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3 disturbing facts prove sexual harassment is a big freaking deal

by YukikoQ52ojac Posted on April 16, 2015

3 disturbing facts prove sexual harassment is a big freaking deal

By on 16 Apr 2015commentsShare

Hello! On this spring-shiny day, are you thinking about street harassment? No? My guess is that that’s probably because you’re not a woman, but no big deal — I am here to make you think about it. Gotcha!

A new study from researchers at Cornell University, with the cooperation of Hollaback!, surveyed over 4,000 American women on their experience of sexual harassment in public spaces. This is, according to Hollaback!, the largest study conducted on street harassment. No big surprise here, but the results are pretty disturbing. These, in our opinion, are the three most arresting:

The majority of women surveyed reported having experienced some type of harassment, from verbal to physical, in the past year. Half (!) had been groped or fondled in the past year.
Eighty-five percent experienced their first instance of harassment before the age of 17. Let’s think about this: If you absorb at an early age — keep in mind that 12 percent of women reported experiencing harassment for the first time before the age of 11 — that your body is subject to the words and hands of strange men in public spaces, wouldn’t that potentially have an effect on how you understand your right to exist outdoors?
A full 70 percent of women have elected, at some point, not to go out at night based on an incidence of harassment, and 73 percent have opted out of public transportation to avoid harassment. Harassment has the power to keep women inside, and unwilling to interact with their streets and cities.

I’m tired of repeating myself when it comes to the need to change attitudes toward women, particularly in public spaces, so I’ll just let Janelle Monae say it (perfectly) for me:

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3 disturbing facts prove sexual harassment is a big freaking deal

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One Thing I Wish Vox Understood About Wishes

by VirgieSeagle Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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

You can’t wish…

…for more wishes.

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One Thing I Wish Vox Understood About Wishes

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Watch John Boehner React to What Obama Said About Gay Marriage

by ChristenaFortun Posted on January 21, 2015

Mother Jones

When President Obama celebrated the rapid advances of marriage equality across the country during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, House majority leader John Boehner, the highest-ranking Republican in Congress, remained seated, unamused.

Here’s what Obama said: “I’ve watched Americans beat back adversity from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains; from Midwest assembly lines to the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. I’ve seen something like gay marriage go from a wedge issue used to drive us apart to a story of freedom across our country, a civil right now legal in states that seven in ten Americans call home.”

Here’s how Boehner reacted:

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Watch John Boehner React to What Obama Said About Gay Marriage

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Obama disses Keystone XL on the Colbert Report

by RickLitchfield Posted on December 9, 2014

Obama disses Keystone XL on the Colbert Report

By on 9 Dec 2014commentsShare

President Obama appeared on The Colbert Report last night to talk health care, jaded young voters, and the recent job report. And — good news for those young voters — while Obama didn’t say whether he’d block Keystone XL, he spoke of the tar-sands pipeline in dismissive terms.

Here’s what he had to say after Colbert asked about Keystone:

[I]f we look at this objectively, we’ve got to make sure that it’s not adding to the problem of carbon and climate change, because these young people are going to have to live in a world where we already know temps are going up. And Keystone is a potential contributor of that — we have to examine that, and we have to weigh that against the amount of jobs that it’s actually going to create, which aren’t a lot.

Essentially there’s Canadian oil passing through the United States to be sold on the world market. It’s not going to push down gas prices here in the United States.

It’s good for Canada. It could create a couple of thousand jobs in the initial construction of the pipeline. But we’ve got to measure that against whether or not it is going to contribute to an overall warming of the planet that could be disastrous.

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Obama disses Keystone XL on the Colbert Report

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Hear that? That’s the sound of the ocean dying

by AmparoQmoipxlt Posted on December 3, 2014

Hear that? That’s the sound of the ocean dying

By on 3 Dec 2014commentsShare

An eerie silence is falling over the world’s coral reefs. Usually quite noisy, reefs are emptying out and quieting down due to a long list of environmental stresses, including overfishing, damage from trawling, pollution, bleaching, heat stress, and ocean acidification. Not only is this silence ominous in a creepy-ghost-town-vibes kind of way — it can actually be another threat to the reef on its own.

