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Important and Overlooked Stories on the Web

Cost of Voting in the American States: 2022

The ease of voting across the American States is constantly changing. This research updates work that established the relative ‘‘cost of voting’’ during presidential election cycles, in each of the 50 states, from 1996 to 2020. A 2022 iteration is necessary to consider the flurry of new legislative initiatives that passed state legislatures after the 2020 election cycle. Many states made voting easier by codifying changes composed in response to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Other states, over concerns about voter fraud and seemingly at the prompting of former President Donald Trump, took a step backward and made voting more difficult. We learn that Oregon, which has the most progressive automatic oter registration process and all-mail voting, maintains the first position as the easiest state to vote in. Mississippi (49th) and New Hampshire (50th) stay at the bottom of the rankings as the most difficult states for voting. Their failure to move is largely due to these states failing to keep pace with reforms like online voter registration, no excuse absentee voting, and automatic voter registration, which have taken place in other states. Voters in Vermont will find voting much less challenging in 2022 as the state has adopted nearly all the progressive reforms used in other states that make voting easier, not the least of which is an all-mail balloting process.

An Indigenous reservation has a novel way to grow food – below the earth’s surface

Underground greenhouses, emerged three decades ago in Bolivia as a way of trying to help rural communities gain food security. Their conditions can be controlled to protect the crops from fierce storms and extreme temperatures.
Those underground on the reservation use geothermal energy to keep a stable year-round temperature of about 52F, and some use a series of tubes that capture and circulate heat from deeper underground. At the same time, the greenhouses absorb and bank heat from the sun.

A fungus growing naturally on roots is found to detoxify mercury in soil and water

Methylmercury from sediment gets ingested by small fish, who are eaten by larger fish, and so on.  Larger and longer-lived predators keep accumulating it, because organisms like fish and people are very slow to clear it from their systems.
Warming waters actually accelerate this accumulation for reasons that go beyond mercury emissions; even though coal burning, and thus mercury emissions, have finally begun to decrease recently, methylmercury levels in fish continue to increase anyway.  Of course that’s bad for people who eat fish, but it’s no picnic for the fish either:

Why Texas Republicans still oppose Medicaid expansion

The result is that in the 12 states that still reject expansion, more than 2 million people have fallen into a coverage gap, meaning they make too much money to qualify for state Medicaid and too little to get subsidies in the ACA marketplace. A third of those people live in Texas, whose Medicaid program is so restrictive that parents in a family of three are denied coverage if they earn more than $4,000 a year.

How the Iroquois Great Law of Peace Shaped U.S. Democracy

The Native American model of governance that is fair and will always meet the needs of the seventh generation to come is taken from the Iroquois Confederacy. The seventh generation principle dictates that decisions that are made today should lead to sustainability for seven generations into the future. And Indigenous nations in North America were and are for the most part organized by democratic principles that focus on the creation of strong kinship bonds that promote leadership in which honor is not earned by material gain but by service to others.

Hollywood’s Finest

In 2018, three Times journalists set off to tell the stories of three women in the world of the unhoused above the Hollywood Freeway.

‘I kept reoffending’: why unhoused people are choosing to go to jail

by Wilson Criscione The Guardian 11/02/22

But Carver’s choice – purposefully, knowingly torpedoing his chance at freedom – fails to shock those who regularly work with the chronically homeless. They say they have seen it many, many times. Only occasionally does it make the news.

Under Siege The Plot to Destroy Democracy

The 2022 survey found that an overwhelming majority Black Americans believe strongly in the power of their vote to make a difference when it comes to social and racial justice, police violence, and economic opportunity.

Americans die younger in states run by conservatives, study finds

The study authors also noted that American life expectancy as a whole is lower than in most high-income countries, “fall[ing] between … Cuba and Albania”.

The Martha's Vineyard migrant flight has echoes of a dark past: Reverse Freedom Rides

In the summer of 1962, after three days on a Greyhound bus, Lela Mae Williams was just an hour from her destination—Hyannis, Mass. She went to the front of the bus and asked the bus driver to pull over. She needed to change into her finest clothes. She had been promised the Kennedy family would be waiting for her.

