Tag Archives: academy

At the SAGs, It’s All About the Bragging

by NOPWallace Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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The folks at the Screen Actors Guild sure do seem pleased with themselves:

Idris Elba…summed up the tone of the evening onstage with this play on words: “Welcome to diverse TV.”

The talk of the evening, onstage and behind the scenes, was the show’s strong display of inclusiveness….Laura Prepon…“This is what we talk about when we talk about diversity.”…Viola Davis…“They won because the actors have craft, they have a level of excellence that reaches people.”…Uzo Aduba…“It’s amazing to see actors have the opportunity to celebrate other actors’ work and to feel empowered by the voting process so they can see whatever actor they want reflected up there.”

….From the outset, the show made a point of presenting the diversity of its membership and nominees. The ceremony opened with several actors — Rami Malek, Queen Latifah, Jeffrey Tambor, Anna Chlumsky, Kunal Nayyar — talking about what it means to be in their profession.

SAG Awards Committee Chair JoBeth Williams said the actor-focused awards show has “worked very hard to reflect the real world.” Williams noted its roster of presenters and nominees as proof of that.

OK, two things. First, these guys sound a lot less interested in diversity than in bragging about their nobility and getting in some digs at the Oscars. Second, I’d be a lot more impressed by their crowing if they had a better record of honoring black actors. The only reasonable comparison with the Academy Awards is in the solo film acting awards, and the chart on the right tells the story. In the past decade, 9 percent of all Oscar acting nominations have gone to black actors. For SAG, it’s a whopping 10 percent. In the past two years, there have been no black actors nominated for Oscars and a grand total of 1 for a SAG. The SAGs are doing better, but they probably shouldn’t sprain their arms patting themselves on the back for their performance.

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At the SAGs, It’s All About the Bragging

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

by CarmellCvf Posted on January 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has taken a lot of heat lately for its failure to nominate any actors of color for the Oscars, two years running. But race may not be Hollywood’s biggest diversity problem.

The number of women directing big-budget films and TV series is stunningly low. Only 9 percent of the directors of last year’s 250 top-grossing movies were female, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. And women accounted for just 12 percent of the directors on more than 225 shows on prime-time TV and Netflix during the 2014-15 season.

The numbers are even more depressing for women of color. Black women directed just 2 of the 500 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2012, according to a study by the Women’s Media Center. Women of color directed only 3 percent of TV episodes during the 2014-15 season, notes a report from the Directors Guild of America.

The numbers aren’t improving, either. The share of big-budget directorial jobs going to women was lower last year than it was 15 years earlier, when it peaked. The TV numbers have been stagnant in recent years. “Women’s underemployment has simply not been perceived by many executives as a problem,” says Martha Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, who has been gathering data on the topic for nearly two decades. “As a result, little meaningful action has been taken to correct the gender imbalance.”

The shunning of female directors is so rampant that the feds have gotten involved. In October, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, began interviewing female directors so that “we may learn more about the gender-related issues” they face. The probe came after the American Civil Liberties Union called on the EEOC to investigate the film industry’s systemic failure to hire women directors. The agency contacted at least 50 women in October, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In an email, an EEOC representative acknowledged that the agency has “had further discussions” with the ACLU about its data and conclusions, but she said she could not comment on any investigation—or even confirm whether one exists. The EEOC, she wrote, encourages the industry to “publicly address the serious issues raised by the ACLU.”

Part of the problem, female directors told the ACLU, is that male producers often make hiring decisions based on tired stereotypes. Women said they were steered toward romantic comedies and “women-oriented” movies, while the most lucrative, action-driven films went almost exclusively to men. Female TV directors said they were offered shows for women and commercials for “girl” products while being overlooked for car commercials or other types of shows.

What’s more, Hollywood producers, who are overwhelmingly male, will often pick directors from short lists that contain few women, or through word of mouth. Women who haven’t yet directed a major project often end up on the sidelines.

Hiring more female directors could be key to improving Hollywood’s gender imbalance. When women are in charge, Lauzen found, the number of women employed behind the scenes increases considerably: On high-grossing films directed by men in 2015, women made up 10 percent of writers, 19 percent of editors, and 10 percent of cinematographers. When a woman was the director, female representation on the crew increased to 53 percent of writers, 32 percent of editors, and 12 percent of cinematographers.

