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Sorry, leaves — we figured out a way to do photosynthesis better than you

by NeilR53gqo Posted on June 7, 2016

Sorry, leaves — we figured out a way to do photosynthesis better than you

By on Jun 6, 2016Share

Trees, be warned: the process of photosynthesis — once the exclusive domain of nature — has just been not only co-opted but upgraded by Harvard scientists.

The team, lead by professor of energy Daniel Nocera, has created a new-and-improved version of a system that converts solar energy into fuel at a rate 10 times more efficient than the fastest-growing plants. It is called the “Bionic Leaf 2.0.”

The “leaf” uses solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, explains Nocera. Engineered microbes eat the hydrogen to convert carbon dioxide into liquid fuel for transportation or conversion into more mainstream fuels.

In 2015, Nocera and Pamela Silver, professor of biochemistry and systems biology at Harvard Medical School, debuted the first bionic leaf. Though it successfully converted sunlight into liquid fuel (aka isopropanol, for you nerds out there), that version used a hydrogen-making catalyst that also ended up screwing with the microbes’ DNA. The result: a much less impressive conversion rate of CO2 to energy.

“[The Bionic Leaf 2.0] is an important discovery,” Nocera said in a press release. “It says we can do better than photosynthesis.”

So much better, in fact, that the team believes that its new invention can already be considered for commercial use. Nocera plans to look for ways to use it in developing countries as a cheap source of clean energy.

A future full of robot trees that create fuel for everyone? Doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world.

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Sorry, leaves — we figured out a way to do photosynthesis better than you

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Report: School Suspensions Are Costing Taxpayers Billions

by DeweyHanlon23 Posted on June 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Suspend a student early in his high school career, and taxpayers could pay the price for years to come.

According to a study released Thursday by the University of California-Los Angeles, the suspensions of 10th graders across the United States in the 2001-02 school year prompted an estimated 68,000 students to eventually drop out of school. Those dropouts, researchers say, cost Americans some $11 billion in lost tax revenue and $35.6 billion in broader social costs—such as health care costs, job loss, and potential earnings—over the course of a lifetime.

UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies

The study’s co-authors—UC-Santa Barbara professor emeritus Russell Rumberger and Daniel Losen, director of UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies—calculated those costs by first looking at how likely students were to drop out after receiving a suspension. They compared graduation rates of 10th graders who’d been suspended in their first semester with graduation rates of those who hadn’t been suspended; they then controlled for factors such as family income and parents’ educational attainment. Later, the researchers determined the financial impact of those departures based on a previous cost analysis by a Queens College professor named Clive Belfield.

Nationally, suspension rates have generally been on the upswing since the 1970s, particularly for children of color. Since 2013, the report notes, many large districts have reduced the number of suspensions handed out. Black students, who made up 16 percent of the overall public school population in the 2011-12 school year, received at least 32 percent of suspensions that year. Overall, 3.5 million students were suspended by US public schools in the 2011-12 school year.

UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies

Researchers argue that by reducing the national suspension rate by just 1 percent—perhaps via alternatives to traditional discipline—we could save up to $2.23 billion in social costs. Losen described the figures as “conservative,” noting the costs associated with suspensions could be far steeper—at least $100 billion—if multiple graduating classes were taken into account. “We’re feeling the costs of kids,” he says, “who were suspended 20 years ago.”

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Report: School Suspensions Are Costing Taxpayers Billions

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The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

by WallyLUDCfn Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Roots miniseries that aired back in 1977 had the largest black cast in the history of commercial television—and the biggest audience numbers, too. It drew more than 100 million viewers in the United States, and millions more internationally. This unprecedented success seemed to herald new possibilities for black employment in television and film, and optimism that more black-themed shows would cross over to white audiences. But nearly four decades later—think #OscarsSoWhite—that dream remains unfilled. With History’s Roots remake now making headlines, it’s useful to look to the original series as a cautionary tale on the pace of progress in Hollywood.

Roots failed to change the racial dynamics of the industry primarily because Hollywood executives perceived it as a unique black story they could pitch to white audiences. In discussing the casting, the creators emphasized that Roots would have to appeal to whites to succeed commercially. Alex Haley’s best-selling book, the basis for the saga, contained no major white characters—but that was never seriously considered as an option for television.

Producer David Wolper argued that hiring white “television names” was the only way to ensure that Roots wouldn’t be marginalized. “If people perceive Roots to be a black history show—nobody is going to watch it,” he said. “If they say, ‘Let me see, there are no names in it, a lot of black actors and there are no whites’…It looks like it’s going to be a black journal—it’s all going to be blacks telling about their history.”

