NYTimes | KANSAS CITY is known for its barbecue, bebop and easy-does-it Midwestern charm. But a decade-long effort to revitalize the city’s downtown has transformed this former jazz mecca, which straddles the Kansas-Missouri border, back into a culturally rich metropolis. The city’s standing will be further bolstered next year when the much-anticipated Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opens, giving a sleek new home to the symphony, opera and ballet. True, Kansas City is no backwater, but don’t expect high polish. In fact, it’s the city’s unvarnished grit that may be its best asset.
TheEconomicPopulist |Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is struggling to save his city from fiscal calamity. Unemployment is at a record 28% and rising, while home prices have plunged 39% since 2007. The 66-year-old Bing, a former NBA all-star with the Detroit Pistons who took office 10 months ago, faces a $300 million budget deficit—and few ways to make up the difference.
Against that bleak backdrop, Wall Street is squeezing one of America's weakest cities for every penny it can. A few years ago, Detroit struck a derivatives deal with UBS (UBS) and other banks that allowed it to save more than $2 million a year in interest on $800 million worth of bonds. But the fine print carried a potentially devastating condition. If the city's credit rating dropped, the banks could opt out of the deal and demand a sizable breakup fee. That's precisely what happened in January: After years of fiscal trouble, Detroit saw its credit rating slashed to junk. Suddenly the sputtering Motor City was on the hook for a $400 million tab.
What most often happened is that Wall Street rating agencies, the same agencies implicated in corrupt business practices, downgraded the municipal bonds, thus turning the the financial deals into an albatross for broke cities, but a profitable one for Wall Street.
Detroit is hardly alone. No state in the union has been spared the backlash of a one-sided financial deal that transferred public wealth to the already wealthy. Wall Street is raking in huge amounts of money from our broke cities and states at the worst possible time. The SEIU did a study which shows the country's municipal governments losing $1.25 Billion just from these interest rate swap deals alone.
"Elected officials are simply no match for the investment banker that's selling the deal."
Yet in conservative political circles there is little blame directed at Wall Street. They would rather blame the guy picking up their garbage for his $45,000 a year wage, than they would denounce the investment banker who tricked their city government out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Can these people even do math?
The logic of this attitude reminds me of someone who drives all the way across town to "save" a couple nickles on gas, while blindly shoving thousands of dollars into their 401k that someone they've never met on Wall Street manages. Matt Taibbi wrote about this phenomenon last year.
The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over.
Taibbi describes it as a "peasant mentality". I agree. However, Taibbi doesn't take the logical next step and tells us what it all means - neofeudalism.
joebageant | Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.
This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.
The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.
For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.
However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape. Go live in a shack in the woods. Call that escape. But everything in the outside world continues to run in accordance with the humming energy of the hologram. There is no cutting our umbilical link to the womb of this illusion, this mass hallucination. There is only getting a longer umbilical cord, closing your eyes, and pretending that what the rest of the nation does has no effect on you. We were all born and raised in that womb. We can no more divorce the neurochemistry and consciousness it shaped in us, than we can deny that we had an earthly mother and are of her tissue. Our consciousness is born of the hologram's connective neural and electrical tissue.
RidingtheRubicon | I'll concede that my personal struggles predisposed me to Doomerism. If I were a rich, happily-married screenwriter living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, I probably wouldn't care a tinker's cuss for Peak Oil. (Shout-out to Frank McCourt!) But I'm a 32-year-old temp living with my parents, so I'm far more receptive to apocalyptic theories. At the same time, I don't think my beliefs are any less valid than those of my successful, parallel-universe doppelganger. Just because I'm more likely to look on the dark side doesn't mean I'm more likely to be wrong. It just depends what era you're living in. Here in the U.S. of A. we've had Happy Days for almost 65 years in a row. Sure, there have been some bumps in the road, but overall our material comforts have been good and getting better (nearly) all the time. Therefore, people who look on the bright side have generally been right for the last 65 years. Now I think we've entered an epoch when the Doomers will be right most of the time.
