Tag Archives: researchers

The world’s largest volcanic region was just discovered in Antarctica.

by WilliamsLockyer Posted on August 17, 2017

That’s all kinds of scary. If there’s one place on Earth that would be the worst possible spot for a giant volcanic chain, it’s beneath West Antarctica. Turns out, it’s not a great situation to have a bunch of volcanoes underneath a huge ice sheet.

In a discovery announced earlier this week, a team of researchers discovered dozens of them across a 2,200-mile swath of the frozen continent. Antarctica, if you’re listening, please stop scaring us.

The study that led to the discovery was conceived of by an undergraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Max Van Wyk de Vries. With a team of researchers, he used radar to look under the ice for evidence of cone-shaped mountains that had disturbed the ice around them. They found 91 previously unknown volcanoes. “We were amazed,” Robert Bingham, one of the study’s authors, told the Guardian.

The worry is that, as in Iceland and Alaska, two regions of active volcanism that were ice-covered until relatively recently, a warming climate could help these Antarctic volcanoes spring to life soon. In a worst-case scenario, the melting ice could release pressure on the volcanoes and trigger eruptions, further destabilizing the ice sheet.

“The big question is: how active are these volcanoes? That is something we need to determine as quickly as possible,” Bingham said.

Original link: 

The world’s largest volcanic region was just discovered in Antarctica.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The world’s largest volcanic region was just discovered in Antarctica.

How Many Republicans Are Atheists?

by SteffenWheen Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

How many Americans are atheists? Many people don’t really like admitting it, but Brian Resnick points today to an attempt to get at the truth. In the cleverly titled “How many atheists are there?” a pair of researchers sent people surveys with a bunch of personal questions (Are you vegetarian? Do you work from home? Etc.). But they didn’t ask for answers to the questions. All they asked for was the number that were true for you.

The researchers don’t report the average number reported back. But let’s suppose it was 4.3 out of 9. This is important, because they sent out a second set of surveys that were identical but added one question: “Do you believe in God?” If the average number of questions that were reported true in the second survey stayed at 4.3 out of 10, we can figure that no one believes in God. If it went up to, say, 5.1 out of 10, a little arithmetic suggests that roughly 80 percent of the respondents believe in God and 20 percent don’t.

After grinding through all this, the paper concludes that about 26 percent of Americans are atheists. Maybe that’s a reliable number, maybe not. This needs to be replicated a few times before we believe it. However, I was pretty gobsmacked by this table:

Granted, the error bars are large, but their point estimate is that no Republicans are atheists. None! If this methodology is accurate, it not only suggests a truly enormous religion gap between Republicans and everyone else, but also that self-reporting isn’t worth a damn.

As it happens, the sample the researchers used was probably somewhat self-selected rather than being truly random, and that may have affected the results. There are other potential problems too. Still, it’s an interesting first crack at this, and I hope that others follow it up.

Excerpt from:  

How Many Republicans Are Atheists?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Many Republicans Are Atheists?

Scientists May Have Finally Found a Way to Stop Ebola

by BrigidaPrevost0 Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Scientists have developed a vaccine that could successfully prevent the spread of Ebola, according to a study published Thursday in The Lancet. The study was conducted in response to the West African Ebola crisis—the largest and deadliest recorded Ebola outbreak to date—and is the first to report a promising solution for the deadly virus.

Since December 2013, Ebola—a highly infectious virus that causes severe hemorrhagic fevers and has a 50 percent fatality rate—has killed over 11,300 people in West Africa. Considered a global health crisis, the outbreak took nearly two years to control and was complicated by a lack of international funding and widespread fear and mistrust of doctors among African locals. Though the virus was discovered in 1976, early attempts to develop vaccines stalled in the absence of financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies. Until 2014, Ebola outbreaks were rare and controlled relatively quickly.

“While these compelling results come too late for those who lost their lives during West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, they show that when the next Ebola outbreak hits, we will not be defenseless,” said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, the World Health Organization’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, and a lead author of the study, in a press release accompanying the study.

Amid the Ebola crisis, researchers from the WHO and more than a dozen other international partners, tested the new vaccine on 5,937 at-risk individuals in Guinea and found it was 100 percent effective when administered soon after exposure. None of the roughly 3,900 people vaccinated within three weeks of Ebola exposure ended up catching the virus 10 or more days after the vaccination. (Researchers discounted any individuals who got Ebola within 10 days—the typical incubation period for the virus—under the assumption that they had already contracted it prior to vaccination.) The vaccine appears to be less effective the longer the researches waited after an exposure: Of the roughly 2,000 people vaccinated more than three weeks after an exposure, 16 got Ebola.