Wolper, whose son Mark produced the new Roots, was a white TV veteran who had pitched and developed programs for two decades before Roots came along. He understood as well as anyone the logic of race and demographics that governed Hollywood in that era. For Wolper and for ABC, it was simple arithmetic. “Remember, the television audience is only 10 percent black and 90 percent white,” Wolper said following Roots‘ record-breaking run. “So if we do the show for blacks and only every black in America watches, it is a disaster—a total disaster.”

Roots was successful in many ways. It sparked a national conversation about race and slavery. It helped legitimize the miniseries format and begat several follow-up projects—Roots: The Next Generation (1979), Roots: The Gift (1988), and Alex Haley’s Queen (1993). It also paved the way for unrelated miniseries such as Holocaust (1978), The Thorn Birds (1983), and Winds of War (1983). It made ABC (and Doubleday books) a ton of money to boot. But what Roots didn’t do was persuade the suits to greenlight more shows with black leads.

Roots‘ black cast members felt this failure acutely. “We were so fabulous I thought we would have jobs up the wazoo,” Leslie Uggams, who played Kizzy, told Wendy Williams in 2013. “And there were no jobs. I didn’t get another job until two years later when I did a show called Back Stairs at the White House. We were very disappointed, because we had all these accolades; it was like we did our quota, and now that’s it for the rest of time.” Lynne Moody, who portrayed Alex Haley’s great-great-grandmother in the original, said she “thought Roots would skyrocket me,” but when those acting jobs failed to materialize, “I felt the color of my skin” and fell into a “deep depression.”

When an interviewer asked John Amos, the actor who portrayed the grown-up Kunta Kinte, whether he’d reaped any rewards from Roots, Amos joked, “Yeah, the unemployment office.” Even David Wolper conceded that Roots‘ success had limits. “I don’t think it changed race relations,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “I think for a moment it had an impact. Did it help African American actors? No. A lot of them couldn’t get work even after Roots came on. Did more stories about African Americans show on television? No.”

The new series plays out, of course, in a very different cultural landscape. The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn national attention to the mistreatment of African Americans by the police. And the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign called out the problematic lack of color in Hollywood’s production pipeline with help from watchdogs like UCLA’s Bunche Center, whose annual “Hollywood Diversity Report” compiles data showing how people of color are underrepresented as actors, directors, and writers in film and television.

America is far more racially and ethnically diverse today than it was in 1977, but Hollywood has been slow to catch up, particularly at the cineplex. And while the success of recent black-led television shows, including How to Get Away With Murder, Blackish, Empire, and Underground, is a hopeful sign, there’s no guarantee this trend will continue.

If Roots proved anything, it’s that high ratings aren’t enough. There have to be more people of color (and women, for that matter) in the writer’s room, behind the camera, and, crucially, in positions of power at the studios and talent agencies that determine what America watches. The Roots remake, though well worth watching, is an apt reminder that the road to equal opportunity is a long one.

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The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

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No, Hillary Clinton Isn’t Being Attacked for Being "Not Qualified"

by AidenBenes01 Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, Janell Ross interviewed a couple of experts in gender and politics to get their take on whether Hillary Clinton is held to a different standard than male candidates. Julie Dolan, a professor of political science at Macalester College in Minnesota, had this to say:

Clinton is the most experienced candidate in the field, but campaign rivals Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are leveling attacks against her that she’s not qualified for the job. In doing so, they’re playing into a long-standing narrative that women lack what it takes to succeed in the male-dominated world of politics. The fact that two less-experienced male candidates are leveling this attack against her is telling. Neither Trump nor Sanders feels compelled to shore up their own credentials or justify their own relative lack of experience because they don’t need to; they benefit from a gendered double standard where men are automatically presumed qualified for public office and women are not.

This illustrates the problem of viewing politics through too narrow a lens. For starters, Hillary Clinton isn’t the most experienced candidate in the field. Bernie Sanders has served in Congress since 1991. That’s more experience than Hillary even if you count her years as First Lady. And while Trump has no political experience, he’s running on his business background—just as lots of other candidates have. This year alone Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson joined Trump in the Republican primary as candidates with no political experience at all.