At stake in all of this, Lauzen explains, is how women are represented on-screen. “People tend to create what they know. Having lived their lives as males, men tend to create male characters,” she says. “If women comprised a larger percentage of film directors, we would see more female characters, particularly as protagonists, onscreen, and we would see more fully developed, multidimensional females.” In another study, Lauzen found that women accounted for just 4 percent of protagonists in films with exclusively male directors or writers. But when at least one woman was writing or directing, nearly 40 percent of the protagonists were female.

TV is way ahead of the film industry on that front—think Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, How to Get Away With Murder’s Annalise Keating, or Jane Villanueva of Jane the Virgin. As X-Files star Gillian Anderson (who says she was initially offered about half of David Duchovny’s salary to reprise her role as Dana Scully) recently put it to Mother Jones: “Television isn’t the issue. There are a lot of female characters on TV who are intelligent, and a good enough portion of them aren’t all about the date and the car and the plastic surgery. It’s in film that it’s lacking…I think there’s a lot of female directors out there—I just don’t think their material gets made. Studios don’t believe they’ll have an audience if women make it. A lot of female directors can’t pay somebody to hire them.”

The Directors Guild’s current agreement with film and TV studios has no quotas for women but asks employers to “make good faith efforts to increase the number of working” women and minority directors. Last May, the Guild’s Women’s Steering Committee considered altering the agreement to treat women and ethnic minorities as separate diversity categories. Supporters of the change felt that it would create more opportunities for women—particularly women of color, who would qualify for both pools. The idea never made it out of committee.

But since the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission got involved in October, there has been some movement within the industry. Two weeks after the agency started its probe, several dozens of Hollywood’s leading CEOs, producers, writers, and directors met privately to discuss solutions to their industry’s gender problem. Among the ideas discussed were introducing “unconscious bias” training across the industry, creating more recruitment programs to identify and hire talented women directors, and rewarding studios that show a commitment to achieving gender parity in hiring.

Gillian Thomas, an attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, says that while an investigation as expansive as this one will take time, she thinks it will ultimately produce results. “I think women in male industries is a priority of the agency’s,” she says. “So I have faith in the process working.”

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

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#OscarsSoWhite Is Targeting Precisely the Wrong Thing

by NiamhMatthias Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Caroline Framke argues that the #OscarsSoWhite movement is targeting the wrong part of Hollywood:

Ever since the Oscar nominations were announced and it became clear that talk of supporting diversity did not translate into tangible recognition, white actors have contributed astonishingly tone-deaf thoughts in droves….But even as these actors make gaffes about the lack of racial diversity in Hollywood, there are countless producers, agents, directors, and executives who aren’t getting the same kind of grilling — and they’re the ones who most stand a chance of making real change.

….The lion’s share of real power in Hollywood lies with its behind-the-scenes players. Producers, agents, and directors rarely have the glossy profiles, red carpet looks, or motivation to keep us interested in their day-to-day lives. Thus, they can operate in a publicity vacuum more than those making a living onscreen. When something like #OscarsSoWhite breaks, they’re usually not the ones sitting on folding chairs at press junkets and putting their words on the record.

Framke is right, but you don’t even need to stray this far to make her point. The chart on the right tells you everything you need to know. As I mentioned the other day, the acting categories at the Academy Awards are actually pretty diverse: the number of black nominees has gone up steadily and reached 9 percent during the last decade. That’s not bad. The songwriting category is even better: 14 percent of all nominees have been black over the past decade.

But everywhere else it’s a wasteland: less than 1 percent of all nominees in every other category combined have been black.1 If I bothered looking through the technical awards, the percentage would be even lower.

This is hardly a big Hollywood secret. And it makes Framke even more right: we should leave the actors alone. Hollywood actually does a decent job of making sure the face of the industry is fairly diverse. But dig an inch below the surface and black faces are all but nonexistent.

1I didn’t include two categories: Best Picture, because the winner is usually a team of producers; and Best Foreign Language Film, since by definition none of the winners are African-American. For the record, five African-Americans have been nominated as part of a group for Best Picture over the past decade.

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#OscarsSoWhite Is Targeting Precisely the Wrong Thing

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Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

by cazaresighisoaraieftina Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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The chart on the right comes from Heterodox Academy, a group founded a few months ago to promote more ideological diversity on university campuses. What it shows is unsurprising: over the past few decades, university faculties have become almost entirely liberal. And this is for all university faculty. According to HA, humanities and social science faculty are closer to 95 percent liberal.

