Saturday, July 26, 2014
Armed robbery in Gaza - Israel, US, UK carve up the spoils of Palestine's stolen gas   SHARE Israel desperately covets Gaza's gas as a 'cheap stop-gap' yielding revenues of $6-7 billion a year, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The UK's BG and the US's Noble Energy are lined up to do the dirty work - but first Hamas must be 'uprooted' from Gaza, and Fatah bullied into cutting off its talks with Russia's Gazprom.

       Wednesday, July 23, 2014
That Antioxidant You're Taking Is Snake Oil   SHARE Despite current dogma, antioxidant pills have proven to be a bust. Just this month, a meta-analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that antioxidant supplements "do not prevent cancer and may accelerate it." And a 2009 study found that taking antioxidant supplements before exercise actually negates most of the well-documented benefits of physical exertion: That is, taking an antioxidant pill before a run is little better than doing neither and just sitting on the couch.

(6 comments)        Friday, July 11, 2014
Seralini republished: Roundup-ready GMO maize causes serious health damage   SHARE A highly controversial paper by Prof Gilles-Eric Seralini and colleagues has been republished after a stringent peer review process. The chronic toxicity study examines the health impacts on rats of eating a commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize, Monsanto's NK603 glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Toxic effects were found from the GM maize tested alone, as well as from Roundup tested alone and together with the maize. Additional unexpected findings were higher rates of large tumours and mortality in most treatment groups.

(4 comments)        Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Bigfoot genome probed by scientists   SHARE In North America, they're called Bigfoot or Sasquatch. In the Himalayan foothills, they're known as yeti or abominable snowmen. And Russians call them Almasty. In 2012, researchers at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the Museum of Zoology in Lausanne, Switzerland, put out a call for hair samples thought to be from anomalous primates. In the lab however, genetic testing of the samples showed that they were all from bears, horses, dogs, wolves and other mammals.

       Sunday, June 29, 2014
Facebook knows just how to control you   SHARE Facebook has published details of a massive experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and discovered that through a process known as "emotional contagion", it had the ability to make users feel either more positively or more negatively about things without them knowing it. Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons media select committee, said the experiment was intrusive and he would urge his committee to investigate. "They are manipulating material from people's personal lives and I am worried about the ability of Facebook and others to manipulate people's thoughts in politics or other areas"

(1 comments)        Friday, June 27, 2014
At least 10% of US deaths caused by excess alcohol consumption   SHARE According to the Centers for Disease Control, excessive drinking accounted for 1 in 10 deaths among working-age adults in the United States between 2006 and 2010. Alcohol associated death rates vary across states, but excessive drinking remains a leading cause of premature mortality nationwide. In addition, excessive drinking is associated with an estimated 2.5 million years of potential life lost each year in the US alone.

(1 comments)        Wednesday, June 25, 2014
How EPA Faked the Entire Science of Sewage Sludge Safety: A Whistleblower's Story   SHARE US EPA's 503 sludge rule (1993) allows treated sewage sludges, aka biosolids, to be land-applied to farms, forests, parks, school playgrounds, home gardens and other private and public lands. According to a recent EPA survey, biosolids contain a wide range of mutagenic and neurotoxic chemicals, which are present at a million-fold higher concentrations (ppm versus ppt) compared with their levels in polluted air and water

(1 comments)        Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Century-old drug reverses signs of autism in mice   SHARE A single dose of a century-old drug has eliminated autism symptoms in adult mice with an experimental form of the disorder. Originally developed to treat African sleeping sickness, the compound, called suramin, quells a heightened stress response in neurons that researchers believe may underlie some traits of autism. The finding raises the hope that some hallmarks of the disorder may not be permanent, but could be correctable even in adulthood.

(1 comments)        Saturday, April 19, 2014
Wall Street deregulation pushed by Clinton advisers: led to financial crisis   SHARE Wall Street deregulation, blamed for deepening the banking crisis, was aggressively pushed by advisers to Bill Clinton who have also been at the heart of current White House policy-making, according to newly disclosed documents from his presidential library. The previously restricted papers reveal two separate attempts, in 1995 and 1997, to hurry Clinton into supporting a repeal of the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act and allow investment banks, insurers and retail banks to merge.

(3 comments)        Friday, April 18, 2014
Open Source Seed Project: seeds free to use any way you want   SHARE This week, scientists, farmers and sustainable food systems advocates will gather on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to celebrate an unusual group of honored guests: 29 new varieties of broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetables and grains that are being publicly released using a novel form of ownership agreement known as the Open Source Seed Pledge. The pledge, which was developed through a UW-Madison-led effort known as the Open Source Seed Initiative, is designed to keep the new seeds free for all people to grow, breed and share for perpetuity, with the goal of protecting the plants from patents and other restrictions down the line.