Nor is it true that Hillary’s opponents have been slamming her for being unqualified—aside from the usual sense in which political candidates always claim to be better qualified than their opponents. There was a single incident in April where Hillary tiptoed a bit around the question of whether Bernie was qualified, which led to a misleading Washington Post headline (“Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president”), which in turn led to Bernie losing his temper and kinda sorta saying she’s not qualified if she’s taking lots of money from Wall Street. But even there, Bernie was pretty obviously using “unqualified” in the sense of “bad policies,” not in the sense of having too little experience.

As for Trump, again, there was a single incident a couple of weeks ago in which Hillary called him unqualified, and he naturally hit back in his usual nanner-nanner way: calling her judgment bad and saying she’s the one not qualified to be president. Just the usual Trump bluster.

Hillary Clinton simply isn’t the target of an unusual number of attacks on her experience and qualification. She’s rather famously running on the fact that she has more of those qualities than anyone else in the race, and no one has really disputed that. Quite the contrary: this year, having a lot of experience is something of a problem, one that both Sanders and Trump have capitalized on. If Hillary Clinton is being slammed for anything, it’s for being too qualified, not the opposite.

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No, Hillary Clinton Isn’t Being Attacked for Being "Not Qualified"

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Donald Trump and the Men’s Rights Movement: It’s Complicated

by DanStringfield Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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At a Trump campaign rally last week in Spokane, Washington, Donald Trump slammed Hillary Clinton for “playing the women’s card” to gain campaign support. When citing Clinton’s criticisms of him, Trump mimicked the candidate, straightening his shoulders and flattening his voice to convey a cold, prim demeanor. He concluded the performance with the pronouncement: “All of the men, we’re petrified to speak to women anymore…You know what? The women get it better than we do, folks. They get it better than we do.”

The audience erupted into cheers and applause.

Moments like this one—where Trump’s unabashed political incorrectness and machismo are on display—resonate with many of his supporters. But his message in Spokane made headlines in part because the notion that men have it worse off than women echoes a central tenet of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM), a network of activists who believe that in many contexts, men are a disadvantaged class. New York magazine even offered its readers a quiz: “Who Said It, Trump or a Men’s Rights Activist?”

It seems like a no-brainer that men’s rights activists would admire Trump’s rhetoric on gender and thus support his candidacy for president. But several leaders of the movement who spoke to Mother Jones are ambivalent about Trump, at best—one has even donated to Hillary Clinton—and say that many others in their community haven’t been won over by Trump’s bluster. But why do many members of a group that would appear to be his natural constituency not support Trump for president?

“It’s nice to hear him say” things that align with the men’s rights movement says Dean Esmay, now a contributor to and formerly the managing editor of A Voice for Men, a blog and men’s rights discussion hub, but those talking points aren’t enough. “Somebody had the guts to say that men have it tougher than women, it gives you an emotional rush,” he continues. “But when you listen, where’s the meat behind it? What’s he offering? I see nothing.” Trump isn’t offering much by way of policy substance, Esmay says, both on issues key to MRAs, such as incarceration or the treatment of fathers in family courts, or on others.

“Why do I think he would make a bad president?” asks Esmay. “Because he is a loose cannon. You don’t know what he’s going to do. We have a student loan debt bubble that’s going to burst. We have a middle class that’s imploding. And Donald Trump is going to fix it all by saying ‘Believe it, baby?’ Give me a break.”

Warren Farrell, widely-considered the father of the men’s right’s movement and the author of one of its foundational texts, The Myth of Male Power, says he’s a “very strong supporter” of Hillary Clinton. He has attended several campaign events for Clinton and donated the allowed maximum of $2700 to her primary campaign. Still, Farrell says he thinks Hillary is “the worst candidate in recent history, in my lifetime, on gender issues from the perspective of understanding and having compassion for men.” But Farrell, who has a Ph.D. in political science, still supports Hillary in part because, he says, “Even though I care about men’s issues a lot, I care about this country being led by the most competent person.”

“Its very hard for me,” he continues, “because Trump does have a clue about what’s happening with men’s issues. But Trump is the quintessential example of the immature man and men at their worst.”

Farrell falls into a more liberal faction of the men’s rights community, says Gwyneth Williams, a professor of politics at Webster University who also studies men’s movements. But some of Farrell’s more conservative colleagues also have serious concerns about Trump.

“I think Trump was right on for saying that men are afraid of upsetting women,” says Paul Elam, the CEO and founder of A Voice for Men. But Elam notes that he doesn’t buy that Trump would be “some sort of savior for” the men’s rights movement, and that there are other Trump positions he finds especially worrisome.