To find people at risk of getting Ebola, researchers used a unique method, “ring vaccination,” inspired by the strategy used to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. Each time a new Ebola case was confirmed, researchers traced all the people the patient had come in direct contact with, as well as the people who had come in contact with those people within the previous three weeks. The clusters, or “rings,” were then randomly assigned to either immediate or delayed vaccinations. After noticing positive results in the first few months, the researchers stopped the delayed vaccinations altogether. Eventually, the researchers began vaccinating children, which was also 100 percent effective.

The “ring vaccination” technique additionally had a positive impact on public health: Communities of those who were vaccinated were also less likely to get sick. That proved crucial not only in studying the vaccine, but also in quashing the outbreak itself.

The team still needs to do more research on the safety of the vaccine in children and other vulnerable populations, such as people with HIV. Other questions also remain about how long the protective effects of a single vaccination can last and whether it can be modified to reduce side effects without compromising efficacy.

In the meantime, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, a global health partnership that includes the WHO, gave $5 million to pharmaceutical giant Merck in January to procure the vaccine after its approval. Merck also committed to making 300,000 doses of the vaccine available, should an emergency arise in the interim.

“Ebola left a devastating legacy in our country,” Dr KeÏta Sakoba, coordinator of the Ebola response in Guinea, said in the press release. “We are proud that we have been able to contribute to developing a vaccine that will prevent other nations from enduring what we endured.”

Jump to original:

Scientists May Have Finally Found a Way to Stop Ebola

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Scientists May Have Finally Found a Way to Stop Ebola

Jeff Bezos wants to save the planet by moving industry off it.

by Boyce74F42 Posted on November 1, 2016

Non-white or non-male riders, however, may have a harder time. That’s the conclusion of a new study in which researchers had students in Seattle and Boston request rides on specific routes from Uber, Lyft, and taxi-hailing app Flywheel.

Here’s how it works: When you request an Uber, the driver can only see your location and star rating. After that driver accepts, they get your name and picture, too — and may cancel if they don’t like what they see. Researchers zeroed in on cancellations to measure discrimination, says Don MacKenzie, one of the study’s coauthors.

For the Boston study, riders used preset identities with names like Keisha, Rasheed, Allison, and Todd. The male riders who used stereotypically black names saw a cancellation rate of 11.2 percent, compared to the 4.5 percent cancellation rate of those using white names. Female riders using white names had a cancellation rate of 5.4 percent, while female riders with black names experienced a cancellation rate of 8.4 percent, nearly double the cancellation rate for white male riders (MacKenzie points out that difference is not statistically significant).

Finally, women were sometimes subjected to unnecessarily long rides from talkative drivers — resulting in lost time and money for those riders.

Taken from – 

Jeff Bezos wants to save the planet by moving industry off it.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, solar, solar power, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jeff Bezos wants to save the planet by moving industry off it.

Welcome to the Dark Side

by ConcettMonti Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Scientists report that they might have discovered a fifth basic force of nature:

Researchers at UC Irvine say they’ve found evidence for a fifth force — one carried by a particle that they’re calling “boson X.”…Tait said that their discovery might be a doorway to eventually creating a model that more accurately describes the universe….“This could actually be the dark force,” Tait said.

Boson X? Please. This is obviously the long-sought midichloriton. Get it together, scientists.

POSTSCRIPT: Why yes, I am having a little trouble finding things to blog about this morning. Why do you ask?

Credit:  

Welcome to the Dark Side

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Welcome to the Dark Side

What Instagram reveals about your access to healthy food

by LouisBitner Posted on March 2, 2016

What Instagram reveals about your access to healthy food

By on 1 Mar 2016commentsShare

If you’ve ever stepped inside a convenience store to pick up some groceries, you may have noticed that it’s much easier to find Almond Joys than arugula.

Food deserts — places where fresh produce is not nearly as easy to come by as chips and candy — are home to millions in the United States. To see what these Americans are actually eating, a recent study turned to an unexpected source: Instagram. Researchers analyzed the content and location of 3 million public Instagram posts tagged with food words like “kale” and “Takis.”

In all regions of the U.S., Instagram posts from food deserts depicted grub that was 5 to 17 percent higher in cholesterol, sugar, and fat, even after controlling for cultural dietary variation by comparing each food desert to a non-desert of similar demographic and socioeconomic standing, The Atlantic points out. Even so, the distinction was so pronounced that the researchers could predict whether or not any given food post came from a food desert with 80 percent accuracy.

Each region of the United States had a unique Instagram food flair that differed inside and outside of food deserts. From The Atlantic:

… In the southeast U.S., food-desert dwellers posted a lot of bacon, brisket, and grits, while non-food-desert dwellers posted more peaches, beans, and collard greens. In the Midwest, food deserts were full of hamburgers, hot dogs, and the generic descriptor “meat,” while kale, turkey, and spinach were more popular outside of food deserts.