       Monday, March 31, 2014
Japan told to halt Antarctic whaling by international court   SHARE The International Court of Justice has ordered a temporary halt to Japan's annual slaughter of whales in the southern ocean after concluding that the hunts are not, as Japan claims, conducted for scientific research. The UN court's decision, by a 12-4 majority among a panel of judges, casts serious doubt over the long-term future of the jewel in the crown of Japan's controversial whaling programme. It also marks a dramatic victory for the Australian government, whose four-year campaign to ban the hunts rested on whether it could convince the court that Japan was using scientific research as a cover for commercial whaling.

       Thursday, March 6, 2014
Senate Intelligence Committee Pulls a Snowden   SHARE After months of denigrating NSA contractor Edward Snowden and calling him a traitor, the Senate Intelligence Committee walked out of CIA headquarters with classified documents that the CIA claims they had no right to remove. Removal of the documents sets the stage for an epic behind the scenes fight between the executive and legislative branches of government, with the CIA having the audacity to claim that the committee charged with overseeing their activities has no right to oversee their activities.

       Monday, February 17, 2014
Easy childhood vaccine opt-outs lead to increased whooping cough   SHARE Easy exemptions from childhood vaccinations in some states have increased the number of unvaccinated children, leading to an increase in some disease outbreaks. In California, for example, the percentage of kindergartners who get their full set of shots has been dropping since 2008, while the rate of personal belief exemptions jumped by nearly a percentage point in that time. Given that the national average exemption rate is 1.8 percent, that's a big increase. During a California outbreak of pertussis in 2010, more than 9,000 cases were reported, and ten infants died. It was the worst outbreak of whooping cough in 60 years.

       Tuesday, February 11, 2014
The Day We Fight Back: Feb. 11th 2014   SHARE Tuesday Feb.11 marks "The Day We Fight Back", with over 300 organizations and 5,000 websites from around the world taking part in an online protest against mass surveillance. You can be part of the protest by going to the web site and taking action. You can also keep track of how many phone calls and emails have been sent to legislators already on the web page.

(1 comments)        Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Major oil companies caught defrauding government on cleanup insurance   SHARE A pioneer in cleaning up toxic messes, Thomas Schruben long suspected major oil companies of being paid twice for dealing with leaks from underground fuel storage tanks - once from government funds and again, secretly, from insurance companies. Court documents show many of the cases and settlement agreements follow a similar pattern, accusing the oil companies of "double-dipping" by collecting both special state funds and insurance money for the same tank cleanups. Some states say any insurance payouts should have gone to them since they covered the cost of the work.

(1 comments)        Monday, February 10, 2014
Syngenta: A case study in industry misuse of science and blatant abuse of scientists   SHARE Tyrone Hayes, biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has conducted numerous experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States and ends up in the drinking water supply in areas where it is applied. Syngenta, the corporation that produces atrazine, has spent the last 15 years hounding Dr. Hayes at conferences, and attempting to discredit him any way possible. Today the New Yorker has an in depth look at the extreme measures that Syngenta went to over the years to discredit Dr. Hayes, and how those efforts have kept atrazine on the market, and on our foods and in our water supplies.

(1 comments)        Sunday, February 9, 2014
Global warming "pause" linked to increased trade winds   SHARE The contentious "pause" in global warming over the past decade is largely due to unusually strong trade winds in the Pacific ocean that have buried surface heat deep underwater, new research has found. A joint Australian and US study analysed why the rise in the Earth's global average surface temperature has slowed since 2001, after rapidly increasing from the 1970s. The research shows that sharply accelerating trade winds in central and eastern areas of the Pacific have driven warm surface water to the ocean's depths, reducing the amount of heat that flows into the atmosphere.

(1 comments)        Saturday, February 8, 2014
Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley sides with agribusiness, will veto bill on bay cleanup   SHARE “In yet another clear indication that Governor Martin O’Malley cares more about big agribusiness than he does about the state’s citizens, he announced last night at the Taste of Maryland annual dinner that he would veto a bill now before the state legislature that would require the four Eastern Shore chicken companies to contribute to the cost of the Chesapeake Bay restoration.

       Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Hewlett-Packard brings back Windows 7 PCs   SHARE PC MAKER HP has announced that it is dropping Windows 8 in favor of its predecessor, Windows 7. Advertising on the HP website declares, "Windows 7 is back.... Due to popular demand." The claim is more than just a marketing statement. HP is now preloading most of its PCs with Windows 7 as standard, with Windows 8 having been relegated to an optional customization. In fact, HP is offering a $150 discount to encourage new buyers.

       Monday, December 9, 2013
NSA spying on online gaming   SHARE The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could "hide in plain sight". Games, the analyst wrote, "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.