“Trump talks a lot about building a wall and the outlandish proposition that he’s going to stop drugs from entering the country—which is impossible” says Elam. He’s wary of a candidate who would further criminalize drugs, leading to greater incarceration of men. While Trump hasn’t directly promised this, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of Trump’s surrogates and a potential vice-presidential pick, has said he supports the criminalization of marijuana use. That’s why both Elam and Esmay say that the possibility that in a Trump administration Chris Christie might be elevated to a position of power might push them to vote for Hillary.

But many men’s rights activists are definitely not Clinton fans: Both Elam and Esmay referred to her as a “lizard” in speaking with Mother Jones, and men’s rights forums on Reddit and elsewhere are filled with anti-Hillary sentiments. But in spite of their Clinton scorn, many MRAs say that it’s obvious that Trump is more swagger than substance. “Trump doesn’t have the ability to successfully call out Hillary on her sexism. He is to sic crass and doesn’t grasp the issues,” writes one user on the men’s rights subreddit. Another sums things up: “Trump VS Clinton. Whoever wins, America (and the world?) loses.”

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Donald Trump and the Men’s Rights Movement: It’s Complicated

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Should We Respond to Climate Change Like We Did to WWII?

by PaulinaEltham5 Posted on May 19, 2016

green4us

The controversial theory of “climate mobilization” says we should. War Production Co-ordinating Committee/Wikimedia Commons This story was originally published by The New Republic. On December 7, 1941, Japan’s surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor killed more than 2,000 people and drew the country into World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Production Board to oversee the mobilization, as factories that once produced civilian goods began churning out tanks, warplanes, ships, and armaments. Food, gasoline, even shoes were rationed, and the production of cars, vacuum cleaners, radios, and sewing machines was halted (the steel, rubber, and glass were needed for the war industries). Similar mobilizations occurred in England and the Soviet Union. Today, some environmentalists want to see a similarly massive effort in response to a different type of existential threat: climate change. These proponents of climate mobilization call for the federal government to use its power to reduce carbon emissions to zero as soon as possible, an economic shift no less substantial and disruptive than during WWII. New coal-fired power plants would be banned, and many existing ones shut down; offshore drilling and fracking might also cease. Meat and livestock production would be drastically reduced. Cars and airplane factories would instead produce solar panels, wind turbines, and other renewable energy equipment. Americans who insisted on driving and flying would face steeper taxes. Though climate mobilization has existed as a concept for as many as 50 years, it’s only now entering the mainstream. Green group The Climate Mobilization pushed the idea during a protest at the April 22 signing of the Paris Agreement. On April 27, Senators Barbara Boxer and Richard Durbin introduced a bill Despite these inroads, climate mobilization remains a fringe idea. Its supporters don’t entirely agree on the answers to key questions, such as: What will trigger this mobilization—a catastrophic event or global alliance? Who will lead this global effort? When will the mobilization start? And perhaps the greatest hurdle isn’t logistical or technical, but psychological: convincing enough people that climate change is a greater threat to our way of life than even the Axis powers were. Lester Brown, environmentalist and founder of the Earth Policy Institute and Worldwatch Institute, says he first introduced climate mobilization in the late 1960s. His approach is holistic—and ambitious. “Mobilizing to save civilization means restructuring the economy, restoring its natural systems, eradicating poverty, stabilizing population and climate, and, above all, restoring hope,” he wrote in his 2008 book, Plan B 3.0. Brown proposes carbon and gas taxes, and pricing goods to account for their carbon and health costs. In his “great mobilization,” all electricity would come from renewable energy. Plant-based diets would replace meat-centric ones. According to Brown, this new economy would be much more labor-intensive, employing droves of people in services like renewable energy and in compulsory youth and voluntary senior service corps. Brown also advises the creation of a Department of Global Security, which would divert funds from the U.S. defense budget and offer development assistance to “failed states,” (he cites countries such as Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Iraq) where climate change’s impact on available natural resources will exacerbate political instability. This may sound far-fetched, but Brown believes we’re at a tipping point for climate mobilization. The economy is increasingly favoring renewables over fossil fuels, and grassroots campaigns like the Divestment Movement are gaining steam. Any number of circumstances could push the globe over the edge toward mobilization: severe droughts that create conflicts over water, or the accumulation of climate catastrophes from raging fires to hurricanes. When we cross over, Brown told me, “suddenly everything starts to move. … We’re just going to be surprised at how fast this transition goes.” For environmentalists who’ve seized upon Brown’s idea, the transition has not been fast enough. They’ve tailored their plans to include more explicit links to the war