Again, I must come clean and admit that I'm looking forward to collapse. (I'm using "collapse" in the anthropological sense, meaning only a re-simplification of society, without the catastrophic connotation the term has accumulated.) The process would be difficult, the resulting turmoil and loss of life could be horrific, but the alternative, in my opinion, would be worse. The status quo has devastated the biosphere and impoverished perhaps a billion or more people. Some would say those people were even poorer before, but whatever creature comforts the global capitalist system has given them have been more than negated by the social, emotional, spiritual and (usually) physical dislocation it has forced on them. I realize these are broad generalizations. I make them because I feel that dislocation and despoilment in myself, and I think our way of life is the cause of it.
Re-simplifying our society could improve our lives tremendously. Instead of spiritual alienation, we could again feel connected to the land, the wildlife and the seasons (and there might not be so much Seasonal Affective Disorder). Instead of social isolation, we could again live in community with our neighbors. Instead of competition, we could provide for ourselves by working cooperatively. This is the Sunny Side of Collapse. It may be (ironically) Utopian, but I think the disintegration of capitalism would strip us of many of our paranoid, competitive tendencies. This may be what truly isolates we Doomers, the fact that inside every one of us is a Utopian. We reject society as it is, yet still believe we'll embrace a society forged in the crucible of apocalypse. We're funny that way.
Bytesize Biology | An article published today in Science shows the first case of animals synthesizing carotenoids. Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik form the University of Arizona looked at the recently sequenced genome of the pea aphid. The pea aphid is known for having two different colors: green and red. It was not very clear though how the aphids got their color. Aphids feed on sap, and sap does not contain carotenoids. When looking at the genomes of the aphids, Moran and Jarvik found that they contained genes for synthesizing carotenoids: this is the first time carotenoid synthesizing genes are found in animals. The question they naturally asked is “where did those genes come from”? The animal kingdom does not contain genes for making carotenoids, so how come aphids have them? Indeed, when they looked for the most similar genes to the aphid carotenoid synthesizing genes they found that they came from fungi, which means they somehow jumped between fungi and aphids, in a process known as horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal gene transfer is not unheard-of in animals, and is actually quite common in plants (yeah, fungi are not plants, I know that), but this is the first time someone has shown a jump from fungi to animals, and that the trait that this gene conveys — color — became embedded and functional in the genome.
Aphid color is important: red aphids get picked easily by predators off green plants, and vice-versa. So there is an evolutionary aspect here: the carotenoid genes play a role in the predator-driven selection of aphids. So in the case of aphids, as opposed to puffins and flamingo, the selective pressure is that of predation, not of mating. (I’ll refrain from comments about Auntie Mae.)
"Long ago, an ancestor to today's pea aphid somehow internalized a large important chunk of DNA from a fungus. This DNA now allows the aphid to generate its own carotenoid molecules. All animals need carotenoids for body functions as important as eyesight. However this aphid is the only organism in the Animal Kingdom so far to have been reported capable of producing it internally. The rest of us must forage for foods such as carrots, containing carotenoids. The precise way the DNA transfer occurred is not yet understood; however patterns within the DNA conclusively show a link to a fungus. DNA transfer from fungus to animal is unprecedented." (text taken from the NSF announcement). Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
As an aside, many of our pseudogenes and other contents of “junk DNA” are thought to have been acquired by horizontal gene transfer. Still, this is the first time a case of gene transfer that is so clear between two different kingdoms. However, I have the sneaking suspicion that as we sequence more animal, plant, fungal and other genomes of multicellular organism, we would find more cases of “large-leap” HGT of functional genes happening: we just don’t have enough genomes yet to appreciate the frequency of these occurrences! Fist tap Dale.
The Scientist | Scientists are one step closer to creating molecular robots that may eventually perform complex tasks, such as building nanomolecules or delivering drugs to target tissues.
They have constructed DNA-based robots that can walk along a specific path unaided or collect various nanoparticles along an assembly line, according to two studies published this week in Nature.
"This has the feel to me of the beginning of a technology revolution," said Andrew Ellington, an evolutionary engineer at the University of Texas at Austin and the vice president of the International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering, who was not involved in the research. "This work will absolutely pave the way for how you build molecular robots."
The robots built in one study are a type of DNA walker, called a molecular "spider." They are minute, mobile molecules that move along a flat surface made out of folded DNA, known as DNA origami, binding to and unbinding from the surface as they go.
