yet to claim bat lives there. (Bats don’t start dying until a year or more after the fungus arrives in their caves.) White-nose syndrome has affected half of the 47 bat species in the United States, including the once ubiquitous little brown bat and the northern long-eared bat, which is now a threatened species.

A little brown bat affected by white-nose syndrome US Fish and Wildlife Service

Scientists test the wings of a little brown bat for white-nose syndrome in Tennessee. Amy Smotherman Burgess/ZUMAPRESS

Some researchers are trying are trying to save bats by manipulating their microbiomes. Blehert says scientists have started to make progress preventing white-nose syndrome’s spread. They discovered that once the fungus enters a cave’s soil it persists for long periods of time, allowing it to travel on the shoe of a spelunker or on the wing of a bat. Scientists and recreational cavers have begun to take precautionary measures to decontaminate clothes and equipment.

Researchers are also looking into more dramatic ways to fight the disease, including innovative vaccination efforts and cutting-edge biological control methods that manipulate the microbes on a bat’s skin so its microbiome develops a resistance to the pathogen. Researchers have found that bats’ immune systems, which largely shut down during hibernation, do not notice to the invasion of Pd fungus, allowing the pathogen to easily out-compete the microbes on bats’ skin that normally fight off germs. Scientists are trying to introduce new organisms to bats’ microbiome that could resist the fungus.

Because of white-nose syndrome, the northern long-eared bat is now a threatened species. Bruno Manunza/ZUMAPRESS

The US government is starting to care about bats. The kind of research needed to counteract white-nose syndrome can be extremely complicated and often costly. Organizations like the Nature Conservancy and bat expert Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation International have made funding available to study white-nose syndrome, but the disease is not going away anytime soon and there is always a worry about how sustainable such funding will be.

Luckily, the US government has also stepped in. At the end of last month, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it was giving another $2.5 million in grants for white-nose syndrome research. Since 2008, the agency has donated nearly $24 million to federal, state, and nongovernmental organizations to study and prevent the disease.

Researchers like Blehert and Maine also hope the new findings showing bats’ economic value will encourage support from spheres outside of wildlife conservation. “It’s not only ethical, but there is an economic incentive to conserve bats too,” Maine told me. “For a lot of people, this latter argument is really persuasive.”

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7 Fascinating Facts About Bats

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The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

by Jonatho39T Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mudslides stranded hundreds of motorists on Southern California’s main north-south highway Thursday evening after severe thunderstorms rocked the area. Cleanup crews worked through the night to plow and scoop up the mud, but meteorologists say that thanks to California’s historic drought, widespread wildfires, and a potentially historic El Niño, this disaster could be just a taste of what’s to come this winter.

The rain was part of a slow-moving storm system that passed through the Los Angeles area Thursday afternoon and battered the mountains to the north of the city in Kern County. The result: flash floods that sent mud and debris flowing down hillsides and onto Interstate 5, as well as onto a smaller state highway. I-5 has been cleared and is waiting final inspection to re-open, but hundreds of cars are still stuck on the state highway.

According to National Weather Service meteorologist Robbie Munroe, it’s too soon to be certain how much we can blame El Niño for the storm—El Niño tends to affect the frequency of storms more than their severity. But if it is the beginning of of a wave of El Niño-linked rainstorms, Californians should start bracing for more flooding and mudslides. There are two reasons for this:

Normally, plants and trees are what hold the soil together, says Munroe. But drought and wildfires have decimated plant life in many areas of California. So when heavy rain flows down slopes, it brings mud and debris along with it.

Second, the drought has dried out and hardened the ground. This can be especially dangerous on hillsides and in canyons like the ones surrounding the highways buried by Thursday’s storm. Instead of being absorbed into the soil, rainwater deflects off of it and continues careening down the hill, picking up velocity and washing out whatever is in its path.

Munroe says there is one potential upside to yesterday’s storm: Rainfall early in the season could loosen the soil and rejuvenate ground cover, hopefully mitigating the destruction caused by the weather that will arrive later this winter.