Haunting images of abandoned sites overrun by nature

However, French photographer Romain Veillon is making it his mission to capture in pictures the potential result of a planet without people.
The 38-year-old has spent years photographing abandoned places around the world that have been overtaken by nature, with eerily beautiful results.

Agrivoltaics pairs solar panels with farming, solving multiple climate-caused problems

Plants do something similar where they use water to keep their leaves cool enough for photosynthesis so, if you take that stress off them, now they’re using less water.” Higgins found through research he co-authored two years ago that even just reserving 1% of farmland in the U.S. to be used for agrivoltaics could meet 20% of the country’s electricity needs through renewables, to say nothing of the profits earned from farming. “I think the keywords are: more food and better food, less water, extra revenue for the farm. It’s a four-way win for farmers,” Higgins told OPR.

Trussonomics is a fanatical, fantastical creed, and the last thing Britain needs

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/17/trussonomics-britain-prime-minister-liz-truss-neoliberalism by George Monbiot 9/17/2022 The Guardian

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This doctrine insists that politics submits to “the market”, which means, when translated, that democracy must submit to the power of money. Any impediment to the accumulation of wealth – such as public ownership, tax, regulation, trade unions and political protest – should be torn down, either quickly and noisily or slowly and stealthily. When consumer choice is unencumbered by political interference, the market is allowed to become a Great Winnower, sifting us into a natural hierarchy of winners and losers.

Prehistoric women were hunters and artists as well as mothers, book reveals

Focusing on the Upper Paleolithic period of 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, the book highlights the etchings found on stone plaquette at the Paleolithic site of Gönnersdorf in Germany, of a woman with a baby carrier on her back, allowing her hands to be free for hunting and foraging.
The documentarians note studies of skeletons that reveal the strength of the upper arm muscles of women, and a recent finding at Peru’s Wilamaya Patjxa site of evidence of humans hunting big game.
Five burial sites were excavated and six individuals were exhumed. Two of them were found with hunting tools: a man in his 30s, and a young woman under the age of 20. Twenty-four stone artefacts had been placed in the young woman’s tomb, comprising a toolkit of everything needed to hunt and butcher big game: six projectile points, four scrapers, a knife and several chipped flakes of stone.

Cells from middle-aged people reprogrammed back to youthful state

A group of researchers in the UK has found a way to rewind the effective biological age of human cells by about 30 years without causing them to lose their functional identity.  They took dermal fibroblast cells from middle-aged humans and reset the controls to make them behave like cells from a 20-something.  This is the first time such a thing has been done, and it carries substantial weight for anti-aging and regenerative therapies.

Our food system isn't ready for the climate crisis

by Nina Lakhani, Alvin Chang, Rita Liu, and Andrew Witherspoon 4/14/2022 The Guardian

The climate breakdown is already threatening many of our favorite foods. In Asia, rice fields are being flooded with saltwater; cyclones have wiped out vanilla crops in Madagascar; in Central America higher temperatures ripen coffee too quickly; drought in sub–Saharan Africa is withering chickpea crops; and rising ocean acidity is killing oysters and scallops in American waters.

All our food systems – agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture – are buckling under the stress of rising temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and floods.

Even in the best-case scenario, global heating is expected to make the earth less suitable for the crops that provide most of our calories. If no action is taken to curtail the climate crisis, crop losses will be devastating.

Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how to tackle both

Now that we’ve watched Russia launch an oil-fired invasion of Ukraine, it’s a little easier to see this trend in high relief – but Putin is far from the only case. Consider the examples.
And so we were left contemplating a world whose people badly want action on climate change, but whose systems aren’t delivering it. In 2021 the UN Development Programme conducted a remarkable poll, across the planet – they questioned people through video-game networks to reach humans less likely to answer traditional surveys. Even amid the Covid pandemic, 64% of them described climate change as a “global emergency”, and that by decisive margins they wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current state of play”. As the UNDP director, Achim Steiner, summarized, “the results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level”.