Why? Paul Krugman thinks it’s because conservatives went nuts starting in the 80s, so nobody with any intelligence and genuine curiosity wants to associate with them anymore. Michael Strain suggests that it might be because faculties actively discriminate against conservative job candidates. This argument has been going on forever, and there are a few basic points of view:

Undergrads, especially in the humanities, are mostly liberal, which means that PhD program fill up with liberals. Conservatives just aren’t interested in the liberal arts these days, so there are very few to choose from when it comes time to hire new faculty.
Being exposed to graduate work in the humanities converts a lot of people to liberalism.
Liberal arts departments consider conservative views inherently racist/sexist/etc. and are loath to hire anyone who promotes conservative views.

Needless to say, all of these interact with each other, and more than one may be right. But here’s what I don’t get: why the endless argument? These all seem like eminently testable hypotheses:

Are undergraduate liberal arts departments predominantly filled with liberal students?
Are conservatives not much interested in the liberal arts these days? Why?
How many conservatives apply to grad programs in the liberal arts? How many are accepted?
How much do views change while in grad school?
How many conservatives end up getting PhDs in the liberal arts?
Of those, how many get tenure-track jobs?

If, say, 95 percent of job candidates are liberal, then there’s probably no discrimination. Conservatives are being hired in proportion to their numbers. If conservatives generally don’t major in the liberal arts as undergrads, then probably PhD programs aren’t discriminating either. Etc. These all seem like fairly answerable questions.

Most likely, there’s a vicious circle involved. As the American right became more conservative while the liberals arts became (say) modestly more liberal, it would make sense if conservatives just didn’t feel like joining up. This naturally produced a more left-leaning liberal arts faculty, rinse and repeat. Eventually you end up at 95 percent.

But why guess? Can’t these questions at least be suggestively answered?

For what it’s worth, I agree that it’s a problem regardless of how it happened. It’s easy for liberals to see the conservative bubble when we talk about Fox News or talk radio, and we immediately understand why it’s bad: it makes people lazy and unwilling to question their basic beliefs. We don’t see this so clearly when it’s our own bubble, but we should. Bubbles are bubbles, and ours are no better than theirs.

And now to end on a griping note: I would be a lot more sympathetic to conservative complaints about the academy if they showed an equal concern about fields that lean heavily conservative (big business, the military, etc.). For some reason, though, that never seems to strike them as a problem. Why?

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Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

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The Supreme Court Just Got Deluged With Arguments Against Texas’ Stupid Anti-Abortion Law

by KraigHailey3 Posted on January 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, a wide-ranging group of organizations and individuals asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Texas anti-abortion law that threatens to close the majority of clinics in the state. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for the case in March and make a decision this summer.

The groups, which included medical professionals, legal experts, economists, religious organizations, the Obama administration, and more than 160 members of Congress, filed 45 briefs explaining their opposition to HB 2, the sweeping 2013 anti-abortion law that has been caught up in legal battles ever since it was passed. More than half of the state’s 41 clinics have closed as a result of the law. If the Supreme Court does not overturn HB 2, the number of clinics in the state could drop to just 10.

“For many women in Texas, HB 2 would create a legal regime in which a real choice about whether to carry a pregnancy to full term ‘exists in theory but not in fact,” argued attorneys at the Department of Justice in a brief, adding that the restrictions imposed by the law “do not serve—in fact, they disserve—the government’s interest in protecting women’s health.”

Both abortion rights opponents and advocates say the case will affect existing restrictions on abortion across the country and will also determine to what extent states can restrict abortion. The case, Whole Women’s Health v. Cole focuses on two aspects of HB 2: one that requires abortion facilities to meet hospital-like architectural standards, and another requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges with a nearby hospital.

“There is incontrovertible evidence that imposing these unjustified burdens on abortion providers is impeding women’s access to quality, evidence-based medicine,” wrote a number of the leading physician’s organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in their brief. “HB 2 has delayed, and in some cases blocked, women’s access to legal abortion. Both outcomes jeopardize women’s health.”

The 45 briefs filed on Tuesday were an unprecedented demonstration of opposition to anti-abortion laws, according to Nancy Northrup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

“Never before has such a diverse array of organizations and leaders from the fields of medicine, government, law, business, and religion stepped forward to condemn abortion restrictions at the US Supreme Court,” Northrup told reporters. “These briefs present a thorough record of the undeniable damage Texas’ sham law has and will continue to cause, and an indisputable legal argument for why it must be struck down. This deceptive law is an affront to science-based medicine, an insult to women’s dignity, and reflects a total disregard for the rule of law and the rights of millions.”

