‘The explicit-sounding call to violence is bad enough. But even worse is that, intentionally or not, Trump has been laying the groundwork for this idea for a while. From his talk of “rigged elections” to his suggestion that we need Russia to hack Clinton’s emails if the Justice Department won’t indict her, Trump’s message is clear: Clinton is so corrupt, and the system that favors her is so broken, that our ordinary democratic and legal processes aren’t equipped to handle it. She should be thrown in jail, but she probably won’t be.It’s a pretty short step from that idea to violent fantasies of going outside the law for real justice — even from official sources like the Republican Party of Riverside County, California, which recently tweeted a picture of a hangman captioned “Ready For Hillary.”

And there’s an unsettling parallel for this kind of rhetoric and what it can lead to, as law professor David S. Cohen pointed out Wednesday in a Rolling Stone op-ed: anti-abortion terrorism. Cohen, who has studied and written about violence and intimidation against abortion providers, points out that while anti-abortion violence is usually carried out by a “lone wolf” — like the Planned Parenthood shooter in Colorado Springs — it’s also incited, quite predictably, by the inflammatory rhetoric of prominent groups or officials. Cohen says that this phenomenon is called “stochastic terrorism”: using language and other forms of communication to incite random acts of violence that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” It’s not a legal term, but it can help us understand just how dangerous Trump’s statements are…’

Source: Vox

‘In a video clip circulating today from a campaign event in Wilmington, NC, Trump jokes that the “Second Amendment, people” might be the only thing that could stop a President Clinton from selecting Supreme Court justices during her term. This appears to be a fancy Trump way of saying to his “base” that she should totally be assassinated, and specifically, shot to death with a gun…’

Source: Boing Boing

Is there really another way to interpret this statement?

‘Members of the press, in their misguided attempt to be “balanced”, love to point out that we face a presidential contest between the two least-popular candidates ever. What they fail to do is analyze their own complicity in blindly adhering to the cartoon version of Hillary Clinton. Trump is unpopular — even with many Republicans who weakly support him — because of his stated positions. Secretary Clinton is unpopular largely because of an aggressive campaign of fictions and slander. That campaign has succeeded largely because of systemic misogyny…’

Source: Social Justice For All

‘Dressed in a long white tunic decorated with beads and glass, and gold headgear covered in a patchwork of brightly colored stones, the Ottamthullal dancer is almost ready to take the stage. Just time to practice some of the quivering facial expressions that form a vital part of the act. As this video shows, the Ottamthullal performer is able to contort his face muscles with incredible elasticity, variety and speed…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Of all the turf wars that have complicated the landscape of grammar over the past few hundred years, the most complicated and frustrating may be that of the singular they.It may be the most controversial word use in the English language—because it highlights a hole where a better-fitting word should go.

It creates a conflict between writers and editors who want things to follow the natural symmetry of Latin, and people who find they the only logical option for referring to a single person without a gender attached.

And there has been a lot written about it—it’s something of a hot topic this year, thanks to a vote by the American Dialect Society to name they its word of the year for 2015. “In the past year, new expressions of gender identity have generated a deal of discussion, and singular they has become a particularly significant element of that conversation,” Ben Zimmer, the chairman of ADS’ New Words Committee, explained back in January. “While many novel gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed, they has the advantage of already being part of the language.” …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

I am a firm believer in and a strong user of the singluar ‘they’. How about you?

‘It is entirely uncontroversial to state that the national media have consistently treated Hillary with profound contempt. We need to understand why #HillaryCoverageIsCrap — and we need to fight back against the ritual humiliation of the first woman with a viable shot at the presidency…’

Source: Melissa McEwan, Blue Nation Review

“Now, if Trump does win, okay, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that…”

Source: BuzzFeed

‘In 2011 a crested macaque in Indonesia took a selfie using photographer David J. Slater’s camera. After Slater claimed copyright of the photo, PETA sued on behalf of the monkey, claiming it was the copyright holder. But in January a federal judge tossed out the lawsuit, ruling that non-human animals are not allowed to own a copyright. Earlier this week PETA filed an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Sen. Marco Rubio said Saturday that he doesn’t believe a pregnant woman infected with the Zika virus should have the right to an abortion — even if she had reason to believe the child would be born with severe microcephaly…’

Source: Politico

‘Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero is planning to perform the first-ever head transplant in December 2017. He will put the head of a terminally ill, wheelchair-bound Russian citizen Valery Spiridonov (31) on an entirely new body.  Spiridonov, a computer scientist, has Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a rare and incurable spinal muscular atrophy. As the disease is sure to kill him, Spiridonov sees the head transplant as his one shot to have a new body.

The controversial surgeon Canavero, dubbed by some “Dr. Frankenstein,” has been criticized for intending to do a possibly unethical and certainly dangerous operation. There are numerous things that could go wrong in such a medical feat that’s never been successfully carried out on humans. The main difficulty is seen in the fusion of the spinal cords. One positive precedent has been set earlier this year by a team of Chinese surgeons, who successfully transplanted a monkey’s head…’

Source: Big Think

‘The species identified include elephants, gorillas, rhinoceroses, lions, tigers, bears (oh my), wolves, and other large mammals. And it’s a serious problem. According to the paper, 59 percent of the world’s largest carnivores and 60 percent of the largest herbivores are facing extinction, particularly in Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where they are prey to illegal hunting, deforestation, human population growth and expansion, and other factors that we can control to an extent…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘A presidential or vice-presidential candidate had never quit a race in modern history before the Eagleton affair, but this year might offer an even grander political spectacle, thanks to Donald Trump. In recent days, Republicans have been expressing increasing nervousness about Donald Trump’s candidacy, with many urging him to quit. Trump might also quit on his own volition, having done the math and decided that bowing out now is better than losing by a landslide in November.

Would Trump actually quit,,,[W]e’ve never seen a candidate like him, and for someone who seemingly entered the race on a whim it wouldn’t be outrageous to see him exit in a similar fashion. And from the standpoint of Republican Party rules, Trump quitting, while unprecedented, would, in fact be a reasonably easy problem to solve. That’s mostly because the party’s rules lay out pretty clearly what would happen next… The rules …define a simple process of replacement: another vote by members of the RNC that could happen at a second national convention or remotely. Whichever candidate gets a majority of the votes, wins the nomination. (The candidates, in this scenario, could come from anywhere—not just those candidates that ran in the primaries and caucuses, which is why some Republicans see House Speaker Paul Ryan getting the nod.)

A far trickier problem, however, are the actual ballots. And it’s that process, separate from the nominating process, that could be a bit messier, and is also where timing becomes important. In the U.S., each individual state controls the election process, from making and printing ballots, to counting votes on Election Day, to certifying election results.Election law in the U.S. is a 50-state patchwork. From voting machines to filing deadlines, each state has different rules. And it’s the deadlines in particular that might concern party officials should Trump quit. That’s because the closer it gets to the November election, the harder and harder it will get to keep Trump’s name from appearing on state ballots, as state deadlines for certifying nominees’ names come and go.

It’s already impossible, in fact, to keep Trump off all 50: according to the Daily Beast, Delaware’s deadline to certify names for the ballot has already passed, meaning that even if Trump quits today you’ll still be able to vote for him in Delaware in three months. Even so, most of these deadlines aren’t until September or October, meaning that, for the next few weeks at least, Republicans could likely still get another name on the ballot in most states by November.