Could Putin Be Failing Because of a Lack of Democracy?

Could he simply be failing because of a deficiency of democracy?
Could it possibly be that simple? Were the Founders of our democracy and the builders of democracies worldwide that have now evolved from it really that brilliant?
Is there some sort of practical, mathematical, scientific, and predictable mechanism at work here?
Astonishingly, the answer is, “Yes.”
What all of those analyses miss about why Putin would have made such a disastrous decision is the importance of democracy — or, in this case, the lack of democracy — in Russia.

A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset

Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That’s been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the 2020 election. The report, drafted by the CIA, the FBI, and several other agencies, was released in unclassified form on Tuesday, but it was presented in classified form on Jan. 7. In other words, it was compiled, written, and edited during Trump’s administration. It destroys his lies about the election, and it exposes him as a Russian asset.

Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct

The most insidious threat to humankind is something called “extinction debt.” There comes a time in the progress of any species, even ones that seem to be thriving, when extinction will be inevitable, no matter what they might do to avert it. The cause of extinction is usually a delayed reaction to habitat loss. The species most at risk are those that dominate particular habitat patches at the expense of others, who tend to migrate elsewhere, and are therefore spread more thinly. Humans occupy more or less the whole planet, and with our sequestration of a large wedge of the productivity of this planetwide habitat patch, we are dominant within it. H. sapiens might therefore already be a dead species walking.

This is a fossil fuel war’: Ukraine’s top climate scientist speaks out

“Burning oil, gas and coal is causing warming and impacts we need to adapt to. And Russia sells these resources and uses the money to buy weapons. Other countries are dependent upon these fossil fuels, they don’t make themselves free of them. This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way, it will destroy our civilization.”

The IPCC report, described by António Guterres, the UN secretary general, as an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership”, is the most comprehensive catalogue yet of the consequences of global heating. Extreme heat and the spread of disease is killing people around the world, about 12 million people are being displaced by floods and droughts each year and the viability of food-producing land is shrinking.

Half of US adults were exposed to harmful lead levels as kids, study finds

The scientists from Florida State University and Duke University also found that 90% of children born in the US between 1950 and 1981 had blood-lead levels higher than the CDC threshold. And the researchers found significant impact on cognitive development: on average, early childhood exposure to lead resulted in a 2.6-point drop in IQ.

Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

Climate change is affecting nature, people’s lives and infrastructure everywhere. Its dangerous and pervasive impacts are increasingly evident in every region of our world. These impacts are hindering efforts to meet basic human needs and they threaten sustainable development across the globe.

All life on Earth – from ecosystems to human civilization – is vulnerable to a changing climate. Since the first IPCC reports, the evidence has become stronger: our world is warming and dangerous climate change and extreme events are increasingly impacting nature and people's lives everywhere. This can be seen in the depths of the ocean and at the top of the highest mountains; in rural areas as well as in cities. The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments. They are causing severe and widespread disruption in nature and in society; reducing our ability to grow nutritious food or provide enough clean drinking water, thus affecting people's health and well-being and damaging livelihoods. In summary, the impacts of climate change are affecting billions of people in many different ways.

Canada's trucker protesters aren't who Americans might think

Carlson, Trump and Musk see something monumental here. They're wrong. Whatever the facile comparisons, familiar symbols and fearful words, this Canadian protest isn't a grassroots revolt or even a Prairie brushfire. More likely, it's a winter carnival, ephemeral, a flaring of anger -- and one that is very, very Canadian.

The US senate presents a long-term threat to US democracy

The filibuster has consistently been an instrument of white Christian domination: during the 20th century, it was used predominantly to block civil rights legislation and measures such as anti-lynching bills. However .... Let’s be specific about how undemocratic an institution this is – something that is best captured in numbers: in the current 50:50 Senate, Democratic senators represent 40 million more voters; by about 2040, 70% of the country will be represented by just 30 senators, while less than one-third of the electorate will get to determine 70 out of 100 members of the Senate.