effort and a new sense of urgency. In 2009, Paul Gilding, the former executive director of Greenpeace International and a member of the Climate Mobilization’s advisory board, and Norwegian climate strategist Jorgen Randers published an article outlining “The One Degree War Plan.” The authors set out a three-phase, 100-year proposal for healing the planet, beginning with a five-year “Climate War.” In that first phase, a cadre of powerful countries—the United States, China, and the European Union, for example—would act first, forming a “Coalition of the Cooling” that would eventually pull the rest of the globe along with them. Governments would launch the mobilization and reduce emissions by at least 50 percent. One thousand coal plants would close. A wind or solar plant would blossom in every town. Carbon would be buried deep in the soil through carbon sequestration. Rooftops and other slanting surfaces would be painted white to increase reflectivity and avoid heat absorption from the sun, which makes buildings and entire cities more energy-intensive to cool. Later, a Climate War Command would distribute funds, impose tariffs, and make sure global strategy is “harmonized.” According to the paper, this Climate War should start as early as 2018. Much has changed since the release of Brown’s Plan B 3.0. Months after Gilding and Randers published “The One Degree War Plan,” climate negotiators faced the crushing defeat of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, where delegates left without toothy commitments. The world has experienced one record-breaking temperature after another, and two of the three global coral bleachings on record. Last year’s climate conference in Paris was a relative success, as an unprecedented number of countries proposed plans to cut their emissions. And although the final agreement won’t bind countries legally, the consent to meetings every five years to consider ramping up commitments and the efforts of groups like the “high ambition coalition,” which pushed for a legally binding agreement, showed progress. But even before the ink dried, environmentalists and some politicians condemned the wishy-washy language and limp goals. Leaving the fate of the planet up to such diplomacy has “always been a delusion—one that I had, by the way,” says Gilding. “In that diplomatic world they have a notion of political realism which is quite separate from physical reality,” says Philip Sutton, a member of The Climate Mobilization’s advisory board and a strategist for an Australian group advocating a full transition to a sustainable economy. “The physical reality is now catching up with us.” To compare the fight against climate change to WWII may sound hyperbolic to some, but framing it in such stark, dramatic terms could help awaken the public to that “physical reality”—and appeal to Americans less inclined to worry about the environment. “It’s not tree hugging—it’s muscular, it’s patriotic,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, director and co-founder of The Climate Mobilization. “We’re calling on America to lead the world and to be heroic and courageous like we once were.” When Salamon began working on the group that would become the Climate Mobilization, she was earning her PhD in clinical psychology. “I view it as a psychological issue. What we need to do is achieve the mentality that the United States achieved the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks,” Salamon said. “Before that there had been just rampant denial and isolationism.” Indeed, climate denial is still pervasive. Only 73 percent of registered U.S. voters believe global warming is even occurring according to the most recent survey. Only 56 percent think climate change is caused mostly by human activity. It’s going to take a catastrophe much worse than Hurricane Katrina or Sandy to alter public opinion to the degree necessary for a climate mobilization—and even then, achieving that war mentality may be impossible. “We’re good at fighting wars. … We fight wars on drugs and wars on poverty and wars on terrorism,” says David Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College. “That becomes kind of the standard metaphor or analogy for action.” But climate change is “more like solving a quadratic equation. We have to get a lot of things right.” There are other reasons the war analogy doesn’t hold up. WWII mobilization was prompted by a sudden, immediate threat and was expected to have a limited time span, whereas the threat of climate change has been increasing for years and stretches in front of us forever. But perhaps the biggest difference is that our enemies in WWII were clear and easy to demonize. There is no Hitler or Mussolini of climate change, and those responsible for it are not foreign powers on distant shores. As Orr says, “We’ve met the enemy and he is us.” that would allow the Treasury to sell $200 million each year in climate change bonds modeled after WWII War Bonds. Bernie Sanders has mentioned mobilization on the campaign trail and in a debate. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced last week that if she’s elected, she plans to install a “Climate Map Room” in the White House inspired by the war map room used by Roosevelt during World War II.

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Should We Respond to Climate Change Like We Did to WWII?

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Should We Respond to Climate Change Like We Did to WWII?

Posted in alo, cannabis, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, global climate change, growing marijuana, Hagen, horticulture, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar panels, solar power, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Should We Respond to Climate Change Like We Did to WWII?