The movement of these spiders is largely random, however, said biochemist and study co-author Milan Stojanovic of Columbia University. But together with several other big players in the nanotechnology and DNA computing fields, including Nils Walter of the University of Michigan, Erik Winfree of the California Institute of Technology, and Hao Yan of Arizona State University, Stojanovic designed a DNA origami surface that directed the DNA spider down a specified path (see video).
"You just have to start it, and it walks the path," said chemist Kurt Gothelf, director of Centre for DNA Nanotechnology at Aarhus University in Denmark, who was not involved in the research.
Neurological Correlates | Now take leptin, and preferably take it for a coupleahundredmil or so, that’s about how much money had been thrown at that molecule trying to figure out if it was a drug. Leptin is one of those molecules that has had hundreds of zillions of dollars thrown at it in hopes that it could be a miracle drug. It never was. It made genetically leptin-deficient mice skinny. A new company is running the clinical trials taking a combination approach, and the reports are good so far.
Leptin, though, is a four helical bundle and very cytokine-like. (E.g., here).And, cytokines live and work in the immune system.
So, being the anti-Occam, our new theory is that the immune system controls everything, and therefore it must simply be aliens that have taken over our bodies and are instructing us to carry out their will. Maybe not the most parsimonious explanation, but still.
LiveScience | Bacteria and other germs latch on to clumps of decaying matter floating in the ocean, creating "germ islands" that could spread disease, a new study reveals.
When plants and animals near the surface of the ocean die, they decay and gradually fall to the seafloor. This dead matter can clump together with sand, soot, fecal matter and other material to form what is called "marine snow," so named because it looks like tiny bits of white fluff. Marine snow continuously rains down on the deep ocean, feeding many of the creatures that dwell there.
A group of scientists studying marine snow found that these clumps, or aggregates, may act as island-like refuges for pathogens, the general term for disease-causing organisms or germs, such as bacteria and viruses. (The "island" term comes from the comparison of the existence of pathogens on marine snow with the way insects, amphibians and other creatures establish homes and persist on remote islands in the oceans.)
The scientists are evaluating the degree to which aggregates made up of this decaying organic matter provide a favorable microclimate for aquatic pathogens. These "refuges" seem to protect pathogens from stressors, such as sunlight and salinity (amount of salt in the water) changes, and from predators. They also might provide sources of nourishment for the pathogens.
"If the microclimate is favorable, aggregates likely facilitate the persistence, prevalence and dispersal of aquatic pathogens," said study team member Fred Dobbs of Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Va.
The researchers found the bacteria had an increased metabolism (meaning they were more active), and a greater diversity, when living on individual organic aggregates compared with those in the surrounding water. These results indicate that aggregates might be potential reservoirs and vectors for aquatic pathogens.
"We've shown, for example, that vibrios [a type of pathogen] proliferate in aggregates and decline in adjacent, aggregate-free water," the authors wrote in the paper describing their findings, which is included in the May 4 issue of the journal Aquatic Microbial Ecology.
Current models developed to look at the transmission of waterborne diseases and illnesses, however, don't consider the benefits microorganisms gain from hitching a ride on marine snow.
Globalresearch | The existence of a "Great Depression" on the scale of the 1930s, while often acknowledged, is overshadowed by an unbending consensus: "The economy is on the road to recovery".
While there is talk of an economic renewal, Wall Street commentators have persistently and intentionally overlooked the fact that the financial meltdown is not simply composed of one bubble – the housing real estate bubble – which has already burst. In fact, the crisis has many bubbles, all of which dwarf the housing bubble burst of 2008.
Although there is no fundamental disagreement among mainstream analysts on the occurrence of an economic recovery, there is heated debate as to when it will occur, whether in the next quarter, or in the third quarter of next year, etc. Already in early 2010, the "recovery" of the U.S. economy had been predicted and confirmed through a carefully worded barrage of media disinformation. Meanwhile, the social plight of increased unemployment in America has been scrupulously camouflaged. Economists view bankruptcy as a microeconomic phenomenon.
The media reports on bankruptcies, while revealing local-level realities affecting one or more factories, fail to provide an overall picture of what is happening at the national and international levels. When all these simultaneous plant closures in towns and cities across the land are added together, a very different picture emerges: entire sectors of a national economy are closing down.