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The Supreme Court Just Got Deluged With Arguments Against Texas’ Stupid Anti-Abortion Law

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A Third of American Kids Will Eat Fast Food Today

by JerryStull Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Every day, more than a third of children in the United States eat fast food. A new report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention also showed that teens eat twice as much fast food as younger children; on average, 17 percent of teens’ daily calories come from fast food.

Fast food consumption among children grew between 1994 and 2006, rising from 10 percent to 13 percent. The new report, which used data from the CDC’s 2011-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, shows only a slight decrease—overall, kids ages 2 to 19 consume 12 percent of their calories from fast food. Surprisingly, these numbers weren’t different across socioeconomic status, gender, or weight.

Percentage of children and adolescents aged 2–19 years who consumed fast food on a given day, by calories consumed: United States, 2011–2012 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Over the last 30 years, childhood obesity in the United States has more than doubled. Between 1980 and 2012 the number of kids considered obese increased from 7 percent to 18 percent and the number of teens during that same period quadrupled.

In an interview with USA Today, Sandra Hassink, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, pointed to fast food ads geared toward kids as a main factor in the soaring obesity rates. Indeed, as my colleague Kiera Butler wrote earlier this year, McDonald’s, in an effort to revive its flagging sales, is marketing inside schools:

Over at Civil Eats, school food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel explained in December that McDonald’s targeting of kids is no accident. Rather, it’s part of the company’s strategy to revive its flagging sales. In a December conference call, Siegel reported, McDonald’s then-CEO Don Thompson and the company’s US President Mike Andres told investors that the company has “got to be in the schools. When you look at the performance relative to peers of the operators whose restaurants are part of the community–it’s significant.”

Hassink also noted that diet-related diseases, like type-2 diabetes, are affecting Americans at much younger ages than they used to. (In fact, the youngest type-2 diabetes patient on record, a three-year-old girl, was recently diagnosed.) This, said Hassink, should be cause for concern:

“Childhood is not a place where you can say, ‘Let everyone eat what they want and we can fix it later.’ “Hassink said parents should remember that daily choices about food can contribute to long-term chronic disease. “Health doesn’t happen by accident,” she said.

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A Third of American Kids Will Eat Fast Food Today

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The “secret science committee” behind the pope’s encyclical

by Chana6228ztgwm Posted on June 19, 2015

The “secret science committee” behind the pope’s encyclical

By on 19 Jun 2015commentsShare

Sick of hearing about the pope’s encyclical? How about the “400-year-old collective […] that operates as the pope’s eyes and ears on the natural world,” a.k.a. the “secret science committee” behind that encyclical?

Didn’t think so. Here’s the scoop from Bloomberg:

The Pontifical Academy has about 80 members, all of them appointed for life. Scientists hail from many nations, religions, and disciplines, which today include astronomy, biochemistry, physics, and mathematics. Members pursue the scientific issues they deem most important to society, without Vatican interference. Unlike the National Academy of Sciences, which is financially independent from the U.S., the Pontifical Academy relies on the Vatican to keep the lights on.

The full academy meets every two years and is often granted an audience from the pope. In the stretches between the biannual sessions, scientists hold workshops and produce reports on whichever topics they agree are most important for the pope to understand.

And they’ve been worried about climate change for quite some time:

Academy events have addressed the basics of climate change going back at least to October 1980. That’s when Italian physicist Giampietro Puppi addressed the academy during a weeklong workshop on energy.

“The introduction into the atmosphere of an additional amount of particulates and gas, as a result of fuel burning,” said Puppi, an academy member from 1978 until his death, in 2006, “represents in the medium term, decades to centuries, the most important issue and the one of greatest concern on a global scale.”

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been a member of the academy since 2004. He told Bloomberg that the group is completely secular: “Not all of them even believe in a god. They are there for pure scientific excellence, and they are not co-opted by any country. They’re not co-opted by the United Nations.”

In April, the academy invited religious leaders from all over — Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and other Christians — to the Vatican for a symposium on climate change. Here’s more from Bloomberg:

They heard from Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who popularized the notion that human industry has shoved the world into a new geological phase — the “anthropocene,” or in plainspeak, “the human age.”

And they heard Jeffrey Sachs, prolific writer and Columbia University economist, say that “we can still, but just barely,” avoid pollution levels that lead to dangerous climate change risk.

