Livestock rearing accounts for 14.5 per cent of the world’s human-caused emissions, nearly half of that coming from growing and shipping the corn and soy that most of the animals eat. (UN Food and Agriculture Organization). A typical meat-eater’s diet is responsible for almost twice as much global warming as that of a vegetarian and almost …
Counterfeit drugs account for roughly $75 billion of the $900 billion global pharmaceutical market — and about 100,000 deaths a year in Africa alone. In Kenya, up to 30 percent of drugs on the market are counterfeit, according to the World Health Organization. Many “drugs” are no more than just chalk or water. Muhammad Zaman, …
Continue reading ‘Some encouraging news about bogus drugs’ »
Isaac Newton once said, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” He had a point. Some aspects of civilization had progressed considerably. But, despite advances in understanding of some fundamental principles, science was still in the Dark Ages. But what would Sir Isaac say now? What we now know …
Earth is on the verge of a mass extinction, the sixth of its kind in the planet’s 4.5 -billion–year history, and it’s all humanity’s fault. Thus a new study in the journal Science Advances (see below) which found that over the past century, 69 mammal species have gone extinct, along with some 400 other types of …
Continue reading ‘Maybe preaching to the choir, but here goes!’ »
The Italian philologist, Lorenzo Valla, studied the Latin document “The Donation of Constantine”, which purported to the legitimize the land grab of the Western Roman Empire by the Catholic Church. Using historical, linguistic and philological evidence in 1440, he pronounced it a fake. He found that words and constructions in the document could not possibly have …