Here’s how: Young fish and other invertebrates use the racket of a healthy reef to find their way to it. If reefs get quieter, it is harder for new generations of critters to move in. Scientists affirmed this with research published this week, comparing the soundscapes of healthy, protected reefs to those of impacted ones, reports Phys.org:

[T]he study … involved taking acoustic recordings of coral reefs with different levels of protection around islands in the Philippines. The research found that the noise produced by the few remaining resident fish and crustaceans on unprotected reefs was only one third of the sound produced at bustling, healthy reef communities. …

With less sound being produced at impacted reefs, the distance over which larvae can detect habitat is ten times less, impacting on the replenishment of future generations needed to build up and maintain healthy population levels.

And if you think coral reefs are only good for rad computer wallpaper and settings for heartwarming Pixar movies, think again: As much as a quarter of the fish we eat rely on protected and thriving reefs at some stage of their lives. I get hungry just thinking about it.

While the researchers didn’t release their recordings of the boomed-and-busted reefs, we have some exclusive footage just for you:

Source:
You can hear the coral reefs dying

, Phys.org.

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Hear that? That’s the sound of the ocean dying

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We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

by TawnyaRiddle Posted on November 18, 2014

bar none

We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

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18 Nov 2014 7:04 AM

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A confession: I want chocolate. I want to eat unreasonable amounts of the stuff — which is a problem for more than just my blood sugar. It turns out I’m not alone: We are eating more chocolate, faster than we ever have before. And now we’re running out.

We already knew that increasingly hot, dry weather and a disease called”frosty pod rot” are both taking their cut from cocoa crops, especially in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where more than half of the world’s cocoa is grown. Now, new statements from Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut, two of the largest chocolate makers, point to another problem facing cocoa addicts: Me. And — be honest — you, too.

Our collective chocolate lust is  so out of control, we are in the middle of a “chocolate deficit” — wherein farmers produce less raw cocoa than the rest of us eat in the course of a year. Like other deficits, this one carries over from year to year, and (let’s be real) usually gets bigger. Unlike other deficits, it has me actually scared. From the Washington Post:

Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. By 2020, the two chocolate-makers warn that that number could swell to 1 million metric tons, a more than 14-fold increase; by 2030, they think the deficit could reach 2 million metric tons.

I’d just like to point out that that’s A LOT of cocoa. Some of that is just because we are eating more chocolate, period. But we’re also eating way more dark chocolate, which contains way more cocoa than the average chocolate bar. Still, don’t panic! Chocolate is not going extinct anytime soon — it’s just going to get a lot more expensive.

Gulp. If you need me, I’ll be stocking my chocolate bunker.

Source:
The world’s biggest chocolate-maker says we’re running out of chocolate

, Washington Post.

Chocolate: Can Science Save the World’s Most Endangered Treat?

, Bloomberg.

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Dead zones are coming for your rivers, lakes, and oceans

by CortneyULX Posted on November 10, 2014

The Dead Sea

Dead zones are coming for your rivers, lakes, and oceans

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10 Nov 2014 4:30 PM

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Halloween may have come and gone, but climate change continues to give us the creeps. A new study revealed that warmer temperatures are causing zombie-like “dead zones” in rivers, lakes, and oceans worldwide.

According to the study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center found two dozen ways that climate change is worsening dead zones.

If you’re catching up: Climate scientists define dead zones as areas of oxygen-depleted water where no life exists. Though unlike a zombie apocalypse, they are potentially reversible. They happen for a number of reasons, but we’re primarily concerned with the human causes, such as industrial sewage pollution, agricultural runoff, and big, ugly oil spills. (P.S. The second largest dead zone in the world is in — yep, you guessed it — the northern Gulf of Mexico).

