Much of Europe has been blanketed in snow as cold weather spreads as far south as the Mediterranean coast. The cold spell, nicknamed "the Beast from the East" in the UK, is carrying freezing winds across the continent, and temperatures as low as -30C (-22F). At least 10 people have died since Monday, including many who were sleeping rough in cities. Aid groups have opened shelters and are providing hot food and blankets for thousands of people. The cold weather - called the "Siberian bear" by the Dutch and "snow cannon" by Swedes - brought rare snowfalls to parts of Spain and Italy and to the Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Capri. Dozens of roads were closed and trains and flights cancelled across the continent. Hundreds of schools suspended classes and some businesses advised workers to stay at home. Many regions were put on alert as the frigid temperatures were expected to continue until the end of the week. Emergency shelters have been opened by many authorities to cope with the needs of homeless citizens. In Belgium, police were allowed to detain people overnight if they refused to go to shelters. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies appealed to the public to check on at-risk neighbours. "Just knocking on someone's door to check they have everything they need can make a huge difference," its Europe director, Simon Missiri, said. "It could even be the difference between life and death."
The extreme warmth is likely to slow or prevent the formation of Arctic sea ice, which has been shrinking for decades due to climate change. WHILE western Europe copes with freezing temperatures and snow, the Arctic is experiencing record highs. At Greenland's most northerly point, Cape Morris Jesup, Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth in California says temperatures are 35°C warmer than normal for the time of year – and that the site has already spent more time above 0°C this year than in any year on record. There is no weather station at the North Pole, but scientists suspect it, too, has risen above freezing this week. "The North Pole is warmer than much of Europe right now," Rohde tweeted Monday. This is backed up by Zachary Labe at the University of California, Irvine, who tracks Arctic temperatures. His data suggests the Arctic is warmer than it has been at this time of year since at least 1958. A weakening of the polar vortex is to blame. This spinning loop of air normally keeps the cold Arctic air separate from the warmer air further south. The extreme warmth is likely to slow or prevent the formation of Arctic sea ice, which has been shrinking for decades due to climate change.
German cities will be allowed to ban older diesel vehicles from some areas following a landmark court ruling. The Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig said the cities of Stuttgart and Duesseldorf could legally ban older, more polluting diesel cars from zones worst affected by pollution. The ruling sets a precedent for other cities and analysts said it could lead to similar action across Europe. The government, which had opposed the bans, said they could still be avoided. The ruling by a top federal court came after German states had appealed against bans imposed by local courts in Stuttgart and Duesseldorf. The environmental group DUH brought the cases after about 70 German cities exceeded European Union limits for nitrogen oxides (NOx) last year. Diesel emissions containing nitrogen oxides can cause respiratory disease. The likelihood now is that the German government will rush to introduce some sort of national policy, to ensure at least some level of consistency across the country. It's not just about Germany either - cities across Europe are struggling to meet EU air quality standards, and may well see the German ruling as setting a precedent. New diesel cars won't be affected, but that's not really the point. Consumers are already moving away from the technology - and the prospect of city bans will only accelerate that process. So diesel's decline is likely to gather momentum. That's a problem for the industry, because while diesels produce high levels of nitrogen oxide - a major urban pollutant - they emit relatively low levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. So moves to control one environmental problem may end up undermining efforts to combat another - unless we all start driving electric cars very soon.
What is Day Zero? It is the date, currently set as July 9, when officials believe Cape Town will run out of water.
Can it be prevented? Day Zero is by no means inevitable.
Which regions are vulnerable? The Middle East and North Africa are most likely to suffer.
Where is conflict likely? Flash points often occur where a river or aquifer stretches across national borders, raising questions over who owns the rights to the flow.
How can shortages be alleviated? One deceptively simple solution is to fix old, leaky pipes, which account for about 40 percent of cities' lost water.
Life under water rations: A hotline for snitching on water-guzzling neighbors.
