Agriculture and its future:
Some interesting questions about the future of agriculture:
Antibiotic Overuse May Increase Superbug Evolution Rate
By flooding our environment with antibiotics, people may alter a little-appreciated but profound aspect of bacterial evolution: the very pace at which it occurs. Bacteria may evolve more rapidly and more radically than just a few decades ago.
This proposition is still a hypothesis, but it’s an intriguing one. While drug resistance is a well-known consequence of antibiotic use, a global acceleration of bacterial mutability could make drug resistance more common and shape pathogens in unpredictable ways.
“Human activities might be altering the fundamental tempo of bacterial evolution,” write geneticists Michael Gillings of Australia’s Macquarie University and Hatch Stokes of the University of Technology in a June Trends in Ecology and Evolution paper.
Brainstorm Episode 73 - Cleaning Water With Sunlight
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Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for medical bills
The lowest price is usually available only if patients don’t use their health insurance. In one case, blood tests that cost an insured patient $415 would have been $95 in cash.
Abdallah*, 12, undergoes exercises in a specially equipped physical therapy room. He suffered a serious leg fracture in a car accident and receives regular physical therapy.
Before the opening of the MSF surgical hospital in Kunduz Province, northern Afghanistan, people in the region suffering from severe injuries had two options. They made the long and dangerous journey to Kabul or Pakistan, or they visited an expensive private clinic. As a result, few patients received the trauma care they needed.
In less than a year, the MSF trauma center, equipped with an emergency room, two operating theaters, and an intensive care unit, has seen more than 3,700 patients. The majority are victims of so-called “general trauma”—road traffic accidents, domestic violence, or civilian gunshot wounds.
More photos: Trauma Care Where There Was None in Northern Afghanistan
*All patients’ names have been changed.
Photos: Afghanistan 2012 © Michael Goldfarb/MSF
The Heavy- How You Like Me Now
I don’t really know what to make of the opposition to GM crops that scientists encounter here in the UK. The opposition raise some valid concerns (gene transfer, will it benefit people or a few multinational corporations etc) but surely the only way to actually test the scientific concerns is in a real life setting. i.e. a field.
Plus, think about all those juicy advantages GM crops might bring. I did some stuff on RNA intereference a while back, you can modify alfalfa seeds not to produce lignin, something not digestible in an animal’s stomachs. Removing that removes waste that doesn’t help animals to grow, allowing more efficient and greater, quantity wise, milk production. Just an example.
Either way, here’s the guardian talking a little bit about changing public and media opinion: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/27/gm-food-pr-strategy?CMP=twt_gu
And here’s a BBC article from a while back documenting a lack of adverse effects GM opponents tend to espouse: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4046427.stm
A personal viewpoint supporting: http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v2/n4/full/embor436.html
And the main opposition against GM that I am aware of, though they may not be that major at all, just seen them in the news: as I said, I believe them to raise some valid concerns, just don’t view the answer to said concerns comes from destroying trial experiments: http://taketheflourback.org/
Fucking beautiful.
When something inspires you to strive for and emulate greatness.
I’ve got a whole bunch of quotes written on my wall, some of them ridiculously cliched (read “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do” and stuff like that), some of them not quite as bad. Either way, most of them were written a couple of years back, during the clutches of a not yet fully escaped adolescent angst, and I was thinking today about how many of them had held true/ I’ve kept to since I wrote them, and how many (I) hadn’t.
It’s an interesting mix.
Ridiculous how, simultaneously, so much and so little changes in a year.
Can’t convey how much I love learning stuff.
Numberphile- Graham’s Number
A number so epic it will collapse your brain into a black hole! Yet Tony Padilla and Matt Parker take the risk of discussing its magnitude. Watch with caution.
See also our video about the Googol and Googolplex at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GEebx72-qs
Website: http://www.numberphile.com/
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Videos by Brady HaranMore about Matt and Tony at: http://www.numberphile.com/team/index.html
Matt’s section filmed at the Champagne Bar at St Pancras train station.
Bicycle-sharing vendor selected by Chicago
Chicago has selected a bike share vendor; same as in London, Melbourne, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington, Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa.
“Alta Bicycle Share, Inc., of Portland and its equipment manufacturer, Public Bike System Co., were chosen over two competing bids to make 3,000 bicycles available at 300 solar-powered self-service pick-up and drop-off locations this summer. The program will be expanded to a total of 5,000 bikes and 500 docking stations by 2014, city officials have said.”
“The bikes will feature multiple speeds, chain guards, fenders on both wheels, a cushioned seat and a basket, officials said. The docking stations will be located in high-density areas, including near CTA rail stations, officials said.”
