Sunday February 07, 2010

First breath: Earth's billion-year struggle for oxygen

Nick Lane
New Scientist

Oxygen is life. That's true not just for us: all animals and plants need oxygen to unleash the energy they scavenge from their environment. Take away oxygen and organisms cannot produce enough energy to support an active lifestyle, or even make them worth eating. Predation, an essential driver of evolutionary change, becomes impossible.

It is easy to picture a planet without oxygen. It looks like Mars. Our nearest planetary neighbour was probably once a water world too, primed for life to evolve.
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Friday February 05, 2010

Would you trade a bigger house for more happiness?

Ashley Braun
Grist

In New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s column on Sunday, he recounts the story of then-14-year-old Hannah Salwen and her dad Kevin, and how a chance encounter with a homeless man catapulted their family into swapping their high-end home for a more modest abode and donating half of the proceeds to charity.

Just reading that story either gives you the warm fuzzies (“So generous, so inspiring!”) or the heebie-jeebies (“Not everyone has that luxury, the show-offs”).
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Friday February 05, 2010

Destination Phobos: humanity's next giant leap

Stuart Clark
New Scientist

Phobos is a name you are going to hear a lot in the coming years. It may be little more than an asteroid - just two-billionths of the mass of our planet, with no atmosphere and hardly any gravity - yet the largest of Mars's two moons is poised to become our next outpost in space, our second home.
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Friday February 05, 2010

Apple tablet excites developers, survey says

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld US

90% want to build software for new device

Application developers are eager to start building software for Apple's expected tablet, according to a just-published survey from Appcelerator, a maker of developer tools.
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Friday February 05, 2010

Killer funnel-web spiders invade Sydney

Kathy Marks
Independent

Several residents already bitten by the plague of poisonous arachnids

Forget sharks and crocodiles: the real menace at this time of year, at least for surburban Sydneysiders, is a backyard spider whose bite can kill you in the space of two hours.
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Friday February 05, 2010

Shrimp's Dirty Secrets: Why America's Favorite Seafood Is a Health and Environmental Nightmare

Jill Richardson
AlterNet

The environmental impact of shrimp can be horrific. But most Americans don't know where their shrimp comes from or what's in it.

Americans love their shrimp. It's the most popular seafood in the country, but unfortunately much of the shrimp we eat are a cocktail of chemicals, harvested at the expense of one of the world's productive ecosystems. Worse, guidelines for finding some kind of "sustainable shrimp" are so far nonexistent.
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Friday February 05, 2010

The Forty-Year Drone War

Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt
Campaign For Liberty

There’s something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations — poison gas, the early airplane, the tank — barely hit the battlefield before the enemy had developed countermeasures and was cranking up his own production line to create something similar.
And this process has never stopped.
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Friday February 05, 2010

Web censorship in China? Not a problem, says Bill Gates

Bobbie Johnson and Tania Branigan
The Guardian

Microsoft founder plays down Beijing's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as 'very limited'

After pouring billions of dollars into the global fight against malaria and rebranding Microsoft in a more cuddly, human way, Bill Gates had just about shaken off accusations that he represented all that was unappealing about aggressive American capitalism.
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Friday February 05, 2010

One Million Casualties of Land Reform

Ann Hellman
Inter Press Service

The seizure of large commercial farms - almost all white-owned - has continued despite the formation of a unity government in Zimbabwe. The country's farm workers say they are the biggest losers.

The workers say that Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders must intervene immediately to stop the violence against them.

About one million farm workers have been evicted from farms across Zimbabwe since the year 2000, according to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
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Friday February 05, 2010

Head of bomb detector company arrested in fraud investigation

Kim Sengupta
Independent

Government announces ban on export of devices to Iraq and Afghanistan

Hundreds of people have been killed in horrific bombings in Iraq after a British company supplied "bogus" equipment which failed to detect explosive devices.

The head of the company, which has made tens of millions of pounds from the sale of the detectors, has now been arrested and the British Government has announced a ban on their export to Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Monday February 01, 2010

UK.gov uses booze to lure London kids into ID scheme

John Oates
The Register

Madchester scheme heads south

Young people in London are getting the chance to get their hands on an ID card, the lucky so-and-sos.

The next stage of the Home Office's attempts to get the cards accepted is to target those privacy-disregarding, Facebook-obsessed youths in the capital. People aged between 16 and 24 years old who hold a current or recently expired passport can apply for a card from 8 February.
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Monday February 01, 2010

Molecular Venus flytrap could munch nuclear waste

New Scientist

The molecular equivalent of a Venus flytrap could capture water-borne nuclear waste.

So say Mercouri Kanatzidis and Nan Ding from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. They have synthesised a sulphide-containing material with a flexible structure that mimics the flytrap's jaws.
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Monday February 01, 2010

The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy

Johann Hari
Independent

You can't appeal to robots for mercy or empathy - or punish them afterwards

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And – at their current rate of acceleration – they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the 21st century.
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Monday February 01, 2010

Russia Bans Salvia, Hawaiian Woodrose, Blue Lotus Flowers, Synthetic Cannabinoids

Stop The Drug War

The Russian government announced Thursday that it has added a number of substances to its controlled substance list and banned their sale. The substances include salvia divinorum, Hawaiian wood rose, Blue Lotus flowers, and 23 different synthetic cannabinoids. Many of the substances are used in "smoking mixes" by users seeking psychoactive effects.
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Monday February 01, 2010

Drinks industry 'seducing teenagers'

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

Alcohol companies accused of using questionable tactics to promote their products

A row has broken out between the alcohol industry and Britain's leading medical journal over allegations that the industry is using dubious tactics to promote its products to young people.
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Monday February 01, 2010

The Obama Brand: Feel Good While Overlords Loot the Treasury and Launch Imperial Wars

Chris Hedges
Alternet

Brand Obama makes us hopeful. We like our president and we believe he's like us. But we're being duped into doing a lot of things that are not in our interest.

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, armies of corporate lobbyists grease the palms of our elected officials, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia, and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president.
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