Crushed basalt applied to agricultural land could soak up billions of tons of carbon dioxide and boost crops. Let's put it to the test, says Olive Heffernan. On the menu of geoengineering options, one has always stood out as a saner choice: enhanced weathering. No need to deploy giant mirrors in space to deflect sunlight or to risk food riots by converting crops to fuel. Just scatter crushed rock far and wide. It sounds simple: rock mops up carbon dioxide – it's a slow but significant part of the carbon cycle – so if we speed up natural weathering we could get enough of this greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to dampen climate change. Ordinarily, common silicate minerals react slowly with CO2 in air and water. In the process, much of the CO2 is bound up in stable alkaline compounds, which eventually wash into the oceans. It's reasonable to assume that if silicates were spread more widely over Earth's surface as crushed rock, more CO2 would bind to them more rapidly, offsetting emissions from human activities. This would have two benefits: the CO2 would be stored more or less permanently; and the end product is alkaline, so run-off has the added bonus of countering ocean acidification. But, like many other geoengineering ideas, enhanced weathering has been beset by problems. Most such propositions have suggested dusting cropland and other surfaces with olivine-rich rock, because it weathers quickly and can capture a tonne of CO2 per tonne of dissolved rock. The olivine, however, would need to be mined on a vast scale, with huge environmental and energy costs. And, as it weathers, olivine releases toxic metals like nickel and chromium that could get into the food chain. That limits its use on farms, which are ideal places to deploy this technique.
The clothes on your back are responsible for huge amounts of pollution – but lab-grown fabrics and changes to our fashion habits can make a big difference. IT WAS a rookie error. Two decades ago, Gary Cass had just finished a degree in viticulture and was working at a friend's winery in Western Australia when he forgot to add carbon dioxide to a vat of wine. Oxygen seeped in, feeding bacteria that caused a thick skin of sludge to form on its surface. Grateful not to be sacked, Cass threw it away in disgust. He couldn't have guessed that, 20 years on, he would be using that same sludge to make more environmentally sound clothes. Dressing ourselves is a necessity that has spawned one of the most polluting economic activities on the planet. The clothing industry creates carbon emissions of 1.2 billion tonnes a year – more than aviation – and making and maintaining our clothes consumes shedloads of water, energy and non-renewable resources, too. Concern about clothing sustainability is suddenly in vogue. In November 2017, designer Stella McCartney spoke out against her industry following a report on clothing's environmental impact by the sustainable economy think tank the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Cass is just one of many trying to respond to such concerns, finding ways to make clothes greener at all stages of their lives, from production and processing to washing and disposal. And although there is no single easy solution, it turns out there is quite a lot we can all do to help.
We can't wait for the next generation to solve the problem of climate change but today's kids can still be a big force for change, says Michael E. Mann. WHEN my daughter was five, I read The Lorax by Dr. Seuss to her. Much of it is about unrestrained development and damage to nature. It is sad, and she cried at times. But it is also hopeful. Its message is that, in the end, we have a choice – an opportunity remains to save our environment, but it is up to us to act. My generation – in particular, our politicians – have so far failed to act sufficiently. We haven't done what is necessary to avert the threat posed by climate change. If fossil fuel use continues as now, we will warm our planet to dangerous levels within a few decades, having released too much carbon dioxide to avoid this. We cannot, as some hope, wait for a more environmentally aware generation to follow and solve the problem, as in The Lorax. And yet children do have a role to play. They have the ability to influence the environmental attitudes of adults for the better. It is this potential to engage across the generations that helped inspire The Tantrum That Saved the World, a book I co-wrote with Megan Herbert, an accomplished children's author and illustrator. We have tried to create a mutual learning experience for parents and children. Our hero is a girl called Sophia, who is upset by creatures appearing at her door. They have been displaced by the impact of climate change on their habitat and are searching for a new home.