State control of elections provides for other sources of potential mayhem, however, because of the Electoral College…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘ “It’s kind of an armchair sport to diagnose public figures, especially politicians,” says Stephen Hinshaw, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Cathartic? Sure. But psychologists say it is almost impossible to gain any real insight into a person’s mind and behavior based on such an analysis. Not only is it wrong, it is a perversion of what psychological diagnoses are meant to do: help people work through mental illness. Casually assigning medical jargon to an erratic politician’s baffling ideologies may actually add to the stigma surrounding mental illness. And that is bad for America…’

Source: WIRED

‘As Shakespeare put it in “As You Like It”: “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”That conventional wisdom is backed up by a Cornell University study conducted by David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The phenomenon is now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. So, if you’re not too sure about your own intellect, it actually might be a indication that you’re pretty intelligent — thoughtful enough to realize your limitations, at least.Here are some subtle signs that you are considerably smarter than you think…’

Source: Business Insider

Uh oh. The fact that I’m confident of my own intelligence, thus, is an indication that I’m not really so smart (although I do know my limitations, I think). And I only scored 11 out of 17 of the above factors…

‘Italian physicist Enrico Fermi once famously exclaimed “Where is everybody?” We have been trying to answer his paradox — we exist, so aliens should exist, too — ever since. According to one new solution, we have not seen or heard from any galactic neighbors because we are still waiting for them to be born…

So says a team of astronomers in a new study, to be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The researchers calculated the probability that life as we know it should exist at any given point in the universe. Based on their assumptions, Earthly life is quite likely premature…’

Source: The Washington Post

Essentially, the argument proceeds from the fact that the conditions for life depend on the stellar environment. The star is the source of radiant energy, the furnace in which the heavier elements on which life is based are created, and creates a habitable temperature zone in which liquid water can exist.  The new study suggests that our stellar environment is an anomaly, centered on a yellow dwarf far less long-lived and less prevalent than the less massive, longer-lived and far more prevalent red dwarf stars that make up the bulk of the galaxy. If such low-mass starts are able to support life, then we are the rarity because of how early in the  life of the universe, and how transient by comparison, Sun-like conditions are.

“Many more stars that all last much longer than our Sun ensures there’s simply more opportunity for life to arise in the future on a small dwarf star than in the last 13 billion years of cosmic time,” as Alan Duffy, an Australian astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology, who was not involved in the study, commented.

Here’s why, and why you should be worried.

‘Faced with a loose-cannon 2016 GOP presidential nominee who disagrees with them on key issues, Charles and David Koch — the two billionaire “Koch brothers” — are directing the vast resources of their political network toward down-ballot races. This should alarm liberals greatly.’

Source: Vox

‘At least 90 people have been hospitalized from an anthrax outbreak in Russia, including 50 children. Eight are confirmed as infected with anthrax. Doctors believe at least 6 patients have the more virulent intestinal form of the disease, which killed one boy, age 12. Authorities say it’s the first fatal anthrax outbreak in Russia in more than 75 years.

The outbreak originated in a Siberian community after a heat wave melted the permafrost where spores of anthrax remained alive inside the frozen carcass of an infected reindeer. Animals fed on that thawed carcass, which may have been up to a hundred years old, then transmitted it to reindeer that nomadic herders killed and ate…’

Source: Boing Boing

Spoiler alert: None of those options are good.

Source: Vox

‘Of the 17 largest land carnivores, most hunt prey that are either already threatened or are in decline…’

Source: National Geographic

‘New research supports a “luxury effect,” in which higher income neighborhoods host more biodiversity…’

Source: National Geographic

Via The New York Times:

‘Meg Whitman, a Hewlett Packard executive and Republican fund-raiser, said Tuesday that she would support Hillary Clinton for president and give a “substantial” contribution to her campaign in order to stop Donald J. Trump, whom she berated as a threat to American democracy.

“I will vote for Hillary, I will talk to my Republican friends about helping her, and I will donate to her campaign and try to raise money for her,” Ms. Whitman said in a telephone interview.

She revealed that Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, had reached out to her in a phone call about a month ago, one of the first indications that Mrs. Clinton is aggressively courting Republican leaders. While acknowledging she diverged from Mrs. Clinton on many policy issues, Ms. Whitman said it was time for Republicans “to put country first before party.” …’

Source: WIRED

The acclaimed chef has struggled to distill the principles accounting for the ecstatic gustatory experiences he inspires at Momofuku, early on apparently as surprising to him as to his patrons. What may result, he suggests, is a more comprehensible and systematic process for culinary innovation. Or maybe it is so much smoke, mirrors and hand waving, justifying serendipity after the fact. Read it, napkin at hand for the mouthwatering, and see what you think.

Source: One Billion Rising

August 3rd marks the two-year anniversary of the brutal attack on the Yazidi people in Sinjar Province in the Northern region of Iraq in which ISIS forces stormed towns and villages in the historic homeland of the ethno-religious group, killing over 5,000 men and elders, enslaving over 7,000 women and children and displacing over 400,000 more, desecrating homes and holy sites. Thousands of internally displaced Yazidis surrounded by ISIS forces were trapped on Sinjar Mountain, dying of exposure and dehydration.

The displaced Yazidi community continues to face a humanitarian crisis; tens of thousands are homeless and unsupported and many, especially children, suffer from malnutrition and health issues. Since the beginning of this crisis, ISIS has sold thousands of Yazidi women into sexual slavery and committed crimes of rape and sexual violence against thousands of Yazidi women and children in captivity. The group abducted at least 5000 Yazidis during their assault on Sinjar, mostly women and children and has relocated abductees to different regions where they are offered for sale as sexual slaves. To date, dozens of women have been killed in captivity while many others have committed suicide. New York Times reporter Rukmina Calimachi has written extensively about the crisis, for instance breaking the story about Isis forcing birth control pills on their captive sexual slaves.

A UN report notes:

“ISIS has committed the crime of genocide as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidis, thousands of whom are held captive in the Syrian Arab Republic where they are subjected to almost unimaginable horrors.ISIS has sought to destroy the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer. The public statements and conduct of ISIS and its fighters clearly demonstrate that ISIS intended to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, composing the majority of the world’s Yazidi population, in whole or in part.”

My wife, a specialist in psychological trauma and refugee crises, and other colleagues at the Victims of Violence Program in Cambridge MA, have been consuting and assisting in the development of the Psychosocial Treatment and Trauma Support Center in Kurdish-controlled Dohuk, northern Iraq, to address the abuse and sexual violence suffered by Yazidi women and girls in ISIS captivity by:

– ensuring urgent medical care and hospital treatment for the aftermath of sexual and physical violence endured;
– ensuring counseling and trauma support for every victim through the center directly or through referral to a specialist organization;

– facilitating pilgrimages for survivors to the holy temple of Lalish to meet with Yazidi religious leaders;

– providing education and training in marketable skills to help victims reclaim their lives and assist them in moving towards self-sufficiency and independence;

– partnering with other local and international organizations and surrounding communities to work to facilitate survivors’ reintegration into society.

The center is being developed under the aegis of YAZDA, a global Yazidi organization established after the genocide against them in northern Iraq. The mission of YAZDA is to support the surviving victims of genocide and to ensure the future safety of the Yazidi ethnoreligious minority group. Know more about their work and ways to help and show solidarity by visiting their website or making a donation.

Source: LA Times via Sean Bonner’s newsletter Just Another Crowd

Safecast is a movement started within days of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and arising out of conversations among the chief technology officer of a large securities firm Pieter Franken, LA tech entrepreneur Sean Bonner and Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. Local volunteers with self-built radiation monitoring equipment are making a continuous crowd-sourced dump of radiation levels around the region — now 50 million readings and counting, all logged and mapped on a website anyone can see. As The Japanese government continues with its extensive effort to decontaminate areas around Fukushima Daiichi and reopen evacuated towns and villages, potential returnees say they want a way to verify official numbers that indicate radiation really has dropped to safe levels.

Funded by grants, foundation support and individual donation, the group holds regular sessions to teach people to assemble their own devices and also posts instructions online, on the principle that people who build their own equipment are more likely to use it. Even Japan’s postal service has cooperated with Safecast, putting its monitors on carriers’ motorbikes in some towns and gathering data.

“Safecast is an interesting social experiment, in a fairly anarchistic kind of way,” says Franken. “It taps into trends including maker-spaces, the Internet of things and even artists. We attract people who want to break out of the traditional way of solving problems.”

The group’s approach has expanded to include radiation monitoring activities elsewhere around the globe and other citizen-based environmental monitoring such as examining air quality around LA and methane readings around Porter Ranch, CA during the recent disastrous gas leak there. Advocates point to incidents such as the recent scandal over the lead-tainted water supply in Flint, Mich., as an example of where deeper community-based scientific knowledge could have improved debate and policymaking.

Franken describes Safecast’s goal now as, essentially,

“base-lining the world,” crowdsourcing environmental data from every corner of the Earth. “We should start with measuring our environments. Then we can talk about things like global warming and air pollution; from there, activism can start. Once you know, for example, that your street is polluted, you can start to make a change. That’s where we can make a difference.”