Carter warns America 'teeters on the brink of a widening abyss' in stark op-ed ahead of January 6

By Shawna Mizelle and Colin McCullough, CNN 1/05/2021

"I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally -- the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power -- has become dangerously fragile at home," said Carter, who in his post-presidency started the Carter Center, a nonprofit that monitors free elections around the globe.

It's Past Time For Democrats To Defy the Supreme Court

  The year 1981 was a big one for court-stripping—or, as it’s sometimes called, jurisdiction-stripping. No fewer than 30 pieces of legislation were introduced that year into the US House of Representatives by Republican congressmen that included court-stripping provisions. It was a huge topic of discussion and legal activity among Republicans.

          And a young lawyer working in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, an up-and-comer named John Roberts, was hot on the trail. …

‘We will all die’: In Kenya, prolonged drought takes heavy toll

Since September, much of Kenya’s north has received less than 30 percent of normal rainfall – the worst short-rain season recorded in decades, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. The lack of rainfall has wiped out pastures and exacerbated food and water shortages.

It wasn’t always like this. While residents such as Adow are used to lean times when faced with the effects of droughts – when maize becomes their only meal, the distance to find water extends, their animals become so weak their bones poke from underneath their skin – they are also accustomed to the eventual return of rainfall and, along with it, greener pastures, healthier animals and fewer financial troubles.

The 2021 Made in America Holiday Gift Guide

By shopping Made in America this holiday season, you can help strengthen American manufacturing and support good factory jobs. But best of all, these American-made gift ideas are just really cool! We think there’s something for everyone on your list, but if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, check out our Made in America Directory or previous gift guides, which are linked below. And don’t forget to share the gift guide with family and friends, and on social media using the hashtag #MadeinUSAGifts.

I was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. We need to do more to help exonerees.

There are nearly 2,900 exonerees in the United States. Many are the lucky ones who had DNA available in their case. I lost 17 years of my life, but I’ve lost more than just hours and days. I lost an innocent man who was my husband; I missed birthdays and moments that can never be replicated. My life is dedicated to helping others who have faced wrongful incarceration.

Why the WHO approval of the first malaria vaccine is a big deal

But progress is happening. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it has given its stamp of approval to a vaccine against malaria for children for the first time, after encouraging results from a pilot study that has reached hundreds of thousands of children across parts of sub-Saharan Africa since 2019. The vaccine, called Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, is far from perfect — it produces about a 30 percent reduction in severe malaria in fully vaccinated children, which is lifesaving but smaller than would be hoped for.

U.S. retail operations got lean by making CEOs fat, and now everyone is paying the price

For an on-the-ground example, see Costco. Throughout the pandemic, even as photographers snapped shots of the empty racks at other retailers, Costco has done a phenomenal job of keeping its stores operating not just as well as they did before the pandemic, but better. Same store sales are up 16% in the last year, and Costco managed this while at the same time increasing their own online sales by 44%. It’s done that, in part, by keeping employee turnover at a minimum, which comes from years of paying its employees well, offering them benefits, and respecting their health concerns during the pandemic. If “lean” companies are now finding themselves unable to keep the shelves stocked, Costco is fat and happy.

The Most Detailed Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the U.S.

It’s not a secret that industrial facilities emit hazardous air pollution. A new ProPublica analysis shows for the first time just how much toxic air pollution they emit — and how much the chemicals they unleash could be elevating cancer risk in their communities. ProPublica’s analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable.

Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth

This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics. It is impossible to understand these subjects in isolation because they are interconnected. The same is true of living organisms that greatly influence the global environment. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature of the surface is actively maintained and regulated by the biosphere, by life, by what the ancient Greeks used to call Gaia.

Earth is already becoming unlivable. Will governments act to stop this disaster from getting worse?

These temperature thresholds will again be the focus of upcoming UN climate talks at the COP26 summit in Scotland as countries variously dawdle or scramble to avert climate catastrophe. But the single digit numbers obscure huge ramifications at stake. “We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.