The global tide of ocean plastic pollution is a clear violation of international law, campaigners say. They have been urging for a new global treaty to tackle the problem. But a new report - to be presented to a Royal Geographical Society conference on Tuesday - says littering the sea with plastics is already prohibited under existing agreements. The report urges those governments that are trying to tackle the issue to put legal pressure on those that are not. The paper (downloadable PDF) has been written by the veteran environment journalist Oliver Tickell. It has been produced as Irish scientists publish details of a study in which they found microplastics in three-in-every-four deep-water fish sampled in the northwest Atlantic. Mr Tickell's principal conclusion is backed by ClientEarth, the legal group that successfully sued the UK over failures to meet air pollution laws. The journalist says legal action against big polluters such as China, India and Indonesia can be taken only by a nation state. So he calls for governments and green groups to support small island nations suffering most from plastic pollution. Tickell maintains that marine plastic litter can already be controlled through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS); the London Convention; the MARPOL Convention; the Basel Convention; Customary Law, and many other regional agreements. Article 194 of UNCLOS, for instance, requires states to "prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from any source. "Measures shall include, inter alia, those designed to minimize to the fullest possible extent... the release of toxic, harmful or noxious substances, especially those which are persistent, from land-based sources… [and] shall include those necessary to protect and preserve rare or fragile ecosystems as well as the habitat of depleted, threatened or endangered species and other forms of marine life."
New Zealand has declared a state of emergency as Cyclone Gita struck the city of Christchurch, just days after causing devastation on the island nation of Tonga. CHRISTCHURCH and other districts on the South Island of New Zealand declared a state of emergency this week as Cyclone Gita tore through the country, leaving many without power. Last week, Gita reached wind speeds of 230 kilometres per hour and ripped through the Pacific island of Tonga. It was the worst cyclone to hit the country in 60 years, destroying or damaging an estimated 1400 houses. Arriving at New Zealand, the storm first hit the zone between the North and South islands, whipping up waves up to 9 metres tall. As Gita went south to Christchurch, it brought almost 30 centimetres of rainfall in places. Almost 200 schools were shut, and New Zealand's national airline cancelled all flights to and from the capital, Wellington. "Even though the deep low pressure system moves away from us early on Wednesday, the effects of Gita will last a few more days, with further rain likely about central New Zealand until Thursday," said Lisa Murray at MetService in Wellington.
The city of Christchurch and several other districts on New Zealand's South Island have declared a state of emergency after being hit by the remnants of Cyclone Gita. Dozens of schools have been shut and roads closed in the South Island as the storm made landfall on Tuesday. Air New Zealand has cancelled all flights in and out of the capital, Wellington, in the North Island. Residents were told to expect floods and winds of up to 150km/h (90mph). The Grey District, Buller District and Nelson Tasman are among the regions in the South Island to have declared a state of emergency, as has Taranaki in the North Island. "The full impact of the storm will be felt overnight and tomorrow morning," said Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel. She urged residents in low-lying areas to evacuate, saying: "We are expecting homes to be flooded." The Buller District Mayor Garry Howard said he expected high seas and strong winds in the West Coast region. "This is not a good situation for those in seafront properties," he said. Gita, which was downgraded on Tuesday from a tropical cyclone to a storm, is already causing flooding in parts of the South Island with waves up to 7m (22ft) high. Community halls in Christchurch and other districts are providing shelter for those affected by the weather.
2-18-18 Does bad air lead to bad behavior?
New research links air pollution to higher levels of crime and other unethical acts. Looking for an excuse the next time you get caught doing something unethical? If you live in a highly polluted city, you may be in luck. Recent research offers evidence that air pollution inspires unethical behavior, ranging from low-stakes cheating to criminal activity. It reports this is likely due to polluted air increasing personal anxiety, which can throw people's moral compasses out of whack. "This research reveals that air pollution may have potential ethical costs that go beyond its well-known toll on health and the environment," lead author Jackson Lu of Columbia Business School said in announcing the results. "Our findings suggest that air pollution not only corrupts people's health, but can contaminate their morality." Evidence of a link between pollution and crime has been growing for several years. A 2015 study found violent crimes were 2.2 percent higher in neighborhoods downwind of air pollution. Another released in December linked higher levels of particulate matter with higher rates of juvenile delinquency. In the first of their four studies, Lu and his colleagues add to this evidence. Using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environmental Protection Agency covering the years 1999 to 2009, they compared air pollution levels and crime rates in 9,360 American cities. They found that, even after taking a variety of factors into account, including the poverty and unemployment rates and the numerical strength of the local police force, cities with higher levels of air pollution also had higher rates of seven major categories of crime, including murder, aggravated assault, and robbery.