As more local cases are announced in Florida, the CDC confirms that Zika can be spread sexually from men or women.

Source: National Geographic

‘If Friday’s announcement that the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower was in bloom—the first occurrence in the city since 1939—inspired a sense of dejá vu, it may not be all in your head. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out that over half a dozen of the gigantic plants have bloomed this year in the United States, unusually, at the same time. What’s going on? …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘In the same underground observatory in Japan where, 18 years ago, neutrinos were first seen oscillating from one “flavor” to another — a landmark discovery that earned two physicists the 2015 Nobel Prize — a tiny anomaly has begun to surface in the neutrinos’ oscillations that could herald an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

The anomaly, detected by the T2K experiment, is not yet pronounced enough to be sure of, but it and the findings of two related experiments “are all pointing in the same direction,” said Hirohisa Tanaka of the University of Toronto, a member of the T2K team who presented the result to a packed audience in London earlier this month…

The long-standing puzzle to be solved is why we and everything we see is matter-made. More to the point, why does anything — matter or antimatter — exist at all? The reigning laws of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, treat matter and antimatter nearly equivalently, respecting (with one known exception) so-called charge-parity, or “CP,” symmetry: For every particle decay that produces, say, a negatively charged electron, the mirror-image decay yielding a positively charged antielectron occurs at the same rate. But this cannot be the whole story. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced during the Big Bang, equal amounts should have existed shortly thereafter. And since matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact, such a situation would have led to the wholesale destruction of both, resulting in an empty cosmos.

Somehow, significantly more matter than antimatter must have been created, such that a matter surplus survived the annihilation and now holds sway. The question is, what CP-violating process beyond the Standard Model favored the production of matter over antimatter? Many physicists suspect that the answer lies with neutrinos — ultra-elusive, omnipresent particles that pass unfelt through your body by the trillions each second…’

Source: Quanta Magazine

She passes. It’s clear you don’t have to lie or exaggerate to counter the Donald’s bloviation.

Via NPR

‘A quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, it seems, we cannot get enough of its most famous chronicler.Finally, we in Britain may have realised what that great American writer Philip Roth understood in 1986, when he described A Perfect Spy as “the best English novel since the war”. Is John le Carré, author of enormously popular novels since 1961, when he published Call for the Dead, our greatest living writer?…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘Anger is both poisonous and popular. Even when people acknowledge its destructive tendencies, they still so often cling to it, seeing it as a strong emotion, connected to self-respect and manliness (or, for women, to the vindication of equality). If you react to insults and wrongs without anger you’ll be seen as spineless and downtrodden. When people wrong you, says conventional wisdom, you should use justified rage to put them in their place, exact a penalty. We could call this football politics, but we’d have to acknowledge right away that athletes, whatever their rhetoric, have to be disciplined people who know how to transcend anger in pursuit of a team goal.

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life. A good place to begin is Aristotle’s definition: not perfect, but useful, and a starting point for a long Western tradition of reflection. Aristotle says that anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted. He adds that although anger is painful, it also contains within itself a hope for payback. So: significant damage, pertaining to one’s own values or circle of cares, and wrongfulness. All this seems both true and uncontroversial. More controversial, perhaps, is his idea (in which, however, all Western philosophers who write about anger concur) that the angry person wants some type of payback, and that this is a conceptual part of what anger is. In other words, if you don’t want some type of payback, your emotion is something else (grief, perhaps), but not really anger…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘Could what happened in Fukushima happen 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of New York City?That’s what many activists and former nuclear regulators fear for the Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant that has operated in Westchester County for more than four decades. The plant provides a good chunk of the energy needs for the surrounding area, but it has come under fire in recent years for safety and environmental concerns, including its warming of the Hudson River and a recent case of bolts missing in one of its reactors. Two of the plant’s three reactor units are currently operating on expired licenses, with the state of New York having denied parent company Entergy’s extension requests due to suspected violations of the federal Clean Water Act…’

Source: Fukushima in New York? This Nuclear Plant Has Regulators Nervous.

‘There is a lot being written and spoken about Trump by intelligent and articulate commentators whose insights I respect. But as a longtime researcher in cognitive science and linguistics, I bring a perspective from these sciences to an understanding of the Trump phenomenon.

This perspective is hardly unknown…Yet you will probably not read what I have to say in the NY Times, nor hear it from your favorite political commentators. You will also not hear it from Democratic candidates or party strategists. There are reasons, and we will discuss them later I this piece. I am writing it because I think it is right and it is needed, even though it comes from the cognitive and brain sciences, not from the normal political sources. I think it is imperative to bring these considerations into public political discourse. But it cannot be done in a 650-word op-ed. My apologies. It is untweetable.

I will begin with an updated version of an earlier piece on who is supporting Trump and why — and why policy details are irrelevant to them. I then move to a section on how Trump uses your brain against you. I finish up discussing how Democratic campaigns could do better, and why they need to do better if we are to avert a Trump presidency…’

Source: Blog « George Lakoff

‘YESTERDAY, THE 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia aired a five and a half minute video about climate change. Directed by James Cameron and narrated by Sigourney Weaver, it featured Don Cheadle, Jack Black, America Ferrera, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other celebs. Instead of scientists and hockey sticks, it had forest fires, Hurricane Sandy survivors, and a summer blockbuster soundtrack. The gist: Climate change is causing awful things in America and abroad. If you care to stop it, vote for Hillary Clinton.

None of that is as remarkable as the context in which it was shown. In the decades since scientists first warned a US president that greenhouse gas emissions would doom us all, no political party has ever presented itself as taking the issue seriously during a presidential election. This year is different. And not because the Republican candidate calls climate change a hoax. What’s new is Democrats are going on the offense. Speaker after speaker at the convention has laid into Donald Trump and his party’s denialism. Climate action is a prominent plank in the Democratic Party platform. They’ve made the stakes clear: A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for planet Earth…’

Source: WIRED

‘DONALD TRUMP’S SCHADENFREUDE in the DNC’s embarrassing email leak is standard practice in America’s messy electoral politics. Today, though, his casual request that Russian hackers dig up Hillary Clinton’s emails—sent while she was U.S. Secretary of State—for his own political gain has sparked a new level of outrage among cybersecurity experts…’

Source: WIRED

(I know I promised not to feature the angry groundhog’s mug as much, but I couldn’t resist sharing this photo.)

‘The rate of new HIV infections peaked globally in 1997 with 3.3 million cases. From there, a steady decrease was seen until 2005, when the average number of new infections had decreased to 2.6 million per year. This rate has remained more or less constant since then, according to a new study published in the Lancet HIV, with the result being a steady growth of total HIV cases to approximately 38.8 million in 2015.

These are discouraging results; one should expect that, given increasing public awareness, infections would consistently continue to decline.

The same study notes, however, that HIV mortality is falling globally. In 2005, 1.8 million people died from the illness, while that number fell to 1.2 million in 2015. The decrease here can be primarily attributed to two things: The scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), which can keep the virus at bay almost indefinitely in infected patients, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission…’

Source: Motherboard

‘This is one of the best sounds you can hear when eavesdropping on scientists: “Oh, what is that?” The research team of the E/V Nautilus, a vessel of the Ocean Exploration Trust, was using their remotely operated underwater vehicle to check out the deep sea around the Channel Islands when they saw something they never had before: a small, glowing purple blob…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

One widely-used pesticide was found to reduce bee sperm counts.

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Gonzalo Ciruelos set out to discover which country was the roundest in shape:

We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem to be.For that reason, we have to define roundness some other way. We represent countries as a plane region, i.e., a compact set C⊂R2C⊂R2. I will define its roundness as…

That’s about where I tune out! Turns out the answer is Sierra Leone. Click through to see lots of mathy thingies on the screen, the runners-up, the least round countries, and the source code.’

Source: Boing Boing

‘John Hinckley Jr., 35-years after he tried to kill a president, has won his freedom.A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has granted a request for Hinckley to leave the mental hospital where he’s resided for decades, to go live full-time with his elderly mother in Williamsburg, Va.

