Tag: climate change

Climate Change, Fossil-Fuel Pollution, and Children’s Health | NEJM

Review Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Climate Change, Fossil-Fuel Pollution, and Children’s Health
— Read on www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra2117706

Scientists spot a massive group of feeding fin whales | Popular Science

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, a new survey signals that the world’s second-largest animal is staging a comeback.
— Read on www.popsci.com/environment/fin-whales-rebound-feeding-frenzy/

60. Cassandra Quave Thinks the Way Antibiotics Are Developed Might Kill Us | People I (Mostly) Admire

By mid-century, 10 million people a year are projected to die from untreatable infections. Can Cassandra, an ethnobotanist at Emory University convince Steve that herbs and ancient healing are key to our medical future?

— Read on people-i-mostly-admire.simplecast.com/episodes/60-cassandra-quave-thinks-the-way-antibiotics-are-developed-might-kill-us-g1HMIenR

The Amazon is turning into savannah – we have 5 years to save it | New Scientist

We have been hearing warnings about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest for decades, but experts say a catastrophic tipping point is now just over the horizon. Are they right? And if so, what can we do to pull things back?
— Read on www.newscientist.com/article/mg25233640-800-the-amazon-is-turning-into-savannah-we-have-5-years-to-save-it/

Great Barrier Reef: how a spectacular coral spawning event is helping to breed heat-tolerant corals | Great Barrier Reef | The Guardian

Scientists have carefully collected spawn bundles by moonlight in a bid to help save the reef
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/26/great-barrier-reef-how-a-spectacular-coral-spawning-event-is-helping-to-breed-heat-tolerant-corals

Yes, plant-based meat is better for fighting climate change – Vox

The environmental debate over meatless meat, explained.
— Read on www.vox.com/22787178/beyond-impossible-plant-based-vegetarian-meat-climate-environmental-impact-sustainability

Why flat-Earthers are a clear and present threat to an AI-powered society

There are almost certainly people from every walk of life, in every industry, at every school, in every police precinct, and working for just about every news outlet who believe things about artificial intelligence that are simply not true.

Let’s make a short list of things that are demonstrably untrue that the general public tends to believe:

Big tech is making progress mitigating racial bias in AI
AI can predict crime
AI can tell if you’re gay
AI writing/images/paintings/videos/audio can fool humans
AI is on the verge of becoming sentient
Having a human in the loop mitigates bias
AI can determine if a job candidate will be successful
AI can determine gender
AI can tell what songs/movies/videos/clothes you’ll like
Human-level self-driving vehicles exist
And that list could go on and on. There are thousands of useless startups and corporations out there running basic algorithms and claiming their systems can do things that no AI can do.

Those that aren’t outright pedaling snake oil often fudge statistics and percentages to mislead people concerning how efficacious their products are.
— Read on thenextweb.com/news/why-flat-earthers-clear-present-threat-ai-powered-society

Jane Goodall Q&A: Discussing climate change, solutions and hope – The Washington Post

‘We’ve got to get everybody around the world to say — we will not be defeated by climate change, we will not be defeated by loss of biodiversity. We will defeat covid, we will fight to prevent another pandemic.’
— Read on www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/10/19/jane-goodall-book-climate-change/

A World Without Sci-Hub – Palladium

David Wiley has proposed that the federal government take the intellectual property of academic publishers using the power of eminent domain. The fees that public universities have already paid (the University of California system alone paid $13 million to Elsevier in 2021) could go quite a ways towards the “just compensation” for property seizure specified in the Fifth Amendment. 

Recently, supporters of Sci-Hub have begun creating copies of the site’s immense archive in case it is taken down. Their hope is to make Sci-Hub “un-censorable.” But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam.
— Read on palladiummag.com/2021/09/24/a-world-without-sci-hub/