Cambridge Study Reveals How Life Could Have Started From Nothing – Mic August 29, 2014
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“In the beginning we had hoped to find one reaction or two maybe, but the results were amazing,” said Ralser. “We could reconstruct two metabolic pathways almost entirely.”If these metabolic pathways were occurring in the absence of RNA in conditions rich with iron and other metals and phosphate, it seems increasingly likely that life could have literally started from nothing and spontaneously formed in ways until now believed impossible. So what? “I think this paper has really interesting connotations for the origins of life,” says Matthew Powner at University College London. “For origins of life, it is important to understand where the source molecules come from.”
via Cambridge Study Reveals How Life Could Have Started From Nothing – Mic.
Create A Graph August 25, 2014
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Graphs and charts are great because they communicate information visually. For this reason, graphs are often used in newspapers, magazines and businesses around the world.NCES constantly uses graphs and charts in our publications and on the web. Sometimes, complicated information is difficult to understand and needs an illustration. Graphs or charts can help impress people by getting your point across quickly and visually.
via Create A Graph.
About Us | SPARC August 25, 2014
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About UsSPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC believes that faster and wider sharing of the outputs of the scholarly research process increases the impact of research, fuels the advancement of knowledge, and increases the return on research investments. SPARC focuses on taking action in collaboration with stakeholders – including authors, publishers, and libraries – to build on the unprecedented opportunities created by the networked digital environment to advance the conduct of scholarship.
via About Us | SPARC.
What I Learned After Taking a Homeless Mother Grocery Shopping | Babble August 2, 2014
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I look at this list and can’t help but wonder how she’s supposed to do it. If $11 of apples equals two snacks but $3 in Ramen will feed her entire family for dinner, how can she possibly pick apples with her limited food stamp budget? And how will she ever afford to fill half of every mealtime plate with fruits and veggies, the amount recommended by the same government that issued her food stamps?The fact of the matter is, this homeless mom is me. She is you.
via What I Learned After Taking a Homeless Mother Grocery Shopping | Babble.
The NSA’s Patents, in One Searchable Database August 2, 2014
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What do a voice identifier, an automated translator, a “tamper-indicating” document tube, and a supersecure manhole cover have in common? They’re all technologies for which the secretive National Security Agency NSA has been granted patents by the U.S. government, giving the agency the exclusive rights to its inventions.The four technologies represent a tiny fraction of the more than 270 sleuthy devices, methods, and designs for which the nation’s biggest intelligence agency has been granted a patent since 1979, the earliest year for which public figures are available. As the patent holder, the NSA can license the particular technology — for a fee — to anyone who wants to use it, so long as the patent hasn’t expired.
Conclusiveness of toxicity data and double standards August 2, 2014
Posted by sandyclaus in Food Culture, Politics.add a comment
We would like to comment on your answers Hayes, 2014a concerning the retraction of our study Seralini et al., 2012 and Hayes, 2014b by Food and Chemical Toxicology FCT. Our study investigated the long-term effects in rats of consumption of two Monsanto products, a genetically modified GM maize and its associated pesticide, Roundup, together and separately. The decision to retract the paper was reached a few months after the appointment of a former Monsanto employee as “editor for biotechnology”, a position created for him at FCT Robinson and Latham, 2013. In a recent editorial, Portier and colleagues express concern about the “dangerous erosion of the underpinnings of the peer-review process” in the case of our study Portier et al., 2014.
Is the South Dragging the Rest of the Nation Down? | Alternet August 1, 2014
Posted by sandyclaus in Politics.1 comment so far
Most of Thompson’s main points are in the first 40 pages:—“It’s too bad that we just didn’t let the South secede when we had the chance.”—“Everyone has joked about a modern-day secession. Politicians, like Texas Governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry, have even threatened it. But what would the measurable impact be if it actually happened? … In fact, for both sides, an exciting by-product of separation would be an explosion of southern tourism. … ”—“With time, Americans would start thinking of the South as another Mexico, only with a more corrupt government.”—“The South has operated like a competing nation in cannibalizing and degrading Michigan and the American auto industry.”—“ … [A] union based on such a diametrically opposed approach to social organization—uncompromising Bible literalism versus protean secular law—is like a bad marriage that needs to end in order to save the children. … “—“All these gloom and doomers … whining about a world on the brink of extinction are descendants of the Lost Cause defeatism fostered and fetishized in post Civil War southern churches. …” Let me interject: Ever since the rise of the Nashville Fugitives, a group of poets, novelists and historians who met at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s, it’s been a popular argument among Southern academics that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery but in defense of states’ rights. I’ll never forget the Birmingham News’ 1963 Civil War centennial issue that proclaimed “The True Story of the Heroic Struggle for States’ Rights.” This ties into one of the primary myths being hammered home to white school kids in the South: that because slavery only benefited the rich and not the common soldier/farmer, the latter did not believe he went to war in defense of slavery.As historian James M. McPherson noted, the leaders of the Confederacy were clear before the war that they were quite willing to fight for slavery. Here’s McPherson from his essay “The War of Southern Aggression” in The New York Review of Books Jan. 19, 1989: “Whether or not they owned productive property, all southern whites owned the most important property of all—a white skin. This enabled them to stand above the mudsill of black slavery and prevented them from sinking into the morass of inequality, as did wage workers and poor men in the North.”
via Is the South Dragging the Rest of the Nation Down? | Alternet.
Culture Foam: Bubbling Up 