The release could happen as early as next week, the judge ruled. Under the terms of the order, Hinckley is not allowed to contact his victims, their relatives or actress Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. Hinckley also will not be permitted to “knowingly travel” to areas where the current president or members of Congress are present. The judge said Hinckley could be allowed to live on his own or in a group home after one year…’

Source: NPR

‘As long as it is “properly packaged, labeled and declared,” one may take Victorian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s mummified head onto your flight. The TSA added that travelers may simply snap a picture and tweet it to @AskTSA if they are in any doubt about the flight-legality of any desiccated human remains with which they wish to fly…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘One of the newest areas of bio-bot research involves the creation of soft robots, where the idea is to take a cue from animals like the octopus and starfish and make a robot that is only made of soft components. Soft robotics is, in essence, the art and science of designing artificial muscles.

Just in the last five years engineers have seen enormous breakthroughs in soft robotics, but a fundamental problem still remains: these robots are still moving at starfish-like speeds. This is why a new approach to engineering robot muscles pioneered by researchers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences which allows for flexible, efficient circuitry is being heralded by soft roboticists as “the holy grail” of the field…’

Source: Motherboard

‘Friends:

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!

You need to exit that bubble right now…’

Source: MICHAEL MOORE

‘There have been instances of humpback whales coming to the aid of seals being attacked by killer whales, and scientists are baffled. Interspecies altruism is adorable when it’s framed as a “cute animal friends” special on Animal Planet, but in the wild, it’s rare. Even so, there have been multiple sightings of humpback whales getting into fights with killer whales when there’s a seal present, making it seem like they’re actually protecting the seal…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘…In more than an hour of unremitting darkness, Trump wove a narrative with the chief purpose of convincing swing voters that the United States is on the verge of collapse from “crime and violence” — and that the only way to avert that collapse is to elect him president…

But it was a con job: a fraudulent, desperate attempt by a losing candidate to snooker the American public into electing him.Trump’s speech hinges on the idea that crime is surging to terrifying levels. But this simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. So to make his case, Trump uses a combination of cherry-picked and out-of-context statistics, incomplete data, and flat out erroneous information to invent a crisis…’

Source: Vox

‘Donald Trump’s speech accepting the nomination for Republican presidential nominee was scary. Really scary. Last night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Elizabeth Warren said that Trump sounded like “some two-bit dictator of a country you couldn’t find on a map.”

“I wanna defend him for a second here” Colbert responded. “He’s not a two-bit dictator. He sounded like a billionaire dictator.” Warren stressed the stakes while on The Late Show, saying that all jokes aside, Trump should not be underestimated. She called the RNC the “nastiest, most divisive convention that we’ve seen in half a century,” acknowledging that people have a right to be angry over issues (college debt, flat incomes, high rent), but “Donald Trump does not have the answers.” …’

Source: Vox

‘…[T]he biggest drawback in picking Kaine, from a liberal perspective, is his record on abortion. Clinton, so far, has pushed hard on choice, conspicuously dropping the “rare” from “safe, legal, and rare” and calling for restoring federal funding for abortion. But while Kaine hasn’t called for overturning the Roe v. Wade decision, he positioned himself as personally opposed to abortion, and in sympathy with many pro-life causes, during his run for Virginia governor in 2005.

As he wrote on his campaign site back then:

I have a faith-based objection to abortion. As governor, I will work in good faith to reduce abortions by

1. Enforcing the current Virginia restrictions on abortion and passing an enforceable ban on partial birth abortion that protects the life and health of the mother;

2. Fighting teen pregnancy through abstinence-focused education;

3. Ensuring women’s access to health care (including legal contraception) and economic opportunity; and

4. Promoting adoption as an alternative for women facing unwanted pregnancies.

Virginia’s restrictions at that point, which Kaine wanted to uphold, included a 24-hour waiting period for abortions and a parental notification requirement, along with restrictions on Medicaid funding. What’s more, Kaine’s actions as governor continually aggravated pro-choice groups, including approving funding for “crisis pregnancy centers” that try to steer women away from abortion and signing into law a bill creating “Choose Life” license plates.

Lately, however, Kaine has shifted his rhetoric on abortion toward that of a generic pro-choice Democrat. “We all share the goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions,” his Senate website currently states…’

Source: Vox

‘Being president of the United States is hard work, it’s important work, and Donald Trump has proven time and again he’s much too lazy to do the job. Not too lazy in the sense of sleeps in too much — he’s clearly happy to maintain a frenetic pace of activity when doing things that engage him, like tweeting or doing television or phone interviews — but too lazy in the sense of being unwilling to put in the time and repetition necessary to master new things.

That is the unescapable message of the interview he conducted with David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times that’s published today on their website. It’s an interview that demands to be read in full, because the full context is much more horrifying than the one headline featured where Trump suggests he would unilaterally abrogate America’s NATO commitments to the Baltic countries and possibly spark a third world war.

The problem with Trump is not just the specific things he says but the casual way in which he says them and the comical “logic” that ties them together. Most of all, it’s the repetition — the fact that it keeps happening without Trump showing any capacity for growth or any interest in doing the work that would make him better at answering questions. For better or worse, Trump is now the GOP nominee, and there are hundreds of professional Republican Party politicians and operatives around the country who would gladly help him become a sharper, better-informed candidate.

It doesn’t happen because he can’t be bothered. It’s terrifying…’

Source: Vox

However, George W. Bush too was not too swift and decidedly anti-intellectual. In this blog, I wrote at length about how appalling the attractiveness of such a stupid man was until I realized that this was part of his appeal to Republican voters. And, I fear, is again.

By the way, I regret that, with such heavy coverage of Trump, I have made you stare at his loathsome face so many times in the thumbnails which accompany my posts. I am considering refraining…

‘During the 1968 election, Richard Nixon successfully ran as the candidate of law and order against a backdrop of rising crime and civil unrest. There was then, as there is now, a very unsubtle racial element at play in the statement. In ’68, Nixon plastered Americans’ TVs with images of protests and urban upheaval, urging the nation to “vote like your whole world depended on it.”

Today, Trump vows that without his guidance regarding Hispanic immigrants, Muslims, and the “threat” of Black Lives Matter, “we will cease to have a country.

“That’s because “law and order” in American politics has always been a dog whistle — a way of speaking in code to one group of Americans to exploit their fears regarding another.

But it’s not just racist posturing. Appealing to white America’s anxieties about black crime was more than smart election strategy for Nixon — it ended up shaping the criminal justice policies of both his administration and the ones that followed. The result was an unprecedented explosion in incarceration and aggressive community policing that continues to disproportionately target people of color…’

Source: Vox

‘Wednesday night, Donald Trump said something that made a nuclear war between the United States and Russia more likely. With a few thoughtless words, he made World War III — the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear holocaust — plausible.

This probably scans like hyperbole, the kind of thing you hear a lot in politics. I assure you, it’s not. Not this time.

What Trump said, in an interview published by the New York Times, is that he wouldn’t necessarily defend the United States’ allies in NATO if they were attacked by a foreign power. This extended, Trump said, to the Baltic countries right on Russia’s border — countries Russia might conceivably invade…’

Source: Vox

‘…The disjointed nature of the convention betrays a serious problem with the GOP right now: As much as Republicans have grudgingly come around to Trump, they don’t seem to agree on what exactly he stands for, and they don’t have a clear message for the American people about why they deserve to be elected….’

Source: Vox

‘[B]y upsetting the Republican Party of 2016, Cruz is positioning himself to be the man who saves the party after the year is over. He’s making a bet: that Donald Trump will fail catastrophically in November and the Republican Party’s next leader will be someone who wasn’t implicated in the catastrophe. Ted Cruz wants to be that someone.’

Source: Vox

‘In a convention full of irresponsible speeches, Newt Gingrich’s may have just taken the cake. Its takeaway message — and I’m paraphrasing only slightly — is that if you don’t elect Donald Trump, ISIS could nuke an American city. He said that electing Hillary Clinton could very well destroy the United States.”The cost of Hillary’s dishonesty could be the loss of America as we know it,” Gingrich warned.

His speech was useful, in a sense. Not as instruction on terrorism — it wrong was in every major particular.It was useful instead in exposing what’s so terrifying about the role foreign policy plays in Trumpism. At the Republican convention, foreign policy is generally reduced to terrorism, and terrorism is hyped to make the world look far more terrifying than it is. ISIS isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a culture war wedge, one designed to make Hillary Clinton into a villain and Trump into a conquering hero. It is base fearmongering, designed to terrify people into voting for an authoritarian who wants to punish huge numbers of Muslims for the actions of a tiny few.

