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Ecocentric : A blog about food, water and energy This Week in Eco News - April 18, 2014 Did you know that NFL linebacker Will Witherspoon is also an organic beef producer? Or that it's possible to extract water from the air? Or fuel from seawater? See these stories, along with climate news and fun multimedia, in this week's Eco News.
Amnesty International Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 3 million supporters, members and activists in over 150 countries and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights. Our vision is for every person to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. We are independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion, and are funded mainly by our membership and public donations. After more than 50 years of groundbreaking achievements, Amnesty International is now embarking on a major process of evolution, to adapt to the dramatic changes in the world we operate in, and to increase the impact of our human rights work. We are introducing a new, global way of working -- with a distributed centre and Regional Hubs of research, campaigns and communications -- because we owe it to the people we work for to be the most effective force for freedom and justice that we can, globally.
Buddhism and the Brain Credit: Flickr user eschipul Over the last few decades many Buddhists and quite a few neuroscientists have examined Buddhism and neuroscience, with both groups reporting overlap. I’m sorry to say I have been privately dismissive. One hears this sort of thing all the time, from any religion, and I was sure in this case it would break down upon closer scrutiny. The Big Book of Yoga: The Yoga Family Treehouse (page 1 of 4) Yoga has been around for a long, long time. The earliest reliable evidence we have of Yoga being practiced in ancient India is a carving from the early Indus Valley settlement, Mohenjo-Daro, possibly dating back to 3300 BCE1. By way of comparison, Lao Tze, Socrates, and Buddha wouldn't be born until almost 3,000 years later. So in order to provide a truly comprehensive history of Yoga would entail the work of a lifetime (or lifetimes!). What follows instead is a brief timeline and "genealogy" of the major influences in Yoga going as far back as we have reliable documentation, which is a bit more than 2,000 years or so.
Water Shortage! Ever since the beginning of this nation, Americans have always been able to take for granted that there would always be plenty of fresh water. But unfortunately that is rapidly changing. Due to pollution, corruption, inefficiency and the never ending greed of the global elite, the United States (and the entire world) is heading for a very serious water shortage. Already, there are some areas of the United States where water is the number one local political issue. In fact, water is becoming so scarce in certain areas that some states are actually battling in court over it. Unfortunately, there is every indication that the worldwide water crisis is about to get a lot worse.
Stop the Canadian Oil Sand Madness Now Historically, surface mining has been used to extract tar sands and this method has produced at much CO2 as all the cars in Canada. The tailings, what are left when the bitumin has been extracted, are being stored in ponds. In the tailings pond, the sand, clay and water separate out. The water is sent back to the plant to be reused. This leopard's death is a familiar tragedy The attack by a leopard on up to six forest rangers in Siliguri in the Sikkim region of north-east India was a tragic result for both the people and animal victims of the conflict occurring between humans and wildlife. In this case it was a male leopard, a species that sometimes adapts to moving into semi-urban areas, that became cornered – and as the photos in the press clearly show, the animal was fighting for his survival as only such a big cat can. The tragedy of its death occurred in a situation where the forest guards were clearly attempting to safely stop it in its tracks. In ideal circumstances it would have been tranquilised, removed and later released in its natural habitat away from urban development. Why the leopard was there in the first place may never be known, but there are other similar incidents with happier outcomes, in which the animal was tranquilised and removed and no party injured.
GMO Deregulation: An act of war By Barbara H. Peterson Farm Wars Scotts Miracle Gro has applied for and received complete deregulation for genetically engineered Kentucky Bluegrass from the USDA. Scotts “is Monsanto’s exclusive agent for the international marketing and distribution of consumer Roundup®.” Monsanto and Gates Foundation Push GE Crops on Africa Skimming the Agricultural Development section of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site is a feel-good experience: African farmers smile in a bright slide show of images amid descriptions of the foundation's fight against poverty and hunger. But biosafety activists in South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates Foundation a "Trojan horse" to open the door for private agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, including a drought-resistant corn that Monsanto hopes to have approved in the United States and abroad. The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) program was launched in 2008 with a $47 million grant from mega-rich philanthropists Warrant Buffet and Bill Gates. The Gates Foundation claims that biotechnology, GE crops and Western agricultural methods are needed to feed the world's growing population and programs like WEMA will help end poverty and hunger in the developing world.
McLuhan Meets the Net By Larry Press Communications of the ACM, Vol 38, No 7, July, 1995, pp 15-20 In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media, a classic discussion of media and their effects on society and the individual. Understanding Media helped transform the 52-year old McLuhan from a somewhat obscure English professor at the University of Toronto, to an academic and media star, and industrial consultant. In recognition of the book's importance, it has been reissued by MIT Press with an introduction by Lewis Lapham of Harper's Magazine [10].
16 Tips for Being Productive When Working from Home I work from home. My friends think I am the luckiest. I have all the time in the world. I don’t need to commute everyday. Humans, Version 3.0 Credit: Flickr user Suvcon Where are we humans going, as a species? If science fiction is any guide, we will genetically evolve like in X-Men, become genetically engineered as in Gattaca, or become cybernetically enhanced like General Grievous in Star Wars. All of these may well be part of the story of our future, but I’m not holding my breath. A Map for the Programmable World At the beginning of the year, Duke professor David Goldstein offered what he described as a "confident but uncomfortable prediction" that by 2020, if advances in genetics continue as he expects, they are "bound to substantially increase interest in embryonic and other screening programmes." About a month later, a new company, Counsyl, launched a first-of-its-kind direct-to-consumer testing service aimed at telling couples, based on screening each member of a couple for recessive mutations that could put potential offspring at risk for certain hereditary diseases, offering an early signal of Goldstein's forecast, as well as a not so subtle reminder that, as I've heard some colleagues say, sometimes the future gets here faster than we expect. As the New York Times notes, though the tests aren't terribly robust, and only screens for diseases, and, for that matter, is still in its infancy, the company is already the subject of some criticism. But some experts foresee new issues.
Putting heads together When it comes to intelligence, the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts. A new study co-authored by MIT researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group. Many social scientists have long contended that the ability of individuals to fare well on diverse cognitive tasks demonstrates the existence of a measurable level of intelligence in each person. In a study published Thursday, Sept. 30, in the advance online issue of the journal Science, the researchers applied a similar principle to small teams of people. They discovered that groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments, a finding with potential applications for businesses and other organizations. How universal is it?