Public opinion continues to be misled as to the causes and consequences of the economic crisis, not to mention the policy solutions. People are led to believe that the economy has a logic of its own which depends on the free interplay of market forces, and that powerful financial actors, who pull the strings in the corporate boardrooms, could not, under any circumstances, have willfully influenced the course of economic events.
The relentless and fraudulent appropriation of wealth is upheld as an integral part of "the American dream", as a means to spreading the benefits of economic growth. As conveyed by Michael Hudson, the myth becomes entrenched that "without wealth at the top, there would be nothing to trickle down." Such flawed logic of the business cycle overshadows an understanding of the structural and historical origins of the global economic crisis.
MotherJones | What unites the Vatican, lefties, conservatives, environmentalists, and scientists in a conspiracy of silence? Population.
"Using United Nations projections of fertility, and projecting statistically through the lifespan of the mother's line—some lineages being short-lived, others indefinitely long—an American child born today adds an average 10,407 tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of her mother. That's almost six times more CO2 than the mother's own lifetime emissions. Furthermore, the ecological costs of that child and her children far outweigh even the combined energy-saving choices from all a mother's other good decisions, like buying a fuel-efficient car, recycling, using energy-saving appliances and lightbulbs. The carbon legacy of one American child and her offspring is 20 times greater than all those other sustainable maternal choices combined." (See chart ["Little Bundle of Carbon"].)
Murtaugh's research shows that even though India has a much larger population and a higher rate of population growth than the US, its overall carbon legacy is vastly reduced, due to its population's drastically lower levels of consumption combined with shorter lifespans (63.8 years on average for India, versus 80.2 years for the US). At current rates, an American child has 55 times the carbon legacy of a child born to a family in India. While India is conservatively predicted to grow by 400 million people by 2050, the US is projected to grow by 86 million. But take those additional Americans and factor in their 55-times-higher carbon legacy (at current national consumption rates), and they will equal the legacy of 4.7 billion Indians.
"The irony," says Ramdas of the Global Fund for Women, "is that just as some Americans are starting to learn to live more like traditional Indians—becoming vegetarian, buying locally, eating organic—aspiring middle-class Indians are trying to live more like over consuming Americans. The question really is, which kind of people do we want less of?"
NYTimes | For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.
But not this year.
On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
The Scientist | Ever since the U.S. government has taken steps to protect and encourage research involving pathogens that could be used as biological weapons, that research has become much less efficient, according to a new analysis.
Though funding for research on so-called "select agents," or pathogens that can be used as weapons, has shot through the roof, and the number of papers using those organisms has risen in recent years, the work has become up to five times less efficient -- meaning, the same amount of funding produces fewer papers than it did before.
"The price of the research was multiplied by maybe a factor of 5 for anthrax and maybe a factor of 2 for Ebola," said Carnegie Mellon University associate professor Elizabeth Casman, who led an analysis of the select agent literature that is published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Casman told The Scientist that her group found, for example, that prior to 2002, an average of 17 papers on anthrax were published for every $1 million of funding, whereas after 2002, that average dropped to 3.
At issue, according to the analysis, are two laws designed to regulate select agent research: the PATRIOT Act and the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, enacted in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
The laws' new regulations govern the exhaustive documentation of the transportation, guarding, and use of select agents. As a result, they are burying researchers studying select agents with administrative duties, Casman noted. Researchers to whom Casman spoke "all complained of the paperwork," she said. "A lot of it, they just find overwhelming."
Some researchers told Casman that their work took twice as long to carry out because of all the paperwork related to select agents, and that money was being diverted from research expenses to pay for things like security cameras, hiring guards, and building walls. "It's expensive to comply with the regulations," Casman said.
JoeBageant | Many of my essays were born in an attempt to communicate working class alienation, separation and rage -- which is the same as middle class rage, but self-described and expressed differently. Most of the liberal thinkers I know still do not grasp that the anxiety working people have, even the Tea Partiers, are rooted in the same things as their own. Yes, the right is definitely cruel. And yes, it can by now be called fascist. However, to deal with what has happened, one must come to grips with what produced the internal distrust upon which fascist empires are built.