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The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

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The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

by MWITeddyzlcxpgq Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mudslides stranded hundreds of motorists on Southern California’s main north-south highway Thursday evening after severe thunderstorms rocked the area. Cleanup crews worked through the night to plow and scoop up the mud, but meteorologists say that thanks to California’s historic drought, widespread wildfires, and a potentially historic El Niño, this disaster could be just a taste of what’s to come this winter.

The rain was part of a slow-moving storm system that passed through the Los Angeles area Thursday afternoon and battered the mountains to the north of the city in Kern County. The result: flash floods that sent mud and debris flowing down hillsides and onto Interstate 5, as well as onto a smaller state highway. I-5 has been cleared and is waiting final inspection to re-open, but hundreds of cars are still stuck on the state highway.

According to National Weather Service meteorologist Robbie Munroe, it’s too soon to be certain how much we can blame El Niño for the storm—El Niño tends to affect the frequency of storms more than their severity. But if it is the beginning of of a wave of El Niño-linked rainstorms, Californians should start bracing for more flooding and mudslides. There are two reasons for this:

Normally, plants and trees are what hold the soil together, says Munroe. But drought and wildfires have decimated plant life in many areas of California. So when heavy rain flows down slopes, it brings mud and debris along with it.

Second, the drought has dried out and hardened the ground. This can be especially dangerous on hillsides and in canyons like the ones surrounding the highways buried by Thursday’s storm. Instead of being absorbed into the soil, rainwater deflects off of it and continues careening down the hill, picking up velocity and washing out whatever is in its path.

Munroe says there is one potential upside to yesterday’s storm: Rainfall early in the season could loosen the soil and rejuvenate ground cover, hopefully mitigating the destruction caused by the weather that will arrive later this winter.

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The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

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This Company Gave Away a Drug That Just Won the Nobel Prize and Helped Millions

by Adan051292979 Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, the Nobel committee awarded its renowned prize for medicine to the discoverers of two anti-parasitic drugs — one that fights malaria and one that treats two lesser-known devastating diseases.

The latter, ivermectin, treats lymphatic filariasis and river blindness, which are parasites that have plagued humans for centuries and currently threaten 1.35 billion people around the world. Developing drugs to treat infectious diseases and making them available to the often-impoverished people who need them is extremely difficult. But because of a breakthrough and an unprecedented move by one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, these diseases might soon be eradicated.

Satoshi Omura Kyodo/AP

Lymphatic filariasis, which can develop into a condition known as elaphantiasis, is a mosquito-transmitted worm that lodges in the lymphatic system, impairing it along with the victim’s immune system and kidneys. In the worst cases, the worm causes extreme swelling and disfigurement of tissue, limbs, and genital parts. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 40 million people, mostly in African and South Asian countries are incapacitated by the disease, and shunned because of their disfigurement.

Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, is a worm spread through the bite of a blackfly, which breeds in rivers. The parasite produces larvae that move through human tissue, causing sever itching and skin rashes, as well as eye lesions, which can lead to severe visual impairment. An estimated 270,000 people are currently blinded by the disease. The vast majority of people at-risk live in Africa, where it has taken a huge economic toll on rural communities, which have had to move away from rivers to less productive land in order to avoid the disease.

William Campbell Mary Schwalm/AP

In the late 1970s, Satoshi Omura, a scientist at the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo found a component of a soil-dwelling bacteria (that’s right, he literally found it in the dirt) called Streptomyces that was very effective at killing parasites. He then sent cultures of this bacteria to William Campbell in New Jersey who worked for Merck & Co., the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world. There, Campbell successfully developed a drug called ivermectin from a compound in the bacteria culture. The discovery was a huge pharmaceutical breakthrough and the drug was determined to be extremely safe for humans and easily distributed.

But, as with many infectious disease drugs, the vast majority of people who needed it lived in the developing world and could not afford it.

What happened next was unprecedented.