A Very Brief Timeline of the Bathroom Wars

by ValentinBunbury Posted on May 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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A very brief Twitter conversation yesterday got me curious about the timeline of transgender bathroom hysteria. Where and when did it start? I’m not interested in going back to the beginning of time and regaling you with the history of Jim Crow bathroom laws and the origin of sex-segregated bathrooms in 18th-century Paris and Victorian Britain. I just want to know the recent history. As best I can piece it together, it goes something like this:

March 2016: The North Carolina legislature meets to discuss the now-infamous HB2, which requires people to use the bathroom of their birth gender. It was passed and signed into law the same day it was introduced. It was a response to:

February 2016: A new law in the city of Charlotte that effectively allowed transgender people to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. Charlotte was following the lead of San Francisco, which in turn was part of a wave of trans-friendly bathroom bills:

2015: In December, Washington State had clarified that existing law allowed transgender people to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. In September Philadelphia adopted rules that would require gender-neutral signage on single-occupancy bathrooms. “It’s a sign change,” said the mayor’s director of LGBT affairs. “We’re labeling restrooms as what they are: restrooms, not gender-monitored spaces.” In July the Justice Department took the side of Gavin Grimm, a Virginia high-school student who argued that he should be allowed to use school bathrooms that match his gender identity. In April President Obama opened the first gender-neutral bathroom in the White House. These actions were largely a response to transphobic laws that had been proposed in red states all over the country:

Late 2014 and early 2015: Texas and several other states introduce “bathroom surveillance” bills that would require transgender people to use bathrooms that match their birth gender. The communications director at the National Center for Transgender Equality says the wave of new legislation seemed to be a backlash to “the gains we have seen in state and local non-discrimination policies that protect transgender people.” For example:

August 2014: Austin approves a law that requires gender-neutral signage on single-occupancy bathrooms. Among others, they join Portland (one of the first a year earlier) and Washington DC, and are soon joined by West Hollywood, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. These cities were largely been inspired by:

2012-13: A growing movement to install gender-neutral bathrooms at university campuses. During this period, 150 university campuses installed gender-neutral bathrooms, along with a growing number of high schools. The movement for gender-inclusive bathrooms in public facilities started at least as early as 2009 in the state of Vermont.

Ancient history: For our purposes this is anything more than five or six years old. A few random examples include the Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, a 2010 collection of papers about (among other things) nongendered bathrooms. In 2005, U of Chicago law professor Mary Anne Case gave a presentation called “On Not Having the Opportunity to Introduce Myself to John Kerry in the Men’s Room.” She has been performing surveys of mens and womens bathroom facilities for years. And of course, there’s the ur-hysteria of recent decades, when Phyllis Schlafly led a campaign against the Equal Right Amendment throughout the 70s out of fear that it would lead to gay marriage, women in combat, taxpayer-funded abortions, and, of course, unisex bathrooms. We never got the ERA, but as it turned out, Schlafly was pretty much right, wasn’t she?

This timeline was surprisingly hard to put together, and it may not be 100 percent accurate. But it gives you the general shape of the river. There are two points I want make about all this. First, there’s a lot of griping about the hypersensitivity of university students these days. You know: safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, and so forth. And, sure, maybe some of this stuff is dumb. History will judge that eventually. But I’ve always found it hard to get too exercised about this stuff. These kids are 19 years old. They want to change the world. They’re idealistic and maybe ??. So were you and I at that age. Frankly, if they didn’t go a little overboard about social justice, I’d be worried about them.

But guess what? The first concrete movement toward gender-neutral bathrooms started at universities. Now it’s becoming mainstream. Good work, idealistic college kids! This is why we should think of universities as petri dishes, not a sign of some future hellscape to come. They’re well-contained areas for trying stuff out. Some of this stuff dies a deserved death. Some of it takes over the world if the rest of us think it makes sense. Stop worrying so much about it.

Second: “Who started this fight?” Yes, that’s a crude way of putting it. But if we contain ourselves to the last decade or so, the answer is: liberals. Before then, the status quo was simple: men used one bathroom and women used another. It was liberals who started pressing for change, and the conservative response was a response to that.

As I’ve said before, we should be proud of this. Most of the right-wing culture war is a backlash against changes to the status quo pushed by liberals. And good for us for doing this. The culture war is one of our grandest achievements of the past half century. It’s helped blacks, gays, women, immigrants, trans people, the disabled, and millions more. Sure, conservatives have fought it all, but that’s only natural: they’re conservatives. What do you expect?