But the pope doesn’t necessarily take advice from the committee, Werner Arber, a Nobel-winning molecular biologist and the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, told Bloomberg. If he doesn’t “appreciate” their work, he’s free to pretty much ignore it.

In an email to Bloomberg, British astronomer Martin Rees, who has been on the committee since 1990, wrote that “the Vatican is as opaque to me as to you!” But he added that this encyclical is encouraging — it could have an impact in the developing world and “maybe also in your Republican Party.”

Yeesh. That’s embarrassing. And also, unfortunately, pretty wishful thinking.

Source:
Behind the Scenes With the Pope’s Secret Science Committee

, Bloomberg Business.

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The “secret science committee” behind the pope’s encyclical

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Why are we building a research center full of deadly diseases in the tornado capital of the world?

by HiramWhittell Posted on June 18, 2015

The United States eradicated foot-and-mouth disease from its borders in 1929. The virus, deadly to livestock, persists in more than 100 countries, though, and travels with ease. It is able to hitchhike on shoes, clothes, and tires. Airborne, it can travel almost 40 miles overland and almost 190 over open ocean. …

If the foot-and-mouth virus—or any other airborne danger—escaped from the lab, the air currents would likely carry it beyond where it could cause harm. An out-of-the-way location makes sense because no lab is risk free. In 2007, for instance, the foot-and-mouth virus escaped from Great Britain’s Pirbright Institute, one of the world’s leading laboratories studying animal disease, and set off an outbreak at a nearby farm.

So it is absolutely mind-boggling that Homeland Security has decided to move the lab, to be known as the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, to the Kansas State University campus in Manhattan, Kansas, smack in the middle of cattle country and Tornado Alley. Builders recently broke ground on the brand-new $1.25 billion dollar facility, which is set to be fully operational in 2022. It will include a biosafety level 4 lab, meaning one designed to handle deadly and exotic pathogens for which no vaccines or treatments exist. …

In 2010, the National Academy of Sciences conducted a risk assessment of Homeland Security’s first proposal for the Kansas lab and found a 70 percent probability that a foot-and-mouth virus release resulting in an outbreak would occur over the facility’s 50-year life span. In 2012, the National Research Council evaluated Homeland Security’s revised proposal and found considerable improvements in lab construction design that lowered the 50-year risk to below 1 percent, but this extremely low probability of accidental viral release was based on Homeland Security’s unsupported, overly optimistic estimates of human error rates.

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Why are we building a research center full of deadly diseases in the tornado capital of the world?

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Exclusive: The CIA Is Shuttering a Secretive Climate Research Program

by Amy R. Eddy Posted on May 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, when President Barack Obama spoke at the US Coast Guard Academy’s commencement ceremony, he called climate change “an immediate risk to our national security.” In recent months, the Obama administration has repeatedly highlighted the international threats posed by global warming and has emphasized the need for the country’s national security agencies to study and confront the issue.

So some national security experts were surprised to learn that an important component of that effort has been ended. A CIA spokesperson confirmed to Climate Desk that the agency is shuttering its main climate research program. Under the program, known as Medea, the CIA had allowed civilian scientists to access classified data—such as ocean temperature and tidal readings gathered by Navy submarines and topography data collected by spy satellites—in an effort to glean insights about how global warming could create security threats around the world. In theory, the program benefited both sides: Scientists could study environmental data that was much higher-resolution than they would normally have access to, and the CIA received research insights about climate-related threats.

But now, the program has come to a close.

“Under the Medea program to examine the implications of climate change, CIA participated in various projects,” a CIA spokesperson explained in a statement. “These projects have been completed and CIA will employ these research results and engage external experts as it continues to evaluate the national security implications of climate change.”

The program was originally launched in 1992 during the George H.W. Bush administration and was later shut down during President George W. Bush’s term. It was re-launched under the Obama administration in 2010, with the aim of providing security clearances to roughly 60 climate scientists. Those scientists were given access to classified information that could be useful for researching global warming and tracking environmental changes that could have national security implications. Data gathered by the military and intelligence agencies is often of much higher quality than what civilian scientists normally work with.

In some cases, that data could then be declassified and published, although Francesco Femia, co-director of the Center for Climate and Security, said it is usually impossible to know whether any particular study includes data from Medea. “You wouldn’t see Medea referenced anywhere” in a peer-reviewed paper, he said. But he pointed to the CIA’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, which includes multiple references to climate change, as a probable Medea product, where the CIA likely partnered with civilian scientists to analyze classified data.