In 1987, Merck announced it would partner with the WHO and donate Mectizan, the drug’s brand name, to any country who requested it for as long as they needed it. Before this, no large pharmaceutical company had ever given away a drug they developed to eradicate a disease. At a news conference after Merck’s announcement, the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy said, “Merck’s gift to the World Health Organization is more than a medical breakthrough–it is truly a triumph of the human spirit.”

Since 1987, the Mectizan Donation Program has given out more than a billion treatments for onchoceriasis and lymphatic filariasis to people in 33 countries (in the late ’90s GlaxoSmithKline contributed another drug for lymphatic filariasis to the program). As a result, the transmission of onchoceriasis has been stopped in many countries. Last year Ecuador became the second affected country, after Colombia, to entirely eradicate the disease. Lymphatic filariasis cases have dramatically decreased, as well. The WHO forecasts that both diseases could be eliminated by 2020.

Omura and Campbell were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work.

The Nobel committee said ivermectin’s importance was “immeasurable” for the health of many in the world’s poorest regions.

“Treatment is so successful that these diseases are on the verge of eradication, which would be a major feat in the medical history of humankind,” the committee said.

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This Company Gave Away a Drug That Just Won the Nobel Prize and Helped Millions

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Why Can’t So Many Cancer Patients Get the Surgery They Need?

by JeannaFergusson Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into the development of new procedures and treatments for cancer: We now have more than 100 different drugs for the disease, and nearly 300 surgical procedures. However, these resources are not spread equally around the world. While 95 percent of global cancer spending occurs in the developed world, a majority of cancer cases and deaths occur in the low-to-middle-income countries, like India, Brazil, and nations in Eastern Europe.

A new study released today sheds light on this disparity. The report, published by the renowned British health journal The Lancet, found that while 80 percent of cancer cases require surgery, less than a quarter of people worldwide who need it will actually get safe, affordable, and timely procedures. Less than 5 percent of cancer patients in low-income countries will get it. According to the study, 2015 will see 15.2 million new cancer cases worldwide and 8.8 million cancer deaths—65 percent of those deaths will occur in the developing world, while 35 percent will occur in the developed world. (The authors did not list specific rates of surgery access in high-income countries, though they did note that in the developed world, “data from staffing and cancer outcomes suggest that cancer surgical needs in terms of human resources are mostly being met.”)

“In too many countries, we have found that the inverse care law dominates, whereby the availability of good surgical care for cancer varies inversely with the population need for it,” the study’s authors wrote.

In low-to-middle-income countries, even for those who do have surgery, cancer can still be financially devastating. The study found that a third of people who get procedures will face “financial catastrophe” and a quarter will stop their life-saving treatment because they cannot afford it.

How can we improve access to cancer treatment around the world? The report has several suggestions, from increasing basic surgery training, to investing more in cancer care where resources and infrastructure are lacking, to improving awareness about the importance of surgery to treat cancer (in addition to non-surgical treatments like chemotherapy).

But the biggest impediment to creating more equal access to cancer treatment, the study found, is the lack of universal health care. “Equity, shared responsibility, and quality cancer surgical delivery to patients, irrespective of ability to pay, are the goals of global cancer and global cancer surgery,” the study concluded. “This is only achieved via universal health coverage.”

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Why Can’t So Many Cancer Patients Get the Surgery They Need?

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Seattle Teacher Strike Is the Latest Front Line in America’s Public School Wars

by KelleeKarr3 Posted on September 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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UPDATE: Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 6 PM, P.S.T.: Nearly twelve hours after Seattle’s school district and teachers union bargaining team reached a tentative agreement, the union’s leadership and representative assembly voted to recommend its ratification and end the strike. School will start on Thursday for Seattle schools, but the strike won’t be officially over until Sunday, when the full union membership has a chance to vote on the contract agreement.

Seattle’s first teacher strike in 30 years appears to be nearing its end. After months of contract negotiations between the city’s school district and teachers union broke down, Seattle teachers unanimously voted to go on strike last Wednesday, shuttering the city’s schools for five days so far. Bargaining between the district and the teachers union resumed this weekend, and after negotiating through the night, the two sides reached a tentative agreement early this morning.