US research has found that chemicals in everyday household products are now a key contributor to city air pollution, rivalling some vehicle emissions. The study, led from Colorado University, focussed on so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These are contained in petroleum-based products such as cleaning fluids and paints, and when they get into the air can form particles that affect health. The scientists say the sources of non-vehicle VOCs have been underestimated. This appears a somewhat surprising result because by weight, we use far more fuel than we do these other chemical products. About 95% of raw oil goes into the production of fuels, whereas roughly only 5% is refined for use in chemicals that are included in the likes of deodorants, pesticides, and adhesives. But Dr Jessica Gilman said it should not be seen as that remarkable because vehicle fuels are burned (to yield mostly carbon dioxide and water), whereas many of the household products are simply wafted into the air by design. "Most commonly, they're used as solvents - things like nail polish remover, the hairspray I used this morning; they are used in many cases as cleaning agents like carpet cleaners," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist told reporters. "It would be difficult to remove them because the alternative is to use straight water, which as you know doesn't work for all stains." One of Dr Gilman's colleagues, Dr Brian McDonald, did however suggest that reduced use would be helpful. "Use as little of the product as you can to get the job done," he said.
In Western cities, household products like deodorants and paints are a bigger source of air pollution than vehicle exhausts – so here's what we need to do. Say air pollution and we tend to think of car exhausts, large factories and open fires. But in Western cities, the biggest source of air pollution is something else entirely: household items like your deodorant and shampoo. A team including Brian McDonald and Jessica Gilman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Colorado examined data on air pollution from the US and Europe. Increasingly stringent regulations mean that pollution from cars and other vehicles has fallen. As a result, a larger proportion of pollution now comes from everyday consumer products that release a mix of carbon-based chemicals into the air. To identify the types of product responsible, the team calculated the flow of chemicals in and out of the air of Los Angeles. The largest source was personal care products like hair spray, shampoo, deodorants and lotions, says McDonald. Other major sources were "paint and other coating-related products, adhesives, and cleaning agents", he says. "As many of these emissions occur indoors, and given the amount of time spent indoors, there are potentially important health implications," says Frank Kelly of King's College London. It is important to put these findings in context, however. They only apply to highly developed places like the US and western Europe, where air quality has generally been improving for decades, says Michael Brauer of the University of British Columbia in Canada. In these places, emissions from consumer products are only significant because emissions from transport and industry have fallen so much.
Consumer products might be next target for air pollution cleanup. To reduce your impact on air quality, you might expect to trade in your gas-guzzling clunker of a car — but you can also unplug those air fresheners. In urban areas, emissions from consumer goods such as paint, cleaning supplies and personal care products now contribute as much to ozone and fine particulate matter in the atmosphere as do emissions from burning gasoline or diesel fuel. The finding is largely a sign of success, study coauthor Brian McDonald said February 15 during a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Steps taken to clean up car exhaust over the past few decades have had a huge effect, and as a result, "the sources of air pollution are now becoming more diverse in cities," said McDonald, a chemist at Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo. "When you have a big mountain in front of you, it's difficult to know what lies behind it," says Spyros Pandis, a chemical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who wasn't part of the study. Now, other sources of air pollution are becoming more visible.
2-14-18 Cape Town is about to run out of water – how did this happen?