The brutal way Americans were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude nearly all Americans. Most foreigners too. This is to say nothing of how our system replaced our humanity with ideology, our liberty with money, and fostered fascist nationalism through profound degeneration of the people's mind and spirit. It's not as if one can ever escape that sort of thing, either by going to a place like Mexico, getting drunk or whatever. We are made in Americas' image, whether we admit it or not, and America's image is the face on a ten dollar bill
Liberal or conservative, money is what we care about -- period. From birth, the empire has made one thing very clear to us: If you do not produce or acquire enough of the green stuff, meet the quota, you will be ground beneath the heel of the machine we call a society. No universal health insurance or higher education, no guaranteed minimum income, no worker rights, nothing for you suckers but the tab. So keep humping.
With such a national ethos, who can blame Americans for caring most profoundly about money? Everything is secondary to money. The future of the world's children, the planet, everything. I've been watching the horrific BP oil spill on CNN (doncha love the way they call it a "spill," as if it was a cup of coffee?) The first and biggest ongoing question has been, "Who is going to pay for it?" Right off hand I'd say the fish, birds and wetlands will pay for it, along with future generations. One quart of motor oil will pollute 250,000 gallons of water, and already there have been millions of gallons of oil blasted into the earth's waters from this single spill. Yet the big question has been "Whose money and how much is going to change hands here?"
steadystate.org | I introduced the trophic theory in chapter 3 of Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train. The theory, in a nutshell, is that the volume of real money (adjusted for inflation) in an economy is a pretty good indicator of the ecological impact of that economy. I believe that the trophic theory of money should become the principle monetary framework in ecological economics, and am grateful that it will be presented in the second edition of the Daly and Farley textbook.
Let’s review the basics here. In ecology, or the economy of nature, “trophic” refers to the flow of energy and nutrients. The lowest trophic level is the producers, or plants that produce their own food in the process of photosynthesis. Herbivorous animals eat plants, and carnivorous animals eat herbivores. That’s the economy of nature in a nutshell. No plants, no animals. In other words, plants are the foundation in the economy of nature, and they must be productive enough to produce more food than needed only for their own reproduction. There has to be surplus plant production in order for herbivores to exist and, in turn, enough herbivores to support the carnivores.
In the human economy, the producers are farmers. Only with an agricultural surplus can there be a division of labor into manufacturing and service sectors. There are, of course, complex nuances to trophic theory, whether applied to the economy of nature or the human economy. I have addressed some of these nuances in the journal Conservation Biology and in our CASSE fact sheet on the Trophic Structure of the Economy. If, for example, you’re wondering where the service providers fit in these trophic levels, I recommend the article in Conservation Biology.
Here, we’ll stick with the basics and tie this trophic theory right back to the origin of money. By “origin,” I’m not referring to the development in the human mind of abstract exchange value, nor to the evolution of monetary instruments from wampum to legal tender. Rather, I am referring to the agricultural and extractive surplus that frees the hands for the division of labor and makes money a meaningful concept and a useful tool of exchange. More real money means more agricultural surplus and therefore more environmental impact.
“Real” money, as we know, means adjusted for inflation. In the simplest of terms, inflation means rising prices, which makes your money worth less. The problem with this simple definition is that it puts the focus on money, so monetary policy miracles are sought to fix the problem. What gets overlooked is that the prices are of real things, real goods and services. That’s why inflation is measured using baskets of goods and services ranging from milk to shirts to haircuts. Even funeral expenses go into the calculation of inflation.
All of these real goods and services occupy some portion of the economic trophic structure. Because this trophic structure as a whole can only increase with increasing agricultural and extractive surplus, an expanding real money supply represents an increasing environmental impact. To think otherwise is to fall into the fallacious trap that “there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment.” So the trophic theory of money helps to explain why there is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, and why that conflict cannot be solved by throwing evermore money at it.
The trophic theory of money also helps to explain financial and monetary crises. The monetary authorities and banks can extend credit and expand the money supply all they want, but if the capacity of the planet to generate more real money has been exceeded, credit leads to default, and the expanded money supply becomes “unreal” or inflated.