How natural disasters benefit rich people but make the poor poorer – an illustrated story

Government programs that help people recover their wealth after natural disasters end up reinforcing inequality

Pandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful

The secret deals and hidden assets of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people have been revealed in the biggest trove of leaked offshore data in history.

Branded the Pandora papers, the cache includes 11.9m files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

They expose the secret offshore affairs of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers and heads of state. They also shine a light on the secret finances of more than 300 other public officials such as government ministers, judges, mayors and military generals in more than 90 countries.

The myths about slavery that still hold America captive

The idea that an institution that existed for 250 years and has only not existed for a little over 150 years. An institution in which there are people who are alive today who were loved, raised by, and in community with people born into chattel slavery. The idea that that would have nothing to do with what the contemporary landscape of inequality looks like today is morally and intellectually disingenuous.

America faces supply-chain disruption and shortages. Here’s why

The specific policies that led to our supply constrained world are lax antitrust, deregulation of basic infrastructure industries like shipping, railroads and trucking, disinvestment in domestic production, and trade policy emphasizing finance over manufacturing......Take biopharmaceutical equipment necessary to make vaccines. There’s a shortage of fancy plastic bags that you mix chemicals in to make medicine, which isn’t surprising in a pandemic. But the reason for the shortage isn’t just Covid but a merger wave; over the last 15 years, four firms bought up the biopharmaceutical equipment industry, without any antitrust agency taking meaningful action. These firms now have market power, and dominate their competitors, by ensuring their bags can only interoperate with their specific mixing machines. It’s like not having enough Keurig coffee machine pods; the shortage isn’t the coffee, it’s the artificial bottleneck used to lock in customers.......Ocean shipping is the same. The 1997 Ocean Shipping Reform Act legalized secret rebates and led to a merger wave. The entire industry has now consolidated globally into three giant alliances that occasionally crash their too-big-to-sail ships into the side of the Suez canal.

Ranked-choice voting is the best fix for our democratic crisis

“A complicated, complex field simplified with a simple trip to the ballot box, at a fraction of the cost of a full-fledged runoff"

Granted, there are a lot of reasons why the Electoral College’s time has long since passed. For instance, it was written into the Constitution in an effort to placate Southern states who wanted their large numbers of slaves to count in their populations. As most of us know, the Northern states were unwilling to count slaves at all. They needed the Southern states for the new government to be viable, so they agreed to let slaves count as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives......Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight estimated that Joe Biden would not have been favored to win the Electoral College unless he won the popular vote by at least 3-4%. Silver also concluded that Biden would have needed to win the popular vote by at least 4-5% in order to close off any realistic path for Trump to win........

Bitcoin miners align with fossil fuel firms, alarming environmentalists

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, essentially a shared database of transactions, where entries must be confirmed and encrypted. The network is secured by “miners” who use powerful computers to compete in an enormous guessing game that ultimately verifies the transactions. If a computer “wins” the game, it’s rewarded with a newly created bitcoin, currently worth about $40,000. The process consumes a lot of electricity, and the computers generate a lot of heat, which means they require industrial cooling systems that need even more energy.

Flying Microchips The Size Of A Sand Grain Could Be Used For Population Surveillance'

The devices don't have a motor, but engineers were instead inspired by the maple tree's free-falling propeller seeds — technically known as samara fruit. They optimized the aerodynamics of the microfliers so that "as these structures fall through the air, the interaction between the air and those wings cause a rotational motion that creates a very stable, slow, falling velocity," said John A. Rogers, who led the development of the devices.

How Trump with Pence's Help Planned to Overthrow the Election

If Eastman seems like he must be some radical character from outside the ranks of the Republican mainstream, he’s not. Eastman is a former clerk for Clarence Thomas, the former dean of Chapman University School of Law (a private law school for those whose primary qualification is having enough cash to pay the tuition—i.e. Hugh Hewitt’s alma mater), and is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the conservative Claremont Institute. Claremont, as The Daily Beast reported in July of 2020, “has arguably done more than any other group to build a philosophical case for Trump’s brand of conservatism.” And what is that case? As Slate explained one month later, Claremont “masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp.”