Cape Town's water reserves are so low that it may soon have to turn off the taps. We've known for a decade that this could happen, but almost nothing has been done. AS I fly south towards Cape Town, I pass over hundreds of kilometres of parched land, with not a speck of green in sight. Closer to the city, green fields start to appear and the city itself is full of lush parks and gardens. If it wasn't for the massive posters at the airport, you wouldn't know that this is a city about to run out of water. In fact, the situation is so bad that, on 1 February, residents were told to use no more than 50 litres a day per person. If the rains don't refill the city's reservoirs, the taps will be shut off in May: Day Zero. Cape Town's problems are partly down to bad luck. Rainfall in the area, which the city relies on for its water, is highly variable and the past three years have been among the driest on record. Climate change might have made this more likely, but no one knows for sure (see "Is climate change to blame?"). The underlying cause, however, is simple: in several parts of South Africa, the supply of water hasn't increased in line with growing demand. It has been clear since at least 2002 that, if nothing was done to increase supply, there would be massive water shortfalls. Cape Town was going to run out of water sooner or later; the drought has just made it sooner. While politicians may be happy to blame climate change, the dire situation is much more a result of institutional incompetence and alleged corruption. Until now, the tight water restrictions have been a nuisance, but manageable. They mean having the shortest of showers and not always flushing the toilet. Many thousands of people have installed boreholes so they can water their gardens or top up swimming pools. But most groundwater isn't drinkable without treatment – there is a distinct sulphurous odour to the borehole water from one of the homes I visit. The situation will worsen dramatically on Day Zero, when the city will start to turn off the taps to a million homes – currently estimated as 11 May. The idea is that places like hospitals and commercial districts will still get running water, but millions of people will have to pick up their 25-litre-a-day rations from just 200 collection points.
From electronics to concrete, modern life depends on sand. With supplies running low and mines harming the environment, it's time to use it smarter. LIKE stars, snowflakes and blades of grass, sand is one of those things that seems to be in infinite supply. It has been a symbol for quantities beyond counting since ancient times. When the biblical hero Joseph faces an impending famine in the book of Genesis he "stored up grain in great abundance like the sand of the sea, until he stopped measuring it, for it was beyond measure". Fast forward a few thousand years and things have changed: we are running out of the stuff. "Sand is a lot like oil," says Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University. "It takes a lot of time to make and it can't be renewed." That's more than a little troubling, for sand is literally the foundation of modern civilisation. It is a crucial ingredient in concrete, bricks, plaster, glass and microchips. What's more, efforts to mine ever more sand are damaging ecosystems around the world. We can't do without it, and yet now might be the time to stay our shovels. Increasingly, the world is waking up to the sand crisis and trying to tackle it. Learn to use less sand in a smarter way, and we might just stop this most precious of resources from slipping through our fingers forever. Think of sand and you probably picture the golden-brown stuff on the beach, which is largely made of silicon dioxide. Yet sand is defined not by its composition, but by the size of its grains, which are smaller than gravel and larger than silt. Roughly speaking, that means between 2 and 0.06 millimetres. Within that range there is a huge variety – from the translucent pink stuff found on dunes in Utah to the black volcanic grains of some Hawaiian beaches.
As cold weather grips a majority of the country, it may be easy to think that all life is dead when the ground is frozen, at least until spring breathes new life into the plant systems and surrounding environments. On the contrary, says Matthew Wallenstein, associate professor of ecosystems science and sustainability at Colorado State University. Wallenstein has spent many years researching the microbes, bacteria, fungi, and other soil organisms that continue on with their normal processes underneath permafrost. By measuring the amount of carbon dioxide, Wallenstein can "measure, essentially, their breathing." "We can see that they're actually transforming that soil and making nutrients available so that when the plants start coming to life in the spring, there's actually nutrients available for them," he says. Wallenstein says that the microbes in the soil are actually aquatic organisms that live on water films. They are able to maintain well below zero Celsius (the point of freezing) due to the high amounts of salt in the water. As the water concentrates down due to freezing, the solutes become more concentrated, lowering the freezing point of water, he says. Roots are also able to thrive in extremely cold climates, says Colleen Iversen, a senior staff scientist and ecosystems ecologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She specializes in the study of climate change's effects on the root-soil interface. Iversen gives the example of Barrow, Alaska, in the summertime with a maximum temperature of only 40 degrees Fahrenheit. In such a setting, one can see a "green seashore" barren of trees but teeming with smaller plants that stay close to the ground to avoid harsh winds, she says. "So really, all the action in the tundra is below ground," Iversen says. "There can be five times as much plant biomass beneath the ground surface compared to above."