With the closure of the program, it remains unclear how much of this sort of data will remain off-limits to climate scientists. The CIA did not respond to questions about what is currently being done with the data that would have been available under the program.

Marc Levy, a Columbia University political scientist, said he was surprised to learn that Medea had been shut down. “The climate problems are getting worse in a way that our data systems are not equipped to handle,” said Levy, who was not a participant in the CIA program but has worked closely with the US intelligence community on climate issues since the 1990s. “There’s a growing gap between what we can currently get our hands on, and what we need to respond better. So that’s inconsistent with the idea that Medea has run out of useful things to do.”

The program had some notable successes. During the Clinton administration, Levy said, it gave researchers access to classified data on sea ice measurements taken by submarines, an invaluable resource for scientists studying climate change at the poles. And last fall, NASA released a trove of high-resolution satellite elevation maps that can be used to project the impacts of flooding. But Levy said the Defense Department possesses even higher-quality satellite maps that have not been released.

Still, it’s possible Medea had outlived its useful life, said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a 23-year veteran of the CIA who had first-hand knowledge of the program before leaving the agency in 2009. He said he was not surprised to see Medea close down.

“In my judgment, the CIA is not the best lead agency for the issue; the agency’s ‘in-box’ is already overflowing with today’s threats and challenges,” he said via email. “CIA has little strategic planning reserves, relatively speaking, and its overseas presence is heavily action-oriented.”

Over the past several years, climate change has gained prominence among defense experts, many of whom see it as a “threat multiplier” that can exacerbate crises such as infectious disease and terrorism. Medea had been part of a larger network of climate-related initiatives across the national security community. Medea’s closure notwithstanding, that network appears to be growing. Last fall, Obama issued an executive order calling on federal agencies to collaborate on developing and sharing climate data and making it accessible to the public.

But the CIA’s work on climate change has drawn heavy fire from a group of congressional Republicans led by Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.). Barrasso said last year that he believes that “the climate is constantly changing” and that “the role human activity plays is not known.” He recently authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he listed the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere as “greater challenges” than climate change. (The Syrian civil war, however, was likely worsened by climate change.)

Around the time Medea was re-instated by the Obama administration, the CIA formed a new office to oversee climate efforts called the Center for Climate Change. At the time, Barrasso said the spy agency “should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs.” That office was closed in 2012 (the agency wouldn’t say why), leaving Medea as the CIA’s main climate research program.

So does the conclusion of Medea signal that the CIA is throwing in the towel on climate altogether? Unlikely, according to Femia. At this point, he said, US security agencies, including the CIA, are still sorting out what resources they can best offer in the effort to adapt to climate change. Regardless of whether the CIA is facilitating civilian research, he said, “continuing to integrate climate change information into its assessments of both unstable and stable regions of the world will be critical.”

“Otherwise,” added Femia, “we will have a blind spot that prevents us from adequately protecting the United States.”

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Exclusive: The CIA Is Shuttering a Secretive Climate Research Program

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Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

by SergioBPFL Posted on May 19, 2015

Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

By on 19 May 2015commentsShare

You know how sometimes humans freak out about genetic engineering? It’s time to freak out again! Except this time it’s a good thing: Scientists are figuring out how to use new gene-editing technologies to eliminate antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

The Tel Aviv-based researchers, whose work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science yesterday, used a new method of gene therapy called CRISPR to selectively slash the DNA of an antibiotic-resistant strain of E. coli. The method uses a virus as its vector to infect the bacteria’s cells (it doesn’t affect human cells at all) and target the exact sequence of genetic base-pairs that confers antibiotic resistance. When it locates that sequence, the virus latches on and excises the offending gene with surgical precision. With the one-two punch of CRISPR and conventional antibiotics, even the toughest infections might soon be easily mopped up.

It’s worth repeating that when it comes to GMO panic, some of that fear is founded while some is a knee-jerk uneasiness with anything that seems “unnatural” — and all of it is a little confused. As Grist’s Nathanael Johnson has pointed out, genetic engineering is a tool, and like any tool — a shovel, a gun, a Facebook post — it can be used for good things or bad ones or just scary sci-fi stuff that we don’t know enough about to start Frankenstein-ing around with.

I happen to believe eliminating antibiotic-resistant infections that infect 2 million people a year would be a very good thing indeed.

Source:
This New Gene Editing Technique Could Turn The Tide on Antibiotic Resistance

, Motherboard.

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Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

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