And that crowd, judging from the reaction to Gingrich’s speech, is eating it up.

Gingrich is wrong about everything, Much of Gingrich’s speech is too vague to fact-check — just scary-sounding platitudes masquerading as truth-telling and brave honesty. But the basic message, that the terrorists will somehow defeat America, is impossible to miss.”We are at war with radical Islamists, we are losing the war, and we must change course to win the war,” Gingrich says. This threat is so grave, according to him, that electing Hillary Clinton might well cause a catastrophic terrorist attack, which (somehow) would endanger the United States itself…

When Gingrich gets specific, attempting to actually defend his theory that the US is “losing” a war on terrorism, his speech becomes nonsensical…’

Source: Vox

‘When humans speak up, the little African birds called honeyguides listen—and can understand, a new study confirms for the first time. Honeyguides in northern Mozambique realize that when a man makes a special trilling sound, he wants to find a bees’ nest—and its delectable honey. Birds that hear this trill often lead human hunters to a nest, receiving a reward of honeycomb.

Communication between domesticated species and people is well known, but “the fascinating point in the case of the honeyguide is that it describes such a relationship between a wild animal and humans,” says behavioral biologist Claudia Wascher of Anglia Ruskin University in Great Britain, who was not involved with the new research…’

Source: National Geographic

‘Scientists have long believed that non-human animals care only about survival, spending their waking hours in search of food and engaging in activities that enhance their odds of survival in some way. Now a recent study in the Journal of Mammalogy of the way animals linger around their dead, and touch them, says we’re witnessing something much different than a survival instinct. It’s grief…’

Source: Big Think

‘One way to make sure robots and AI stay on the helpful side is to imbue them with empathy. That’s at least according to expert Murray Shanahan. He is a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London. But is it actually possible to develop a feeling robot? Not only is it possible, Shanahan thinks it’s necessary…’

Source: Big Think

‘Melbourne, Australia’s Transport Accident Commission commissioned an artist, trauma surgeon, and road safety engineer to imagine and design a human built to survive car wrecks. The result is Graham, seen above…’

Source: Boing Boing

Third Eye Blind trolled the RNC by playing Third Eye Blind songs no one wants to hear

‘… “I want something else to get me through this” is the linchpin of the chorus in “Semi-Charmed Life,” the most popular song the ’90s band Third Eye Blind has ever created. The jaunty track is about the allure of crystal meth addiction and the itchy desperation of desiring an escape.

And on Tuesday night, Third Eye Blind inflicted a similar kind of distress at the Republican National Convention during an after-party, surprising guests with messages of gay rights and science and serenading them with some of the band’s more obscure songs, while withholding the most popular song in their discography.

The crowd was not pleased, but Third Eye Blind didn’t care. “You can boo all you want, but I’m the motherfucking artist up here,” lead singer Stephan Jenkins said…’

Source:  Vox

Donald Trump’s first 2 speakers made the subtext text : Though the theme was “make America safe again,” the first two speakers on Monday evening weren’t military veterans, law enforcement professionals, crime victims, or politicians. They were C-list celebrities Willie Robertson from Duck Dynasty and Scott Baio …

Chaos at the convention (but not where you’d expect) : The convention hasn’t exactly started on the right foot for Trump…

An ex-senator called Trump backers “brownshirts,” in case you wondered how the RNC’s going : Former Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-NH) hasn’t been a major national political figure for some time. While he was a leading conservative in the Senate from 1978 to 1990, he faded away after he declined to seek reelection that year… But he surged back into the limelight as a leading #NeverTrump delegate to the Convention…

The RNC platform, explained : This year’s platform bears the distinctive mark of Donald Trump: It calls for stricter controls on immigration and an “America first” trade policy. But the platform isn’t just about Trump…

Stephen Colbert wasn’t supposed to speak at the RNC, but that didn’t stop him: The comedian and host of The Late Show on CBS made a surprise speech at Quicken Loans Arena on Sunday, welcoming everyone to the “2016 Republican National Hungry…

The chaos that just broke out on the Republican convention floor, explained : The opening session of the Republican convention briefly dissolved into chaos Monday afternoon, as pro-Trump and anti-Trump delegates shouted competing chants at each other and brought proceedings to a halt. Shouts of “Roll call vote!” and “Dump Trump” rang out in front of an empty stage, as anti-Trump delegates, including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, demanded a full roll call…

The 5 most uncomfortable moments from Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s first joint interview : When Donald Trump announced Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, it was widely seen as an uncharacteristically establishment pick for a presidential candidate known for bombastic — and often wildly inaccurate — statements…

Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes interview left me wondering if he even wants to be president : On Sunday night, Donald Trump and Mike Pence sat down with 60 Minutes ’ Lesley Stahl for their first joint interview . It got weird quickly. ”

Melania Trump: the 5 most important things to read to understand Donald Trump’s wife

Source: Vox

Conventions, particularly Republican conventions, usually attract protests and violence. But where Donald Trumpt goes, violence all too often follows. And this convention has become a destination for extremists of all stripes. The killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge has people worried that even a peaceful protest can be a cover for extremists, particularly because anyone can bring a gun to Cleveland. The Cleveland police, feeling unsupported, might lash out. And, perhaps most important, predicting violence (like this) might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Source: Vox

‘At the root of these protests is the extraordinary passion Trump has inspired — not just among his supporters, but also for his opposition. After all, every candidate faces some level of opposition or protest, but Trump is clearly inspiring something unique.

So why are Trump’s opponents so passionate? In short, Trump is explicit in his bigotry in a way that people find extremely dangerous. That’s not solely because a President Trump would rule in a racist, xenophobic, or misogynistic way, but also because his campaign’s success represents a dissolution of American norms that reject outright bigotry — a shift that could have implications far beyond 2016.

Rebecca Pletewski, a leading member of Ohio-based Stand Together Against Trump, which will protest this week, had a long list ready of Trump’s worst hits: “He came out of the gate calling for a complete shutdown of Muslims coming into the country and for surveillance of mosques. He’s implied that Mexicans coming into this country are all rapists and murderers, and that a federal judge would be incapable of doing his job because of his Mexican heritage. He’s attacked any critic or opponent with violence and bullying, especially if you’re female. He’d rather call you a fat dog, a pig, a basket-case — just no respect for any [woman] unless they’re pretty and pageant-worthy.” The list goes on and on.

Time and time again, this was the consistent theme for why protesters and activists told me they’re terrified by Trump’s rise: It’s not just they disagree with his policies — although they do — but that they find his rhetoric and attitude bigoted in a way that’s particularly negative and, crucially, very influential…’

Source: Vox

‘Best orchid species ever: Telipogon diabolicus!’

Source: Boing Boing

‘If Britain can leave the European Union, what if blacks left the U.S.? If they did, what would the impact be? Dr. Ulysses Burley III tells NPR’s Lynn Neary about all the things the country would lose…’

Source: NPR

‘The 2016 political season has been the most fractious in living memory. This week, America’s potpourri of turmoil will coalesce in Cleveland as groups from around the country come to support or protest the Republican National Convention. Or more accurately, they’ve come here because of Donald Trump, the demigod of modern American disarray.

Capturing these confrontations will be the nation’s corps of photo and video journalists. And many of them are packing protective gear—kevlar vests, helmets, gas masks—stuff that usually stays in the closet unless their assignment is a war zone…’

Source: WIRED

‘In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 opus The Birds, two outsiders arrive in a seaside town in northern California with a cage of love birds in tow. Their arrival in the Bodega Bay triggers birds of all types to begin attacking the residents in the area, but Hitchcock ultimately leaves the reason for this strange avian behavior a mystery.

Luckily, new research published in Biology Letters which found that birds that live in areas with high human populations (urban/suburban areas) are more territorially aggressive than birds in rural areas might be able to shed some light on this Hitchcockian mystery.

“A possible reason for this is that these birds have less space but better resources to defend,” said Scott Davies, a postdoctoral associate in biological sciences at Virginia Tech. “Living near humans provides better food and shelter, but it also means more competition for these limited resources.” …’

Source: Motherboard

‘I do not know how to explain what I just watched.It should be easy.