‘Havana syndrome ’ and the mystery of the microwaves

Then Ambassador Stoessel, himself, fell ill - with bleeding of the eyes as one of his symptoms. In a now declassified 1975 phone call to the Soviet ambassador to Washington, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger linked Stoessel's illness to microwaves, admitting "we are trying to keep the thing quiet". Stoessel died of leukaemia at the age of 66. "He decided to play the good soldier", and not make a fuss, his daughter told the BBC.  

Adding Rock Dust to Soil Can Capture Carbon

BY SUSAN COSIER • SEPTEMBER 2, 2021 Yale Environment360

The hemp field experiments go beyond testing which amendments increase yields and sequester carbon and examine how much rock dust should be applied for best results. Some sections got 20 tons of rock dust per acre, while others got 40, allowing the researchers to get a more fine-tuned picture of the relationship between the dust, the soil, and the crops. The research adds to a growing body of scientific work showing the potential for these soil amendments to become one of the many measures needed to help solve our climate crisis.

Economists' erroneous estimates of damages from climate change

Here we review the empirical work done by economists and show that it severely underestimates damages from climate change by committing several methodological errors, including neglecting tipping points, and assuming that economic sectors not exposed to the weather are insulated from climate change. Most fundamentally, the influential Integrated Assessment Model DICE is shown to be incapable of generating an economic collapse, regardless of the level of damages. Given these flaws, economists' empirical estimates of economic damages from global warming should be rejected as unscientific, and models that have been calibrated to them, such as DICE, should not be used to evaluate economic risks from climate change, or in the development of policy to attenuate damages.

U.S. boarding schools for Indians had a hidden agenda: Stealing land’

This is because the U.S. schools had a very specific purpose: They helped the government acquire Indian lands. Beginning with Carlisle in Pennsylvania in 1879 and ending with the Sherman Institute in California in 1903, the U.S. government operated 25 off-reservation boarding schools. (Some religious denominations also opened their own mission schools.) At the same time, a massive dispossession took place in the form of the General Allotment Act, which authorized the president to survey and divide Indian lands. Boarding schools, designed to reeducate Indian youth who would no longer have a tribal homeland, went hand in hand with this genocidal policy.

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth’

Book Review Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford

Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over.

Too hot to work: the dire impact of extreme heat on outdoor US jobs’

Southern states will face the largest number of days when working outside is all but impossible. In Louisiana, for example, workers already lose about $1,000 in wages because of days when it’s too hot to work. That figure could increase to nearly $5,000 due to 34 days worth of lost work time annually.

IPCC climate report: Earth is warmer than it’s been in 125,000 years’

Modern society’s continued dependence on fossil fuels is warming the world at a pace that is unprecedented in the past 2,000 years — and its effects are already apparent as record droughts, wildfires and floods devastate communities worldwide — according to a landmark report from the United Nations on the state of climate science. The assessment from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says things are poised to get worse if greenhouse-gas emissions continue, but also makes it clear that the future of the planet depends in large part on the choices that humanity takes today.

Toyota is quietly pushing Congress to slow the shift to electric vehicles’

By Andrew J. Hawkins@andyjayhawk Jul 26, 2021 The Verge

The company came under fire recently after it was revealed that it was the largest corporate donor to Republican lawmakers who objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election. A majority of those politicians also dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. Toyota initially defended the contributions, but then later said it would halt them. You know things are bad for the company when a Toyota spokesperson has to confirm to the Times that the automaker does indeed believe that climate change is real.

The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Help?’

By Eric Klinenberg August 2, 2021 The New Yorker

“A lot of coastal infrastructure lacks surface complexity,” Pippa Brashear, one of Orff’s colleagues at scape, told me. “It’s mostly hard walls.” The scape project will be the opposite. “If you put on a scuba suit and swim around Living Breakwaters, you’ll see something that looks like an oyster reef, with lots of nooks and crannies,” she said. “It’s designed to be messy, with lots of little critters, invertebrates like tunicates, really colorful sponges, young sea bass and striped bass and silversides darting around and finding places to hide. Then we’ll have the oysters, hopefully tons of them. It’ll be teeming with life.”