Back to the study: Researchers looked at 476 zombie zones around the world and found that once wildlife is eliminated, water temperatures typically increase by about 4 degrees F, instigating the potential of a vicious cycle: Climate change exacerbates dead zones and, in turn, dead zones increase water temperature. And unfortunately, we can’t stop it with a bullet to the brain.

The researchers also used a projection model to surmise how climate change’s effects on dead zones could look by the end of the century. The study reads:

The implications of these projections, especially for Northern Europe, are shifts in vulnerability of coastal systems to HAB events, increased regional HAB impacts to aquaculture, increased risks to human health and ecosystems, and economic consequences of these events due to losses to fisheries and ecosystem services.

The findings of this study scare us as much as a Bruce Campbell flick. But this problem unfortunately doesn’t come with a step-by-step survival guide. Yet.

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These wearable air monitors fight pollution from the streets

by KristyEZTL Posted on October 31, 2014

These wearable air monitors fight pollution from the streets

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31 Oct 2014 5:21 PM

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Here’s a Kickstarter that got our attention this month: The AirBeam, a wearable air monitor designed by Brooklyn-based environmental justice nonprofit HabitatMaps. The device costs $200 to produce, fits in your palm (if you’re Sasquatch), and is designed to measure particulate pollution on city streets, as well as temperature and humidity. It’s also kinda adorable — which is good, considering that the group is counting on hundreds of people wearing them around NYC in the near future.

But don’t let those cute blue Mickey ears fool you — the AirBeam is a response to a very real problem: Air pollution costs the U.S. $78 billion a year, HabitatMaps claim on their Kickstarter page:

The negative impacts of air pollution rank it among the most serious and widespread human health hazards in the world. Breathing dirty air causes chronic illnesses such as asthma and bronchitis and contributes to terminal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Unfortunately, despite the very real impacts air pollution has on our every day lives, it often goes unnoticed because it is largely invisible. In addition, because government-run air quality monitoring networks are sparse, publicly available air quality measurements don’t translate into an accurate assessment of personal exposure. The answer? Low-cost, portable air quality instruments.

Most official air monitoring occurs well above street level, where the air tends to be cleaner. The AirBeam monitors — once fully deployed by a team of citizen scientists — will measure pollution where it counts: where you actually breathe it. From GigaOm:

Michael Heimbinder, executive director at HabitatMaps, said that the nonprofit had developed the cheapest, portable air quality monitoring sensor it could in hopes of gathering data that it can then use to make policy arguments in the city. It’s also helpful for individuals who may want to change their own habits.

That is, if you know that levels of air pollution are pretty bad at a certain time and place on your commute, you might be able to tinker with your habits to limit your own exposure. But the real solutions will come from the sum total of all the data — cities will be able to identify hot spots for pollution, and then (er, hopefully) be better equipped to address them.

If you pledge $200, you’ll get an AirBeam of your own come launch — and a healthy dose of civic engagement to boot.

Source:
See how a Brooklyn nonprofit is using the internet of things for environmental justice

, GigaOm.

AirBeam: Share & Improve Your Air

, Kickstarter.

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All that light pollution is wasting energy AND making you sick

by PriscilBohn Posted on October 24, 2014

All that light pollution is wasting energy AND making you sick

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23 Oct 2014 8:23 PM

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If you stood at the heart of Hong Kong in the middle of the night and looked up, the sky would be about 1,000 times brighter than it’d be in the countryside.

Not all of us are living in cities that huge, or that utterly blinding — Hong Kong has been dubbed “the most light-polluted city in the world.” Still, researchers claim “light pollution” is not only wasting a lot of energy, but it could also be impacting our health.