Donald Trump introduced Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. There it is. One sentence. Eleven words. But that doesn’t explain what happened any better than “I spent a few hours letting lysergic acid diethylamide mimic serotonin in my brain” explains an acid trip. What just happened was weird, and it was important.

Back in May, EJ Dionne wrote that the hardest thing about covering Donald Trump would be “staying shocked.” Watching him, day after day, week after week, month after month, the temptation would be to normalize his behavior, “to move Trump into the political mainstream.”

But today helped. Donald Trump’s introduction of Mike Pence was shocking. Forget the political mainstream. What happened today sat outside the mainstream for normal human behavior.

It began in irony. Before Pence, before Trump, there was an empty podium, and the Rolling Stones blasting through the speakers. It had been widely reported that few top Republicans were willing to serve as Trump’s running mate. It had been widely reported that Trump was unsure about Pence, that he had regretted the decision almost as soon as he made it, that he had sought ways to reverse himself. Hours before the announcement, Trump tweeted that Pence was “my first choice from the start!”, which is a thing presidential candidates typically do not need to say.So there we were. Waiting for Trump and Pence to emerge. And what Rolling Stones song did the campaign choose? What did we all hear, over and over again, as we waited for Trump to introduce Mike Pence, his “first choice from the start!”?”You can’t always get what you want…”

Now back to Mike Pence…What started as farce continued as farce. Trump emerged without Pence. He spoke, alone, at a podium adorned with Trump’s name, but not Pence’s. And then Trump proceeded to talk about himself for 28 minutes. There is no other way to say this than to say it: it was the single most bizarre, impulsive, narcissistic performance I have ever seen from a major politician.There is no way I will be able to properly described Trump’s speech to you. You should really just go and watch it yourself…’

Source: Ezra Klein, Vox

‘Towns in Mississippi and other Tea Party-ruled states with large (often private) prison industries are totally reliant on state/fed funding transfers to local prisons for cash and jobs, forced prison labor to provide local services for free, and War on Drugs arrests and minimum sentencing to fill those jails. The first tiny steps toward criminal justice reform have eroded the underpinnings of the whole system, leaving the towns facing collapse.Increasing vacancy rates in these prisons mean less revenue (and less free, forced labor), but the counties and towns still have to keep up payments on the bonds they floated to raise the money to build their prisons…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘…[A]n article in The Atlantic describes how paranoia and psychosis are more common in cities and why the quest to explain the ‘urban psychosis effect’ is reshaping psychiatry.

The more urban your neighbourhood, the higher the rate of diagnosed schizophrenia and you are more likely to experience what are broadly known as ‘non-affective psychosis-psychoses’ – that is, delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia not primarily caused by mood problems.

This has led to a long and ongoing debate about why this is, with some arguing that it is an effect of city-living on the mind, while others arguing the association is better explained by a complex interaction between genetic risk factors and limited life chances.

The article discusses the science behind exactly this debate, partly a judgement on the value of the city itself, and notes how it’s pushing psychiatry to re-examine how it deals with what is often euphemistically called ‘the environment’. Link to ‘The Mystery of Urban Psychosis’ in The Atlantic…’

Source: Mind Hacks

Sorry. Couldn’t. Care. Less.

Source: Big Think

Here’s what Penn Jillette has to say about turning into an atheist.

Source: Big Think

This came as a surprise to New York City.

‘On the corner of Bank Street and Sixth Street in the quaint mining town of Wallace, Idaho, you will find a manhole. Initially, it may seem like an unremarkable sewer cover, but step a bit closer and you’ll realize it is much, much more: It is the Center of the Universe.The town of Wallace is four by nine blocks and has a current population of 784 citizens. But in 2004, the mayor made a proclamation: “I, Ron Garitone, Mayor of Wallace, Idaho, and all of its subjects, and being of sound body and mind, do hereby solemnly declare and proclaim Wallace to be the Center of the Universe.” …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘A growing body of research now links experiencing racism to poorer health outcomes—from depression to low-birth weight to cardiovascular disease.

Racism, blatant or subtle, marks the bodies of those who have to live with it. Much of the research, though not all, comes from the experience of African Americans in the US.  “The literature is quite consistent,” says Naa Oyo Kwate, a psychologist and professor of Africana studies at Rutgers. “The more racism you experience, the worse your health experience in a number of domains.”

Experiencing racism, whether it’s violence or insults or more subtle snubbing, makes life more difficult. That added stress becomes “allostatic load,” which disrupts the normal function of the body: more stress means more cortisol in the body means more cardiovascular disease. “You’re continually having to respond to this kind of stress in the body and this kind of wear and tear,” says Kwate.

…Even subtle racism can hurt. In a 2012 study, researchers compared the performance of students trying to solve a simple task after they had experienced subtle or blatant racism from the person at the desk next to them. The subtle stuff—having someone inch away while sitting next to the student—was a bigger drag on performance than the blatant bigotry. Uncertainty about racism in a situation can sometimes make it worse. Vicarious experiences matter, too. A preliminary study in 2010 catalogued the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in students who not only experienced but witnessed racist incidents. The more vicarious incidents they experienced, the more signs of trauma. “So much of what people contend with is not just their individual experience, but also their family and friends and broader society with the police killings,” says Kwate…’

Source: WIRED

“It might be justified to use remotely controlled robots to apply lethal force where such force is justified,” Jay Stanley, a senior legal analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union told me. “As a legal matter, the choice of weapon in a decision to use lethal force does not change the constitutional calculus, which hinges on whether an individual poses an imminent threat to others, and whether the use of lethal force is reasonable under the circumstances.”

Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters Friday that the force “saw no other option than to use our bomb robot” to kill Johnson, and said that prior to using the bomb, Johnson and officers on the force exchanged gunfire.

“It is essentially a jury-rigged version of a drone strike,” Ryan Calo, a University of Washington School of Law professor specializing in cyber and robotic law, told me. “If they would have been justified in throwing a grenade, then they’re likely justified in doing this, which was quite frankly a creative thing.”

Source: Motherboard

A number of nations put out notices this week about police violence and demonstrations.

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘A team of researchers led by Dr. Hélène Rougier of California State University has announced a landmark discovery in the journal Scientific Reports this week. The team has uncovered evidence of cannibalism among a population of Neanderthals at the Goyet cave site in Belgium—the first discovery of Neanderthal cannibalism in Northern Europe.

Paleoanthropologists have debated evidence for Neanderthal cannibalism for over 100 years, since researchers first discovered remains believed to show evidence of cannibalism in Croatia, although those findings were later disproven. More recently, cannibalized remains were found in France in 1999, Spain in 2006, and in other parts of Southern Europe.

The Goyet remains, which consist of four adolescent or adult neanderthals and one child—the largest discovery of cannibalized remains in Northern Europe—exhibit cut marks where flesh and muscle was separated from bone and percussion marks where bones were crushed to extract marrow. The research team concluded the remains were processed for consumption based on the similar treatment of horses and reindeer remains also found at the site. Because there is no evidence that modern humans were in the area, the scientists believe it is most likely the remains were butchered by other Neanderthals. Basically, it’s a clear case of cannibalism.There’s also evidence the remains weren’t solely used as a food source, as some bones appear to have been used as tools to reshape or sharpen stones. Neanderthals’ use of other Neanderthals’ bones as tools has been seen before in Croatia and France, but the quantity found in Belgium far surpasses what has been recovered at the other sites. Eerily, the researchers note that the living Neanderthals “may have been aware that they were using human remains” as tools, although it’s unclear whether the use was ceremonial or functional.

While the discovery represents “unambiguous evidence” that Neanderthals in Northern Europe practiced cannibalism, the findings shed little light on the motivations behind the behavior. In the published results, the research team argues that the state of preservation of the remains makes it “highly unlikely” that cannibalism was part of a funerary rite, although they acknowledge that it’s ultimately “impossible to infer the behavioural signature represented by these remains.” …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Twenty-six times since 1972, the world’s timekeepers have added a leap second to the clock, the last time being on June 30 of last year, when the day got a little longer, even if you might not have noticed.

