Southern Sweden may be home to big cities like Stockholm and Gothenburg, but the North is fast emerging as our nation’s industrial powerhouse. The lithium-ion battery cell factory in Skellefrea keeps taking new orders, the State-owned metals company LKAB has made giant investments in its Northern iron mines, and a zero-emissions steelworks has opened in …
Continue reading ‘News from Sweden. Nothing is simple or easy.’ »
Recently, the tipping point concept has found a new application in climate science as a way to explain, and possibly engineer, social change. The way changes in attitude creep along at a glacial pace before suddenly bursting forth to take root across society is a classic tipping point. This process is useful because it moves …
The world’s 60 largest banks have provided $3.8tn of financing for fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate agreement in 2015, a coalition of NGOs have said. While the coronavirus pandemic has triggered a drop in energy use, funding is still net rising. US and Canadian banks comprise 13 of the 60 banks analysed but …
Continue reading ‘So much for fighting global climate change!’ »
Just the other week, hundreds of residents who live near Luke air force base in Arizona were advised not to drink their water, when tests detected high levels of toxic chemicals. Scientists have found these substances in the blood of nearly all the people they tested in the US. No country or region on earth …
Continue reading ‘The decimation of fertility. No. 3 (last comments)’ »
The end of humankind? It may be coming sooner than we think, thanks to hormone-disrupting chemicals that are decimating fertility at an alarming rate around the globe. A new book called Countdown, by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, finds that sperm counts …
Women are having fewer children than at any time on record. What are the implications? The U.S.’s total fertility rate, or the number of babies each woman is expected to have during her lifetime, reached a record low of 1.705 births per woman (that’s 1 point 705!)in 2019, the latest year for which data is …
A Russian academic has said that humans will one day be able to live forever and bring the dead back to life. “Death seems to be a permanent event, but there is no actual proof of its irreversibility,” said “transhumanist” Alexey Turchin. He added that there are four different paths to indefinite life so that …
John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump’s former intelligence director, recently said: “There are a lot more sightings of UFOs than have been made public.” He continued that in some of the cases “we don’t have good explanations” about what the UFOs might have been, adding: “I actually wanted to get this information out and declassify it before …
“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us”. (Bill Watterson) My reaction: Why would any intelligent being from outer space want to visit this riven planet? I write this after seeing the news about the white supremacists and other violent crazies, armed to …
People with extremist views are less able to do complex tasks. The Cambridge University team say their findings could be used to spot people at risk from radicalisation: Our brains hold clues for the ideologies we choose to live by, according to the research, which has suggested that people who espouse extremist attitudes tend to perform …
“If it was racist to call the virus the ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus,’ why do you insist on referring to the ‘U.K. variant?’” —Chuck in Wisconsin For whatever reason, we — media, health experts, politicians, humans in general — have historically referred to novel viruses by their unique new “thing.” But not only is …
More than 25% of Americans are likely to refuse the vaccine, according to an international study Only 11% of US citizens said they trusted their government to be a reliable source of information on vaccines, compared with 30% in the UK. Three out of four Republicans don’t think Joe Biden won the election legitimately. About …
Oklahoma is trying to return its $2 million purchase of hydroxychloroquine and get a refund from the manufacturer. Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt ordered the purchase of the malaria drug in April, when President Trump was promoting it as a “miracle” treatment for Covid-19. Studies, however, have found the drug inappropriate (actually useless, to be honest, except …
Birds fly at tens of thousands of metres high. Ice forms on the wings of planes at this altitude, so why don’t the birds freeze? Birds can sometimes reach astonishingly high altitudes. The record is a massive 11,278 metres by a Rüppell’s vulture that collided with an aircraft. The resulting “snarge” – that is to …
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When cosmologists came up with cosmic inflation, the idea that the early universe ballooned exponentially in a moment, they quickly realised they may have got more than they bargained for. Inflation can happen anywhere in space and time. It happened in our patch of the universe a long time ago, and it made our corner …