The BBC is to ban single-use plastics by 2020, after TV series Blue Planet II highlighted the scale of sea pollution. More than eight million tonnes of plastic enters the world's oceans every year. First, throwaway plastic cups and cutlery will be scrapped by the end of this year, followed by plastic containers in canteens by 2019. By 2020, the BBC hopes to be free of single-use plastic across all sites. Tony Hall, director general of the BBC, said he had been "shocked" by the plastic waste featured in last year's nature documentary. Two million plastic cups are currently used by BBC visitors and staff annually. The decision comes after the Queen backed efforts to reduce single-use plastics on Britain's royal estates. The Scottish Parliament also announced plans to ban plastic straws, following similar announcements by restaurants including Pizza Express, Wagamama and JD Wetherspoon. Announcing its three-step plan on Tuesday, the BBC said some of its kitchens had already started replacing plastic cups with glasses. A trial will be launched at its site in Salford later this month to remove plastic containers from canteens and test a coffee cup recycling scheme. Any new contracts which come up for tender will also include a requirement to cut single-use plastic. Lord Hall said: "Like millions of people watching Blue Planet II, I was shocked to see the avoidable waste and harm created by single-use plastic. "We all need to do our bit to tackle this problem, and I want the BBC to lead the way. "Scrapping throwaway plastic cups and cutlery is the first step, and with our plan I hope we can have a BBC free of single-use plastic altogether."
Meteorologists cannot currently predict the monster storms that occasionally strike Australia, but decades of newspaper accounts suggest there may be a pattern. "It was blowing a perfect hurricane, the squalls coming down in regular gusts… the sea at this time running mountains high, and very broken." That was one of the last things written in the logbook of a ship called the Catherine Hill, before a giant storm drove it aground north of Sydney, Australia, on 21 June 1867. That storm and others like it are now being studied to help weather forecasters predict future recurrences. Australia's eastern seaboard is lashed by monster storms called "extreme east coast lows" about once every 10 to 20 years. Their infrequency makes them notoriously difficult to predict. For example, meteorologists failed to foresee the severity of the 8 June 2007 storm, which caused the Pasha Bulker coal ship to run aground 100 kilometres north of Sydney. "Most forecasters would only see one such event during their careers, and nobody working on the forecast desk at the time had ever seen anything like it," says Stuart Browning at Macquarie University in Sydney. Most of what we know about these storms is based on satellite data, which only goes back to 1979. To build a more comprehensive picture, Browning and his colleague Ian Goodwin pieced together data going back almost two centuries.
Scientists will set out in the next week to study an Antarctic realm that has been hidden for thousands of years. A British Antarctic Survey-led team will explore the seabed ecosystem exposed when a giant iceberg broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2017. The organisation has also released the first video of the berg, which covers almost 6,000 sq km. Its true scale begins to emerge in a shot filmed from an aircraft flown along its edge. British Antarctic Survey marine biologist Dr Katrin Linse, who is leading the mission, said that the calving of the iceberg, which has been named A68, provides researchers with "a unique opportunity to study marine life as it responds to a dramatic environmental change". "It's important we get there quickly before the undersea environment changes as sunlight enters the water and new species begin to colonise," she explained, adding that the mission was "very exciting". Prof David Vaughan, science director at BAS stressed that it was a treacherous journey but said the team needed to "be bold". "Larsen C is a long way south and there's lots of sea ice in the area, but this is important science, so we will try our best to get the team where they need to be," he said. "The calving of A68 offers a new and unprecedented opportunity to establish an interdisciplinary scientific research programme in this climate-sensitive region. Now is the time to address fundamental questions about the sustainability of polar continental shelves under climate change."