Neither the district nor the union has released details of the agreement, and teachers will continue picketing today until the Seattle Education Association’s leadership can review the proposed contract and make recommendations to its membership of 5,000 teachers, specialists, paraprofessionals, and administrative workers. Here’s what’s at stake, for teachers and students alike, in the first teacher strike in a major US city since Chicago’s 2012 strike.

Why are Seattle teachers on strike?

The conflict between striking teachers and the school district is in part about teachers’ salaries. Seattle teachers have not received cost-of-living raises in more than six years, despite Seattle’s skyrocketing rents. Many teachers, whose salaries range from $44,000 to more than $86,000, have struggled to afford life in the city. Furthermore, the district wants to increase the length of the school day by 20 minutes without adequately compensating teachers for the extra time, according to union negotiators.

But the union’s grievances extend beyond pay. It is also seeking to address racial and social inequality in Seattle schools by setting up equity teams to study achievement gaps and discipline trends in 60 of the district’s 97 schools. Recess has also became a sticking point: At some schools, students get as little as 15 minutes for lunch and recess, forcing them to choose between food and play. Schools with more low-income students and students of color tend to have less recess than wealthier, whiter ones. The union wants the contract to ensure that every elementary school student gets at least 30 minutes of time to play outside the classroom. Finally, capping the caseloads for school psychologists and specialists, like occupational and speech therapists, who are often disproportionately overworked at underprivileged schools, is another demand.

The union’s proposed contract also addresses over-testing by imposing limits on the number of tests students take and increasing teacher involvement in deciding which tests are given and how they are used. A recent Mother Jones investigation found that the average American student now takes 10 to 20 standardized tests a year.

How did the school district respond?

It initially threatened to bring legal action against the teachers, but finally decided not to. Before negotiations resumed, members of the district’s school board argued that while they would like to pay teachers more, they “simply do not have the funds.” They pointed to a statewide education funding crisis that led the state supreme court to hold the state legislature in contempt for failing to fund basic education for Washington’s children. The state Supreme Court is currently fining the legislature $100,000 a day for not fulfilling its constitutionally mandated responsibility to fund schools adequately. Washington is one of seven states without an income tax; many people point to this as the main reason that the state hasn’t been able to come up with the money. Meanwhile, the school district has been using a patchwork of local taxes to raise funds to pay teachers.

The district has also argued that students need more classroom time in order to meet state standards, noting that Seattle schools already have among the shortest school days in the state.

So is this really just the state’s fault?

The union recognizes that lack of state funding is part of the problem, but the they have accused the district of exaggerating how much money teachers are asking for. They argue that despite the state funding fiasco, the school district can make budget adjustments that prioritize teachers and use some of the nearly $40 million that the legislature was able to allocate to the district earlier this year to allow teachers to earn a higher wage.

The issues in the contract dispute are part of a larger national debate over education that’s been playing out in Seattle, too. On one side, local billionaires like Bill Gates have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to push Common Core standards and testing in order to create data-driven ways to evaluate teachers and students. On the other side, teachers in Seattle and elsewhere have pushed back against overtesting, saying standardized tests are expensive, take up valuable class time, and measure racial and socioeconomic inequality better than aptitude.

Is this related to the state supreme court’s charter school ruling?

Last week, the state supreme court ruled that charter schools were unconstitutional because they use public funds without oversight from an elected governing board. This news is not directly related to the teacher strike, but many critics of using public money for charter schools, which were first made legal in Washington by a 2012 referendum, also oppose Common Core standards. And many Common Core advocates, including Gates, have also helped bring charter schools to Seattle. One charter school opened in Washington last year, and eight more were slated to open this school year, but their future is now uncertain.

What’s next?

Until union leadership reviews the tentative agreement and its members’ representatives are able to vote on the proposed contract, teachers will continue to picket and schools will continue to stay closed. If the contract is approved, schools could open their doors on Thursday, but there is still a chance it will be voted down. We will update this post as new details emerge.

This post has been updated.

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Seattle Teacher Strike Is the Latest Front Line in America’s Public School Wars

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