It’s going to happen again this year, according to the Associated Press, with the leap second added to the final day of 2016, when the clock will strike 11 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds. Ordinarily the next tick would be midnight, but timekeepers said this year it will be 11:59:60, before turning over to 12:00.

The leap second isn’t necessary on some years, if the Earth orbits more quickly around the Sun. But an official from the U.S. Naval Observatory told the AP that the Earth was a bit slower around the Sun this year, in part because of El Niño…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Q: I want to hear what the loudest thing in the world is! — Kara Jo, age 5

No. No, you really don’t. See, there’s this thing about sound that even we grown-ups tend to forget — it’s not some glitter rainbow floating around with no connection to the physical world. Sound is mechanical. A sound is a shove — just a little one, a tap on the tightly stretched membrane of your ear drum. The louder the sound, the heavier the knock. If a sound is loud enough, it can rip a hole in your ear drum. If a sound is loud enough, it can plow into you like a linebacker and knock you flat on your butt. When the shock wave from a bomb levels a house, that’s sound tearing apart bricks and splintering glass. Sound can kill you.

Consider this piece of history: On the morning of Aug. 27, 1883, ranchers on a sheep camp outside Alice Springs, Australia, heard a sound like two shots from a rifle. At that very moment, the Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa was blowing itself to bits 2,233 miles away. Scientists think this is probably the loudest sound humans have ever accurately measured. Not only are there records of people hearing the sound of Krakatoa thousands of miles away, there is also physical evidence that the sound of the volcano’s explosion traveled all the way around the globe multiple times…’

Source: Maggie Koerth-Baker, FiveThirtyEight

‘‘Do-it-yourself’ users of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) seek enhanced brain function; scientific community warns of unintended results …’

Via EurekAlert! Science News

’… [T]he simple act of sniffing can infect you with a bacteria that has a 50 percent chance of killing you.

We’ve long known about the bacteria, which is called Burkholderia pseudomallei and leads to a disease called melioidosis found in southeast Asia and Australia. But until this week’s findings, published in the journal Immunity and Society, we didn’t know that how people contracted it. By studying mice, scientists found that the bacteria is transmitted from the nose to the brain stem to the spinal cord in as little as 24 hours.

“Imagine walking around and you sniff it up from the soil and the next day you’ve got this bacteria in your brain and damaging the spinal cord,” said James St John, who is head of the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research at Griffith University. Griffith, along with Bond University, collaborated on the study.

Even better, once you made that decisive sniff, you might not know it’s there for years and years. The longest-known incubation period for the bacteria is 62 years. In that extraordinary case, one man contacted the bacteria after being taken as prisoner of war by the Japanese in World War II, and had no idea for the next six decades.

“It could just be sitting there waiting for an opportune moment, or it could just be doing small incremental damage over a lifetime. You could lose the function in your brain incrementally,” continued elite-level fearmonger St. John, who added that the study’s results were interesting because it showed that other bacteria could also use this pathway. Great news, for science! Also, he thinks the bacteria could be used as a bioweapon, which is an interesting development for science, but terrifying for us.

Melioidosis kills about 89,000 people a year with symptoms such as fever, bone pain, and abscesses in the liver. Nearly half the population in southeast Asia may have it, and the mortality rate is as high as 50 percent in places like Cambodia and northern Australia…’

Via Gizmodo

‘…The recent victory of the Brexiters in the referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU has led many people to reflect on–and worry about–similarities between support for Trump in the US and support for Brexit in the UK. Clearly, both campaigns have appealed to racist attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiments; indeed, this has been a core element without which neither would have got off the ground. The lack of clarity about what Leavers think Brexit will entail, and the immediate backpedalling after their victory of those who campaigned for it, is also revealing. It looks like a classic case of chickens coming home to roost when overly simple solutions are proposed for complex problems. And Trump’s critics hope the US electorate will draw the appropriate moral from this.

…It seems blindingly obvious that Trump is a narcissistic, mendacious windbag, an attention junkie who manifestly lacks the knowledge, experience, judgment, and character that one would hope for in any individual who wishes to shoulder the responsibilities of high office. Asked by journalists to explain their position, Trump supporters seem to traffic mainly in vacuities or absurdities…

But suppose we bracket the racism, the xenophobia, the hopeful embracing of simplistic solutions, and (in the case of Trump supporters) the messianic faith in an individual savior. Are there, in addition, cogent reasons why people might vote for Trump. I think there are, although “cogent” does not here mean “good”; it just means understandable in rational terms. And here, too, there are interesting parallels between the appeal of Brexit and the appeal of Trump…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘In 2006 historian Ben Macintyre suggested in The Times that the internet had “chased off” the UFOs. The web’s free-flowing, easy exchange of ideas and information had allowed UFO skeptics to prevail, and, to Macintyre, people were no longer seeing UFOs because they no longer believed in them.

Data seemed to back up Macintyre’s argument that, when it came to belief in UFOs, reason was winning out. A 1990 Gallup poll found that 27 percent of Americans believed “extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past.” That number rose to 33 percent in 2001, before dropping back to 24 percent in 2005.

But now “The X-Files” is back, and Hillary Clinton has even pledged to disclose what the government knows about aliens if elected president. Meanwhile, a recent Boston Globe article by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie suggests that belief in UFOs may be growing. She points to a 2015 Ipsos poll, which reported that 45 percent of Americans believe extraterrestrials have visited the Earth.

So much for reason.

Why does Western society continue to be fascinated with the paranormal? If science doesn’t automatically kill belief in UFOs, why do reports of UFOs and alien abductions go in and out of fashion? …’

Source: The Conversation

‘For years we’ve been told to reduce the amount of butter in our diets. Health guidelines, many of which have been around since the 1970s, have warned us about the dangers of eating food high in saturated fats, claiming—and often without merit—that they contribute to heart problems and other health issues. Increasingly, however, scientists are learning that saturated fats aren’t the demons they’ve been made out to be.

A new study published in PLOS ONE is now bolstering this changing tide of opinion, showing there’s no link between butter and chronic disease. This gigantic analysis—a meta-study that included a total of 636,151 individuals across 15 countries, and involving 6.5 million person-years of follow-up—showed no association between the consumption of butter and cardiovascular disease…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Nearly thirty years after an international treaty banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons, the Antarctic ozone hole is finally starting to heal. By mid to late century, it should be fully recovered. “This is a reminder that when the world gets together, we really can solve environmental problems,” Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at MIT, told Gizmodo…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Plants, they’re just like us. Or at least enough like us that they can still judge risk and make good decisions even though they happen to have a few handicaps that we don’t…’

Source: Gizmodo

Via Atlas Obscura, thanks to Garrett

‘Back in December, Donald Trump’s personal doctor declared to the world that Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” While that particular claim is unfalsifiable (although almost certainly incorrect), according to a source with knowledge of Trump’s current prescriptions, that letter isn’t telling the whole story. Most notably: Donald Trump is allegedly still taking speed-like diet pills.

Rumors of Trump’s predilection for stimulants first started really popping up in 1992, when Spy magazine wrote, “Have you ever wondered why Donald Trump has acted so erratically at times, full of manic energy, paranoid, garrulous? Well, he was a patient of Dr. [Joseph] Greenberg’s from 1982 to 1985.” At the time, Dr. Greenberg was notorious for allegedly doling out prescription stimulants to anyone who could pay.

In 1993, Harry Hurt’s unauthorized biography on Trump, Lost Tycoon, corroborated the rumors and went one step further:

The diet drugs, which [Trump] took in pill form, not only curbed his appetite but gave him a feeling of euphoria and unlimited energy. The medical literature warned that some potentially dangerous side effects could result from long-term usage; they included anxiety, insomnia, and delusions of grandeur. According to several Trump Organization insiders, Donald exhibited all these ominous symptoms of diet drug usage, and then some.

The supposed drug Trump took back then was Tenuate Dospan, a drug with speed-like effects that’s not unlike dexedrine.

These rumors say Trump stopped seeing Dr. Greenberg decades ago. But according to our source, the Donald Trump of today is on a diet drug called phentermine—and has been since at least April of 2014…

C. Richard Allen, the director of the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency, called phentermine “cheap speed” to The New York Times. Side effects of phentermine include:

• Trouble with thinking, speaking, or walking
• Decreased ability to exercise
• False or unusual sense of well-being
• Insomnia
• Nervousness
• Increase in sexual ability, desire, drive, or performance
• Confusion …’

Via Gawker

‘Bacteria have been discovered in our guts that depend on one of our brain chemicals for survival. These bacteria consume GABA, a molecule crucial for calming the brain, and the fact that they gobble it up could help explain why the gut microbiome seems to affect mood.