Barren trees could have collapsed food webs, leading to Earth's greatest mass extinction. Volcano-fueled holes in Earth's ozone layer 252 million years ago may have repeatedly sterilized large swaths of forest, setting the stage for the world's largest mass extinction event. Such holes would have allowed ultraviolet-B radiation to blast the planet. Even radiation levels below those predicted for the end of the Permian period damage trees' abilities to make seeds, researchers report February 7 in Science Advances. Jeffrey Benca, a paleobotanist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues exposed plantings of modern dwarf pine tree (Pinus mugo) to varying levels of UV-B radiation. Those levels ranged from none to up to 93 kilojoules per square meter per day. According to previous simulations, UV-B radiation at the end of the Permian may have increased from a background level of 10 kilojoules (just above current ambient levels) to as much as 100 kilojoules, due to large concentrations of ozone-damaging halogens spewed from volcanoes (SN: 1/15/11, p. 12). Exposure to higher UV-B levels led to more malformed pollen, the researchers found, with up to 13 percent of the pollen grains deformed under the highest conditions. And although the trees survived the heightened irradiation, the trees' ovulate cones — cones that, when fertilized by pollen, become seeds — did not. But the trees weren't permanently sterilized: Once removed from extra UV-B exposure, the trees could reproduce again.
Cape Town is in the unenviable situation of being the first major city in the modern era to face the threat of running out of drinking water. However, the plight of the drought-hit South African city is just one extreme example of a problem that experts have long been warning about - water scarcity. Despite covering about 70% of the Earth's surface, water, especially drinking water, is not as plentiful as one might think. Only 3% of it is fresh. Over one billion people lack access to water and another 2.7 billion find it scarce for at least one month of the year. A 2014 survey of the world's 500 largest cities estimates that one in four are in a situation of "water stress". According to UN-endorsed projections, global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40% in 2030, thanks to a combination of climate change, human action and population growth. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that Cape Town is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are the other 11 cities most likely to run out of water.
India's southern state of Tamil Nadu is poised to become a global leader in wind power, according to a new report. But first the state must overcome its addiction to coal, writes Nityanand Jayaraman. The report - by the US-based Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis - predicts that by 2027, more than half of Tamil Nadu's power will be generated by "zero emissions" technologies - notably solar and wind. The state's current capacity to generate wind power - 7.85 gigawatts (GW) - is already impressive considering it is higher than that of Denmark or Sweden. But the report estimates that it could double over the next decade, and that solar installations too could increase six-fold to reach 13.5GW. If that happens, clean, renewable energy would account for 67% of Tamil Nadu's capacity, which could revive the state's debt-ridden utility. But in order to harvest that potential, Tamil Nadu needs to transform its power sector. Tamil Nadu's population is three times that of Australia and its per capita GDP is on a par with Sri Lanka and Ukraine. It could prove to be an example of how emerging economies can grow while slashing their carbon emissions. Assuming Tamil Nadu's GDP will grow at an annual rate of 7%, the report suggests that much of this growth can be driven by renewables. Installation and operating costs for wind and solar power have dropped low enough to compete with established but dirty sources of power such as coal. But that is where reality tempers the possibilities. The report argues that not only does Tamil Nadu not need coal or nuclear power, but that these projects are financially fraught.
Eight years after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, British oil giant BP reported a $6.2 billion profit in 2017, more than double that of 2016. A surge in oil and gas production and the launch of seven new fields helped fuel the turnaround.