These findings suggest that people who live further from grocery stores are eating very differently from the rest of the country — and that’s a problem.

But the solution isn’t super-complicated: Studies have shown that if you open up farmers markets in areas accessible to low-income folks and have vendors accept food stamps, plenty of customers will come. 7-11 Slurpees just aren’t going to cut it when it comes to meeting America’s nutritional needs.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.Climate on the Mind

A Grist Special Series

Get Grist in your inbox

Source:  

What Instagram reveals about your access to healthy food

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Instagram reveals about your access to healthy food

Your Meat-Eating Habit Is Killing More Than Just Cows

by IsabellAlmeida Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The earth is in the middle of its sixth mass extinction, and die-offs are happening more quickly than ever before. In a little over a century, the world has said goodbye to more than 400 species—and many biologists believe this is just the beginning. Scientists predict that in the next 35 years, as many as 37 percent of the world’s species could go extinct, if current trends continue.

While we know that climate change is a major culprit in the loss of biodiversity, some researchers now believe burgers might also be to blame. In a new report, a team from Florida International University cited the land degradation, pollution, and deforestation caused by rising global demand for meat as “likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions,” and the problem is only expected to get worse.

“It’s a colossally important paper,” Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, who studies how human diets affect the environment, told Science Magazine:

Researchers have struggled to determine the full impacts of meat consumption on biodiversity, Eshel says. “Now we can say, only slightly fancifully: You eat a steak, you kill a lemur in Madagascar. You eat a chicken, you kill an Amazonian parrot.”

Meat consumption has increased globally by 24 percent since the 1960s, mostly fueled by high demand from wealthy countries like the United States. Each year the number of livestock—specifically cattle, sheep, goats, and buffalo—increases by 25 million, requiring more space for both housing and feed production. Cattle, which require vast amounts of feed and produce the potent greenhouse gas methane, are expected to grow in number by more than 1 billion by 2050.

The world’s “biodiveristy hotspots,” areas biologists have identified where many species flourish, have already been reduced by nearly 90 percent in size and are now restricted to only 2 percent of the Earth’s land surface. What’s worse is that these biodiverse areas are the places where meat production is most likely to increase in the coming years. Researchers have predicted an additional loss of as much as 50 percent of land to livestock production.

Though Americans are already eating less meat than they used to, the researchers emphasized the continued need to cut back, especially because of how much meat ends up going to waste: Thirty percent of food—or $48 billion worth—is wasted in the United States each year, pushing up demand for meat production. “To support a future with lower animal product food demands,” they write, “would drastically reduce habitat and biodiversity loss, fossil fuel energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution, while providing highly nutritious diets that greatly improve human health.”

See the original article here:  

Your Meat-Eating Habit Is Killing More Than Just Cows

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Your Meat-Eating Habit Is Killing More Than Just Cows

A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

by DeloresLamson Posted on August 7, 2015

spoiler alert!

A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

By on 7 Aug 2015commentsShare

Remember that big algae bloom that was sweeping the West Coast a few weeks ago? Here’s an update: It’s still there, and it’s bigger, denser, and more toxic than anyone suspected. You know what this means, don’t you? Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where we bring the worst news from our changing climate, straight to you.

This kind of toxic algae bloom — sometimes called a “red tide” — is not uncommon. But scientists have never known one to be this bad before, according to Reuters:

The bloom, which emerged in May, stretches thousands of miles from the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and has surprised researchers by its size and composition.

“It’s just lurking there,” Vera Trainer, research oceanographer with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Washington state, told Reuters on Thursday. “It’s the longest lasting, highest toxicity and densest bloom that we’ve ever seen.”

“It’s just lurking there.” Is it just me, or does that sound like the beginning of a creature feature flick about mutant mollusks? Before you ask, we’re not certain climate change is fully to blame — but we’re pretty sure we could be seeing more of these supercharged red tides in the future:

Researchers have yet to determine whether longer-term global climate change from rising levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions are playing a role, but the massive bloom may be a harbinger of things to come in any case, she said.

“Whether this is or is not due to climate change, I think it provides a window to the future of what we could see happen under climate change scenarios,” Trainer said.

What we do know for sure is that it’s costing us big time:

NOAA said in a statement that the closure of a Washington state razor clam fishery resulted in $9.2 million in lost income and has also damaged the state’s $84 million commercial crabbing industry.

First, with the salmon, then with the razor clams and crabs. It’s as if climate change is trying to turn us all into vegetarians — though that’s maybe not the worst idea, it’s not great news for my cioppino habit.

Source:
Massive toxic algae bloom reaches from California to Alaska

, Reuters.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Originally posted here:  

A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, global climate change, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

These Antidepressants May Increase the Risk of Birth Defects

by SusannahGiles Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Babies born to women who took certain antidepressants during pregnancy may have an elevated risk of birth defects, according to a study published Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ.