According to Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Steven Lockley, this whole life-after-dark habit we’ve got is really messing with our natural rhythms. “Every day we don’t go to bed at dusk, we experience what Lockley calls ‘mini jetlag,’” reports The Guardian. And prolonged mini jetlag could even be “carcinogenic;” one study found that female workers on the night shift are more likely to develop breast cancer.

To add insult to injury, a lot of the excess light is superfluous:

“As a society we need to think, do we really need some of these amenities that are putting light pollution into the environment?” Lockley says. “Do we need 24/7 garages, do we need 24/7 supermarkets, do we need 24/7 TV? It was only in 1997 that the BBC turned off and there was the national anthem and we all went to bed.”

OK, so maybe everything would be a lot more beautiful and a lot less cancer-causing if we didn’t live in these blazing urban centers and instead went to bed with the sun like our well-rested ancestors. But since most of us do live in cities, then perhaps more places should take a page from Los Angeles, whose fleet of LED street lamps save the city almost $10 million annually in energy and maintenance costs.

Because LED technology also makes it easier to install smart things like color-changing lights and motion sensors, it could both reduce our carbon footprint and make it a little less likely to have that annoying streetlamp flooding our bedroom window. But would it make us less likely to be up ’til the wee hours eating cookies and watching Netflix? Hmmmm.

Source:
Urban light pollution: why we’re all living with permanent ‘mini jetlag

, The Guardian.

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All that light pollution is wasting energy AND making you sick

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Is the new Whole Foods rating system creating an inferiority complex for zucchini?

by ncf01r Posted on October 15, 2014

Is the new Whole Foods rating system creating an inferiority complex for zucchini?

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15 Oct 2014 6:37 PM

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On Wednesday, Whole Foods started issuing ratings for its fruit, veggies, and flowers to measure the quality of farming practices. The rating system is simple: Fresh food is divided up as “good,” “better,” and “best.” It’s like getting gold, red, or green stars from your kindergarten teacher! Except it’s Whole Foods, instead of Mrs. Carter, grading you — and it’s judging greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem management, and farmworker treatment, instead of coloring book pages.

Here is some of what Whole Foods is measuring (click here for the full list):

[F]arming practices that evaluate, protect and improve soil health. Examples include composting, rotating crops and using the latest science to measure and enhance nutrients in the soil.

[F]arming practices that create better working conditions. Examples include reducing pesticide risks, providing protective equipment and participating in third-party auditing programs to promote safe conditions and fair compensation.

[F]arming practices that protect and conserve water. Examples include rainwater collection and drip irrigation.

[F]arming practices that protect native species. Examples include planting “bee-friendly” wildflowers, improving conservation areas and taking steps to protect beneficial insects from harmful chemicals.

Fruits, flowers, and vegetables that come from overseas also have to comply with the rating system — yes, Whole Foods imports produce from overseas — even when the country’s standards for pesticides and soil composition are different.

Retrieving the information to issue the labels is complicated, too, and some farmers have insinuated that the system may be taking things a teeny bit too far. Sellers have to undergo a thorough certification process, answering questions about the minutia of each farms’ practices. Reports the New York Times:

“For instance, they want to know about earthworms and how many I have in my soil,” said Mr. Lyman, whose family has grown apples, peaches, pears, and various berries on their farm in Middlefield, Conn., since 1741. “I thought, How do I count every earthworm? It’s going to take a while.”

So while farmers are counting worms in the dirt to scramble for the coveted “best” title, Whole Foods says that it’s just trying to be more honest. Or, here comes the buzzword, more transparent. Plus, the fancy organic food seller now has to compete with cheaper super-companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, General Mills, and Cargill, who are starting up similar transparency campaigns (*cough* marketing ploys) — like McDonald’s recent social media blitz — in order to appeal to curious consumers such as those meddling kids, millennials.

Whether the transparency campaign will make a difference for Whole Food’s sales is still up in the air, but farmers can rest assured that they will be certain to score, at the very least, “good.”

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Is the new Whole Foods rating system creating an inferiority complex for zucchini?

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