Philip Strandwitz and his colleagues at Northeastern University in Boston discovered that they could only grow a species of recently discovered gut bacteria, called KLE1738, if they provide it with GABA molecules. “Nothing made it grow, except GABA,” Strandwitz said while announcing his findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston last month.

GABA acts by inhibiting signals from nerve cells, calming down the activity of the brain, so it’s surprising to learn that a gut bacterium needs it to grow and reproduce. Having abnormally low levels of GABA is linked to depression and mood disorders, and this finding adds to growing evidence that our gut bacteria may affect our brains.

An experiment in 2011 showed that a different type of gut bacteria, called Lactobacillus rhamnosus, can dramatically alter GABA activity in the brains of mice, as well as influencing how they respond to stress. In this study, the researchers found that this effect vanished when they surgically removed the vagus nerve – which links the gut to the brain – suggesting it somehow plays a role in the influence gut bacteria can have on the brain. …’

Via New Scientist

‘…[C]oncealed carry laws… are now legal in all fifty states. In two decades the number of concealed-carry permit holders has increased from under five million to 12.8 million… More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War.

The media will always focus on mass shootings. While tragic, those are not the episodes that result in the majority of gun deaths. Those occur one by one, on late night streets outside of bars, in homes due to domestic fights or accidental shootings, and simply when someone’s vision is primed for violence and so decides to pre-empt the situation.

…[A] person holding a gun is more likely to misperceive an object in another person’s hand to be a gun…While a fringe community in size, the ‘Open Carry’ sect of gun advocates presents an even more dangerous proposition. Knowing, instead of imagining, that a potential adversary—really, who initially perceives a person walking toward you with a gun as a friend?—is armed does not hint at de-escalation of violence. The human brain simply is not built that way. Add in alcohol and anger, both which stoke and taunt the lizard brain, and the difference between self-defense and offense becomes difficult to discern…’

Source: Big Think

‘Jeet Heer explains that Republicans fell for Trump because of years of conservative policy that told them science, reason and skepticism were bad. Put simply, they were primed to be suckers: “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” …’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Mas Subramanian and his team at Oregon State University weren’t looking to create colors; they were just mixing chemicals together to see what they could produce. They were aiming for something with an electronics application. Instead, they got YInMn Blue—a new and vibrant blue pigment.

YInMn Blue came from mixing manganese oxide, which is black, with “other chemicals” and baking them in a 2,000 degree oven. One of the samples that came out was this beautiful blue color. Its name comes from some of those “other chemicals,” which included the elements Yttrium and Indium.

YInMn Blue has some other nice properties. It’s non-toxic! It’s very durable. And since it absorbs infrared waves with remarkable efficiency, it could be used to help keep buildings cool, if used in exterior paint. Imagine flying over a city of a roofs painted bright blue instead of dirty white or dark black. That’s a very beautiful future…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘This past weekend, the good people of Ålesund, Norway celebrated their annual Midsummer festival, Slinningsbålet. Like most celebrations, this one features eating, drinking, and other assorted revels.Unlike most ones, though, it also features a multi-story bonfire the size of the Statue of Liberty, which towers over the landscape for hours before collapsing into a waterfall of flames… Ålesund volunteers hand-build the bonfire out of pallets, hosting them up with ropes and stacking them into an elegant, building-shaped structure. When the time comes, they climb up their creation, light the wick at the top, and then climb back down again before the blaze begins.According to The Local, this year’s bonfire was the biggest ever, measuring about 155.5 feet tall. Video footage shows the flames slowly engulfing their scaffolding, as several fire boats tame them with constant streams… Eventually, the whole caboodle disintegrates into the surrounding ocean.

“We were sitting on the beach over 100 meters away, but the heat was still intense,” wrote festival attendee and Instagram user thegypsyviking. “I hope the gods are pleased.” ‘

Source: Atlas Obscura

Here are the Presidents who rated most strongly on psychopathic trends, as per a survey of Presidential biographers and historians. Note the inclusion of some of the Presidents rated best by historians (as well as GW Bush):

• Teddy Roosevelt
• John F. Kennedy
• Franklin Roosevelt
• Ronald Reagan
• Rutherford B. Hayes
• Zachary Taylor
• Bill Clinton
• Martin Van Buren
• Andrew Jackson
• George W. Bush

Some of our less-effective leaders were among the least strongly psychopathic: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush.

‘Okay, so, what the hell? Here’s neuroscientist James Fallon.Why do we prefer leaders who are, as Fallon puts it, “world-champ liars, pathological liars, even for the hell of it?” Well, it turns out that they lie for us. We’re totally cool with someone being a psychopath as long as they’re our psychopath…’

Source: Big Think

Via NPR:

‘In his new book, What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins, [Jonathan] Balcombe presents evidence that fish have a conscious awareness — or “sentience” — that allows them to experience pain, recognize individual humans and have memory. He argues that humans should consider the moral implications of how we catch and farm fish. …’

Via The Verge:

‘…An article in this week’s New York Magazine looks at Snowden’s life in exile and comes away with a unique insight into Snowden’s clemency plan. As Snowden’s central counsel, the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, puts it: “We’re going to make a very strong case between now and the end of this administration that this is one of those rare cases for which the pardon power exists.” …’

Via National Geographic:

‘“North Dakota is the last, best place in North America to keep bees…”

The state’s vast, open prairies with a sparse human population and scant agricultural development offer honeybees a safe haven. Buffered from farm pesticides, they can reap the nutritional benefits of pollen and nectar from a diverse array of flowering prairie plants.

But North Dakota is losing its prairie at an alarming rate.’

Dr Drang writes:

‘My stuff keeps lying to me.

My keyboard, trackpad, and mouse always tell me their batteries are nearly out of power weeks before they’re actually dead. All of the printers I connect to at work and at home, tell me their ink is getting low but continue to print just fine for at least another month.

I can appreciate the value in a well-timed warning—it gives me a chance to buy new supplies before the current set runs out—but when the warnings are consistently premature, they don’t have the desired effect. “Yeah, right,” I think when I see the ⚠︎ next to a printer’s name. “Do I look like I was born yesterday?”

The printer manufacturers at least have avarice as an excuse. They make their money on the ink cartridges they try to con you into buying before the old ones are spent. But I don’t understand the motive behind Apple’s premature ejaculations in Notifications. It’s not like my peripherals require Apple batteries.

Most people who are concerned about the coming Internet of Things Age decry the loss of privacy as their refrigerators spill the details on how much milk they buy. I’m more worried about my printer tracking me down over the internet to send me an urgent warning that its paper tray is only half full…’

Via Gawker:

‘An overachieving bigot in Nebraska reached an impressive new level of intolerance this week, filing a lawsuit against “Homosexuals”—as in all of them, everywhere—in a U.S. District Court on Friday, NBC News reports.

In the handwritten petition, 66-year-old Sylvia Driskell claims to be acting as ambassador for the plaintiffs, “God, and His, Son, Jesus Christ.” Appropriately titled Driskell v. Homosexuals, it asks U.S. District Judge John M. Gerrard to rule whether homosexuality “is a sin, or not a sin.” From the Omaha World-Herald:

Citing Bible verses, Driskell contends “that homosexuality is a sin and that they the homosexuals know it is a sin to live a life of homosexuality. Why else would they have been hiding in the closet(?)”

Driskell wrote in a seven-page petition to the court that God has said homosexuality is an abomination. She challenged the court to not call God a liar.

“I never thought that I would see a day in which our great nation or our own great state of Nebraska would become so compliant to the complicity of some people(’s) lewd behavior.”

Despite the suit naming hundreds of millions of defendants, however, the court’s docket notes no summons were issued.’

‘In March, Christy Sheats, 42, wrote on Facebook: “It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semiautomatic weapons.” On Friday she got into an argument with her two daughters and shot them both dead. Sheats herself was shot and killed by a police officer. …’

Via Boing Boing