So own the culture war, liberals! Why are we always blaming such a terrific thing on conservatives?

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A Very Brief Timeline of the Bathroom Wars

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Pope Francis Opens the Possibility of Women Serving as Deacons

by KayleeAlcantar Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Speaking to an international meeting of the world congregations of Catholic women on Thursday, Pope Francis announced that the church should create an official commission to examine the expansion of women’s roles, including for them to be ordained as deacons, the National Catholic Register reports. He also described the church’s integration of women as “very weak.”

Ordained deacons are now all male and can perform some official functions—though not to celebrate Mass. Francis’ statement came during a question-and-answer session, during which he was asked to explain the current exclusion of women from serving in ordained roles, especially since women were permitted to be ordained in the early church. One woman asked, “Why not construct an official commission that might study the question?”

“Constituting an official commission that might study the question?” Francis responded. “I believe yes. It would do good for the church to clarify this point. I am in agreement. I will speak to do something like this.”

According to Catholic News, Francis told the group that it was his understanding that women in early scripture were not ordained as permanent deacons, and that he had meditated on the issue with a professor years ago. His announcement on Thursday signaled a historic step that could potentially open the doors for women to serve in that ordained position.

The pope, however, did not comment on the role of women serving as priests, something he has previously rejected as a change that “cannot be done.”

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Pope Francis Opens the Possibility of Women Serving as Deacons

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“Keystone-ization” is the fossil fuel industry’s new nightmare

by EdisonWJOkpkr Posted on April 26, 2016

“Keystone-ization” is the fossil fuel industry’s new nightmare

By on Apr 25, 2016commentsShare

“Another Pipeline Rejected” is now the go-to headline for updates on new fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States. Does the growing file of scrapped pipeline plans forecast the “Keystone-ization” of our energy future? Yes — proposals for pipelines to transport oil and natural gas are being brought down by public protest so frequently, we now have a term for it.

A quick review: On Friday, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation announced that it would not grant a necessary permit for the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline proposed to run through the northeastern United States. The Earth Day announcement came after backlash regarding potential safety issues from residents, as well as from Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who said that the plan would be “catastrophic to our air and our climate.” The DEC ultimately refused to grant the permit after concluding that the pipeline would interfere with water resources in its path.

This latest decision follows the rejection, just days prior, of a $3.1 billion natural gas plan proposed by Kinder Morgan. Before that, the 550-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have run through Virginia and West Virginia, was delayed earlier this year. Georgia’s 360-mile Palmetto Pipeline and Oregon’s 232-mile Pacific Connector Pipeline were both thwarted in March. All that went down in 2016 alone.

The mother of all these killed projects is, of course, the Keystone XL pipeline, a $7 billion undertaking that would have ferried 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada to the Gulf Coast — had President Barack Obama not vetoed it last November. Since that decision, the phrase “Keystone-ization” has come to connote the death of a proposed oil and gas pipeline — often due to public backlash.

“Fifty years ago, people in the U.S. were much more accepting of new pipelines and new infrastructure,” Rob Jackson, a professor at the Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment who studies energy use and climate change, told Grist. “Today, people don’t want new pipelines and nuclear power plants near their homes and schools. The failure of Keystone emboldened people to fight the next project.”

“Keystone-ization” has become a rallying cry for writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who uses it to encourage activists to protest new fossil fuel infrastructure. (Editor’s note: Bill McKibben is a member of Grist’s board). McKibben, however, repurposed it — how green of him — from Marty Durbin, President and CEO of America’s Natural Gas Alliance. Durbin said last year that the pipeline had become a model for climate activists, noting that it has changed the way fossil fuel companies operate:

“These aren’t new issues. These are things that pipeline developers have had to deal with for a long time. But we’ve seen a change in the debate. I hesitate to put it this way, but call it the Keystone-ization of every pipeline project that’s out there, that if you can stop one permit, you can stop the development of fossil fuels. That’s changing the way we have to manage these projects.”

Killing a pipeline plan, Jackson explained, could prevent fossil fuel extraction on the condition that there is no other way for the resources to reach the market. But in the case of oil, it also could backfire. If no pipeline is available, oil may travel by train. According to Jackson, pipelines look like a safer option when considering the terrible track record of oil train derailments — and therefore, the “Keystone-ization” of proposed pipelines may not be such a good thing after all.

