Links for you. Science:
The Plan to Rescue Hawaii’s Birds with Genetic Engineering
The Computer Virus That Haunted Early AIDS Researchers
Resistance fighters (not convinced at all, but interesting)
Theranos Is Wrong: We Don’t Need More Blood Tests
Environmentalists Hate Fracking. Are They Right? The pros and cons of natural gas, explained
Other:
A master teacher went to court to challenge her low evaluation. What her win means for her profession.
Think Pieces About MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE And How I Could Possibly Be Wrong (hilarious)
One city’s solution to drinking water contamination? Get rid of every lead pipe. (despite the article’s set up, it’s actually very cheap, all things considered)
Beware Democratic Party Optimism
Our Awful Elites Gutted America. Now They Dare Ring Alarms About Trump, Sanders—And Cast Themselves as Saviors
On Diaper Stamps
Why America Can’t Quit the Drug War
The Intelligence Community Casts Its Vote for Hillary Clinton
Atlanta Mayor’s Column Ripping Bernie Sanders Drafted by Lobbyist, Emails Show (but there is no influence at all. So we are told)
The sharing economy will screw us all — and it’s retirement we have to be really worried about
Suburban Sprawl Is Not Pro-Family
Why Millennials Love Bernie Sanders
London’s First Muslim Mayor Is Neoliberal Who Will Likely Blunt Social Progress
You Don’t Need Residential Skyscrapers
The Well-Thumbed History and Plainsong Lore…
When Can Fetuses Feel Pain? Utah Abortion Law and Doctors Are at Odds
The Most Successful Trojan Horse Since the Trojan War
In Florida it appears that the alligators have developed sign making skills
Obama Expresses Support For Making Election Day A National Holiday
Politics is Kayfabe: Oh yeah!
mikethemadbiologist
That’s an interesting article on natural gas. Good find. My one quibble would be that it doesn’t point out that for the foreseeable future that a backup to variable renewables would appear to be an absolute necessity, not a choice. The storage problem is apparently a long way from being economically solved, no matter how cheap wind or solar cells get. Nobody who should know, like Steven Chu, seems to believe variable renewables can provide more than about 50% of our total energy production by 2050 without a major breakthrough in storage technology, and some of us can’t afford for our energy bills to be doubled or tripled. Jeffrey Leonard, founder of the Global Environment Fund, recently stated than the producers of German wind power told him that they couldn’t say for sure that their wind power is green because of all the required diesel backup.
Hence, environmentalists need to make hard choices on what is possible. If you really believe that climate change is about to “destroy the world”, building more nuclear plants, hopefully with safer designs, is the cleanest, out-of-the-box-ready choice. However, personally I find the security risks of building a lot of new nuclear plants around the world to be more frightening than climate change. Also, the lag time in developing and testing new designs could be so long and so expensive that all those plants could be a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist by the time that they are ready.
Likewise, any solution that can’t be replicated in the developing world is pointless in terms of stopping climate change. Most of the new population (and new emissions) in this century will probably come from India and Africa. Those people may not agree to consume very few resources by staying dirt poor. Hence, the bridge strategy with natural gas and sensible regulations to spur plugging methane leaks seems the best alternative to me at the moment, based on what I’ve read from popular science and technology portals. New storage tech could change my position, but I don’t think policy can assume a game-changer is going to happen any time soon. Research should obviously be properly financed however.