Over the past few years, researchers have come to conflicting conclusions about the health impacts of taking common antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, early in pregnancy. Some studies have found prenatal exposure to SSRIs to be associated with heart and brain defects, autism, and more, while others have found the risk to be minimal or nonexistent.

The BMJ study, led by researchers at the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shed light on the matter by analyzing federal data of 38,000 births between 1997 and 2009. Researchers interviewed the mothers of children with certain birth defects associated with SSRIs, asking if they took certain antidepressants during the first three months of pregnancy or the month prior to it. Unlike many previous studies, which looked at the effects of SSRIs as a group, the researchers looked at the health impacts of five specific drugs. They found that two drugs were associated with birth defects, while three of the drugs were not. Here are the details:

Sertraline (Zoloft): No increased risk of birth defects. (This was the most common of the five drugs, taken by forty percent of the women on antidepressants.)
Paroxetine (Paxil): Babies were between 2 and 3.5 more likely to be born with heart defects, brain defects, holes between heart chambers, and intestinal deformities.
Fluoxetine (Prozac): Babies were two times more likely to experience heart defects and skull and brain shape abnormalities.
Escitalopram (Lexapro): No increased risk of birth defects.
Citalopram (Celexa): No increased risk of birth defects.

Researchers are quick to note that even in the case of paroxetine and fluexetine, the absolute risk of these defects is still very small. If mothers take paroxetine early in pregnancy, for example, the chance of giving birth to a baby with anencephaly, a brain defect, rise from 2 in 10,000 to 7 in 10,000.

Some doctors worry that studies like this dissuade mothers who truly need mental health treatment from seeking it—particularly since the stress associated with depression in the mother can impact the health of the baby. Elizabeth Fitelson, a Columbia University psychiatrist who treats pregnant women with depression, described this tricky balance to the New York Times earlier this year: “For about 10 percent of my patients, I can readily say that they don’t need medication and should go off it,” she said. “I see a lot of high-risk women. Another 20 percent absolutely have to stay on medication—people who have made a suicide attempt every time they’ve been unmedicated. For the remaining 70 percent, it’s a venture into the unknowable.”

View original article – 

These Antidepressants May Increase the Risk of Birth Defects

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Antidepressants May Increase the Risk of Birth Defects

New EPA carbon rules would save thousands of lives, science says

by CassieRZJyu Posted on May 5, 2015

E.P.Yay.

New EPA carbon rules would save thousands of lives, science says

By on 5 May 2015commentsShare

We’re all thinking it, I’ll just say it: Carbon emissions regulations are boring. Nine times out of 10, I’m yawning by the time I get to the “regulations” part. Plus, I don’t personally spew CO2 and other pollutants from industrial-scale smokestacks — even if I’m personally responsible for some of that spew — so it can be kinda hard to care about this or that incentive or check meant to keep big polluters in line.

Well, too bad, it’s time to pay attention. Carbon regulations save lives — we were already pretty sure about this, but now science can confirm just how many lives we’re talking: thousands. The Obama administration’s proposed regulations on carbon pollution from power plants would save thousands of lives every year. Here’s The New York Times with the gist:

[A new] study, led by researchers at Syracuse and Harvard Universities, used modeling to predict the effect on human health of changes to national carbon standards for power plants. The researchers calculated three different outcomes using data from the Census Bureau and detailed maps of the more than 2,400 fossil-fuel power plants across the country.

The model with the biggest health benefit was the one that most closely resembled the changes that the Environmental Protection Agency proposed in a rule in June. Under that plan, reductions in carbon emissions for the plants would be set by states and would include improvements to the energy efficiency of, for example, air-conditioners, refrigerators and power grids.

The health benefits of the rule would be indirect. While carbon emissions trap heat in the atmosphere, which contributes to a warming planet, they are not directly linked to health threats. Emissions from coal-fired power plants, however, also include a number of other pollutants, such as soot and ozone, that are directly linked to illnesses like asthma and lung disease.

Researchers calculated that the changes in the E.P.A. rule could prevent 3,500 premature deaths a year and more than 1,000 heart attacks and hospitalizations from air-pollution-related illness.

Nearly 5,000 lives saved and hospitalizations avoided — that’s about four suburban high schools (this is a unit I just made up) worth of people, which is a horrifying number to drop to preventable causes every year. 

Source:
E.P.A. Carbon Emissions Plan Could Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds

, New York Times.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

sponsored post

Think you could hack it as a farmer? Read this first

Before you go buying a farm, there are a few things you need to consider.

Get Grist in your inbox

Taken from: 

New EPA carbon rules would save thousands of lives, science says

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New EPA carbon rules would save thousands of lives, science says