At the same time, if oil prices remain low (as they are now), the cost of rail transport can be prohibitive — and when a pipeline is rejected, extracting the oil it was meant to transport may no longer be a profitable decision. If this is the case, Jackson explains, nixing a pipeline may help keep fossil fuels in the ground.

“Some people fight pipelines because they oppose any fossil fuel use. Viewed through that lens, blocking oil and gas pipelines makes sense,” said Jackson. “You will see a fight for every new pipeline from now on, I guarantee it.”

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“Keystone-ization” is the fossil fuel industry’s new nightmare

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Science Has Some Awesome News for Coffee Drinkers

by BlythePhifer Posted on April 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s a familiar feeling for any caffeine addict: a racing heart, fluttering away after one too many espresso shots. For years, that’s been enough to steer people with certain heart conditions away from coffee. But as it turns out, there’s little evidence that a caffeine habit could send us into cardiac arrest.

That’s according to Dr. Greg Marcus, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco and this week’s guest on the Inquiring Minds podcast. Marcus specializes in the treatment of arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats—the fast, sluggish, or off-kilter rhythms that can trigger sudden cardiac arrest, an unexpected loss of heart function. The condition is different from a heart attack, which is caused by blockages to blood vessels leading to the heart, and it has seen comparatively little progress in treatment and prevention, Marcus says. In the United States, sudden cardiac arrest kills 325,000 adults each year.

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Last year, Marcus’ research team looked into the relationship between caffeine and a type of arrhythmia called early beats, which can be a risk factor for developing heart failure. You can think of this condition as individual heart cells gone rogue. “If you take a heart cell out of the heart, put it in a petri dish, and keep it alive, it will beat on its own,” Marcus tells co-host Kishore Hari. Sometimes those cells will jump the gun, beating a little earlier than the rest of the heart.

“There’s this conventional wisdom that more caffeine leads to these early beats,” Marcus says. To find out if that’s really the case, his the team monitored heart rhythms along with consumption of common caffeine fixes such as tea, coffee, and chocolate. What they discovered might surprise you. “We could find no evidence of a relationship,” says Marcus. The results were published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Still, Marcus cautions that the heart risks of caffeine may depend on the individual and that more work needs to be done to unpack the role of a patient’s unique genetics and environmental exposures. This ties into a broader need for more precision medicine, he says—highly personalized treatments that take those specific factors into account. “The hope is that with modern techniques to sequence genes as well as to potentially monitor activity using technology, maybe we can really get down to that level,” he says.

Cue Health eHeart, a pioneering Big Data approach to develop strategies to prevent and treat all aspects of heart disease. The goal of the project is to use personal technology to free large-scale clinical research from its traditional home in brick-and-mortar hospitals, where researchers capture a controlled, artificial snapshot of participants’ health and behaviors. By gathering information from online surveys and personal gadgets (anything from smartphones to Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure cuffs), Marcus’ team at UCSF is able to study a continuous stream of health data as participants go about their daily activities. “That’s what I like to call real-time, real-life data,” he says.

Participants are given the option to get involved in a variety of studies depending on their backgrounds and the devices they use. Owners of a smart watch, for example, might be asked to opt into an ongoing study on atrial fibrillation—an irregular beat in the heart’s upper chambers that’s an important risk factor for stroke. The study attempts to develop a more nuanced understanding of what triggers the condition, making use of the watch’s heart rate monitor to interlace rhythmic data with other instantaneous measures of health and physical activity.

While the Health eHeart project aims to unpack the individualized factors that carry risk for heart disease, Marcus also hopes it will play a more foundational role for further research—”separating the wheat from the chaff,” as he puts it, by helping to figure out whether wearable devices are as beneficial to public health research as their makers chalk them up to be. Fitbit and the Apple Watch are examples, he says, of devices with savvy health and fitness marketing but still-untested claims: “Is it useful for health? We make that assumption, but how valid is it? And if it is valid, what is the best way to use it?”

UCSF hopes to enroll 1 million people in Health eHeart. If you want to take part in this ambitious study, you can sign up for the special Inquiring Minds Health eHeart group. Anyone over 18 years old is eligible, including those who are completely healthy, have heart disease, or are patients with cardiovascular conditions that we don’t yet know how to treat. Participation requires a few hours over the course of the year. (Note: Inquiring Minds co-host Kishore Hari is an academic staff member of UCSF, but he’s not affiliated in any way with the Health eHeart study.)

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow, like us on Facebook, and check out show notes and other cool stuff on Tumblr.

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Science Has Some Awesome News for Coffee Drinkers

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