The main thing to remember, though, is that money – real money – represents a unit of pressure on the environment. Benjamin Franklin said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Accounting for inflation, we might say, “A dollar spent is a dollar burned.” But what does that mean, “burned?” Let me explain by example.
BBCNews | The abundance of mammals, birds, reptiles and other creatures is falling rapidly
The Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies, a major UN report has warned.
The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) says that some ecosystems may soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.
Such tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death.
Last month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010. Continue reading the main story
Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity
"The news is not good," said Ahmed Djoglaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
"We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history - extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate."
The global abundance of vertebrates - the group that includes mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish - fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006, the UN says.
The Scientist | You may soon be visited by an FBI agent, or a scientist acting on behalf of one. Here's why.
They tried to fit in at this year’s iGEM synthetic biology competition. They really tried. Piers Millet from the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs sported a white hoodie with an iGEM insignia that was slightly too tight. Beside him, Lindsay Hartmann, a Weapons of Mass Destruction analyst with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wore nails painted black—the look of a rebellious college kid. The bracelet with charms of a badge, handcuffs, and gun, however, gave her away.
Around them, student competitors whooshed by before the next round of presentations inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stata Center. Some headed for the cookies and juice trays. Some gossiped about the 11-year-old who made a liquid handling robot out of Lego bricks. A duo of artists working with a team from Cambridge shuttled around a suitcase of fake, neon-spotted feces—replicas, they said, of a digestive diagnostics tool from an imagined future.
In the midst of the giddy confusion, the agents handed out brochures for a newly invigorated FBI initiative. Its goal: Collaborate with the science community to secure biology from those who would use it to harm people, by engineering a synthetic epidemic, for instance. Only, for the campaign to succeed, the FBI will have to bridge an enormous rift between the science community and law enforcement.
“I’m here to deliver a message,” Millet told students during a presentation. “Securing synthetic biology is not my job, it’s your job. Our job is to give you guys the tools to do that.” The tools were printed on the back of every brochure—56 direct phone lines to the regional offices of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, an FBI division devoted to handling WMD threats. The agents asked students and biologists alike to call if they spotted anything “suspicious” in their labs.
Titled the Biological Sciences Outreach Program, the campaign to start a dialogue with biologists about potential biosecurity risks from their science has begun with the synthetic biology community and is spreading from there. It’s being praised by biosecurity experts for its foresight. What scientists think, however, is a different story.
Treehugger | I'm a big fan of scenario thinking. Although no one can predict "the future," several plausible scenarios can be constructed, informing decisions made difficult by many unknowns. A good decision works in all the scenarios, a very weak decision only in one, and so on. The Big Picture blog has a wonderful article, called Oil Slickonomics, in which three up-to-date prospective scenarios for the BP blowout are succinctly described as: The Bad; The Worse; and,The Ugliest. The writing is powerful good at the end of The Ugliest, in which economics are discussed. Check it out - a short outtake follows.
Deepwater and all offshore drilling in the US has been set back for a generation, just as Three Mile Island set back nuclear power development for decades. No politician can win an election now with a permissive view on drilling. Sarah Palin's "Drill, baby, drill" now condemns her to political marginalization. Off shore drilling has lurched to the top of the political agenda in this November's election cycle.
I'll go out on a a limb here: if by elections this fall we are into The Ugliest, any oil money will be absolutely toxic to politicians who have accepted it. All bets would be off as to who'd ever again invest in deep water drilling platforms. Hence the TMI metaphor used in my headline (credit for the idea goes to The Big Picture). If on the other hand the responders pull off "The Bad" BP will be a corporate hero and their stock will rebound. Government Agencies will have regained the reputation they lost from the Katrina fiasco, Ms Palin will have her chops back, and so on. Higher stakes can not be imagined. Fist tap Dale.
In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.
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arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
NYTimes | KANSAS CITY is known for its barbecue, bebop and easy-does-it Midwestern charm. But a decade-long effort to revitalize the city’s downtown has transformed this former jazz mecca, which straddles the Kansas-Missouri border, back into a culturally rich metropolis. The city’s standing will be further bolstered next year when the much-anticipated Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opens, giving a sleek new home to the symphony, opera and ballet. True, Kansas City is no backwater, but don’t expect high polish. In fact, it’s the city’s unvarnished grit that may be its best asset.