It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization’

Cecilia Nowell in Albuquerque, New Mexico Aug 7th The Guardian

Indigenous women in North and Central America are coming together to share ancestral knowledge of amaranth, a plant booming in popularity as a health food.

Americas Bolivia's lake Poopo dries up and scientists fear refill unlikely’

Scientists say the one-time lake, which sprawls across Bolivia's sun-drenched, high-altitude altiplano, has fallen victim to decades of water diversion for regional irrigation needs. And a warmer, drier climate has made its recovery increasingly unlikely.

Environmental impact of bottled water ‘up to 3,500 times greater than tap water’

Research led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found that if the city’s population were all to drink bottled water, this would result in a 3,500 times higher cost of resource extraction than if they all drank tap water, at $83.9m (£60.3m)a year.

For Billion-Dollar COVID Vaccines, Basic Government-Funded Science Laid the Groundwork

The idea of creating a vaccine with messenger RNA, or mRNA—the substance that converts DNA into proteins—goes back decades. Early efforts to create mRNA vaccines failed, however, because the raw RNA was destroyed before it could generate the desired response. Our innate immune systems evolved to kill RNA strands because that’s what many viruses are.

Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil?

More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are now at their peak. But despite the overwhelming evidence that Covid-19 rarely kills young children, in Brazil 1,300 babies have died from the virus. One doctor refused to test Jessika Ricarte's one-year-old son for Covid, saying his symptoms did not fit the profile of the virus. Two months later he died of complications from the disease.

How the Supreme Court laid the path for Georgia's new election law

And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines.

From Crisis to Reform: A Call to Strengthen America’s Battered Democracy

After experiencing a gradual decline in respect for political rights and civil liberties over the past decade, the United States is now facing an acute crisis for democracy.

New stars on the American flag? Fresh hope as Puerto Rico and DC push for statehood

But with the impetus of last summer’s protests against racial injustice, and the election of a Democratic president, one of those territories – Puerto Rico – is aiming to become the 51st state of the union. A parallel effort by Washington, District of Columbia (DC), is also closer than ever to its similar goal.

Two of India’s richest men face farmers’ ire over new laws

Two of India’s richest men have landed in an unlikely controversy over farming laws, becoming targets of protesters who allege the tycoons have benefited from their close links to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The new farm legislation, passed in September, will allow private companies to buy produce directly from farmers, moving from the decades-old system of state-run wholesale buyers and markets that guaranteed a minimum support price. India’s top court last week barred the implementation of the law until the court decides on the matter.

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

Major changes in the biosphere are directly linked to the growth of human systems (summarized in Figure 1). While the rapid loss of species and populations differs regionally in intensity (Ceballos et al., 2015, 2017, 2020; Díaz et al., 2019), and most species have not been adequately assessed for extinction risk (Webb and Mindel, 2015), certain global trends are obvious. Since the start of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, the biomass of terrestrial vegetation has been halved (Erb et al., 2018), with a corresponding loss of >20% of its original biodiversity (Díaz et al., 2019), together denoting that >70% of the Earth's land surface has been altered by Homo sapiens (IPBES, 2019). There have been >700 documented vertebrate (Díaz et al., 2019) and ~600 plant (Humphreys et al., 2019) species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more species clearly having gone extinct unrecorded (Tedesco et al., 2014). Population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades (WWF, 2020), with certain population clusters in extreme decline (Leung et al., 2020), thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species

Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy — using methods newsrooms avoid

by Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi Jan. 9, 2021

The investigative collaborative — which relies on both paid and volunteer researchers combing through “open-source” digital data available to anyone with the right searching skills — has been responsible for several eye-popping scoops: pinning the crash of a Malaysian airliner in Ukraine to a Russian missile, unmasking spies supposedly behind the poisoning of a Russian double agent in England and dissecting the racist motives of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque mass shooter.