It is well established that coral reefs are being destroyed by rising temperatures, acidic waters, and overfishing. Now new research suggests these vital marine ecosystems face another dire threat: plastic dumped in the ocean. Marine biologists examined more than 124,000 corals from 159 reefs in Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia. Based on their findings, they estimate there are at least 11 billion pieces of plastic caught in these important habitats. They also found that this plastic pollution raises corals' risk for infection from 4 to 89 percent. The debris blocks out light and oxygen, which stresses corals, and cuts from plastic shards make them more vulnerable to disease-causing germs. "Corals are animals just like me and you—they become wounded and then infected," Cornell University's Joleah Lamb tells The Guardian (U.K.). "Plastics are ideal vessels for microorganisms, with pits and pores, so it's like cutting yourself with a really dirty knife." Coral reefs house about 25 percent of marine life and serve as a buffer that protects coastal regions from storms and floods. The researchers expect plastic pollution across the Asia-Pacific region to surge 40 percent by 2025.
Storms dumped 22 inches of snow on Moscow this week in just 36 hours, bringing a city with plenty of experience in winter weather to a standstill. It was the city's biggest single snowfall since record keeping began. Moscow schoolchildren were given an unheard-of day off for snow, prompting an avalanche of tsking tweets from disapproving parents. "There is no reason to give children a break," said one. "Schools are usually close to home." Snowplows couldn't push the snow to the roadside without burying buildings, so they trucked it to a central dump near a railway station, creating an artificial snow mountain. The epic snowfall toppled some 2,000 trees around the city; at least one person was killed by a falling tree.
Plastic waste is building up in the supposedly pristine wilderness of the Norwegian Arctic, scientists say. Researchers are particularly concerned about huge concentrations of microplastic fragments in sea ice. They say they've found plastic litter almost everywhere in the Arctic they have looked. Norwegian fishermen are worried that their fish stocks may lose their reputation for being untouched by pollution. Most of the large plastic waste there comes from discarded fishing gear. And boat owners admit it will take hundreds of years to overcome a few reckless decades of using the sea as a dump. Norway's environment minister says politicians in the past haven't fully registered the extent of the problem. A synthesis report from the Norwegian Polar Institute to the recent Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø says there's a great need for more research into the extent of possible harm from plastic. It says effects have been monitored so far on zooplankton, invertebrates, fish, seabirds, and mammals. Research shows that up to 234 particles have been found concentrated into just one litre of melted Arctic sea ice. That's much higher than in the open ocean. Researchers explain that sea ice forms from the top. By unfortunate coincidence, plastic particles also float at the surface, so they get bonded into the ice as it freezes.
Poorly treated sewage and fertilizer runoff are main sources of the nutrient. Human activities are driving phosphorus levels in the world's lakes, rivers and other freshwater bodies to a critical point. The freshwater bodies on 38 percent of Earth's land area (not including Antarctica) are overly enriched with phosphorus, leading to potentially toxic algal blooms and less available drinking water, researchers report January 24 in Water Resources Research. Sewage, agriculture and other human sources add about 1.5 teragrams of phosphorus to freshwaters each year, the study estimates. That's roughly equivalent to about four times the weight of the Empire State Building. The scientists tracked human phosphorus inputs from 2002 to 2010 from domestic, industrial and agricultural sources. Phosphorus in human waste was responsible for about 54 percent of the global load, while agricultural fertilizer use contributed about 38 percent. By country, China contributed 30 percent of the global total, India 8 percent and the United States 7 percent.
2-7-18 The survivors: Is climate change really killing polar bears?
Rapid global warming is said to be ringing the death knell for polar bears, by melting their icy hunting grounds. But the reality is more complex. FOOTAGE of a poorly polar bear went viral in December. Emaciated, it stumbled across a green Arctic landscape without a speck of snow or ice in sight (see picture below). Media outlets seized on the video as an example of how climate change is killing its poster child. But behind the headlines is an awkward question: have climate change activists chosen the wrong mascot? The International Union for Conservation of Nature has long considered polar bears (Ursus maritimus) "vulnerable to extinction". In May 2008, the US raised its own listing to threatened. The decision made international headlines and helped the polar bear achieve its iconic status in climate change campaigns. Both listings rested on forecasts that Arctic sea ice would rapidly melt during the first half of the 21st century as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. Polar bears are expected to suffer the consequences. They spend most of the year cruising the fringes of sea ice, hunting ringed seals. The two play a game of Arctic cat and mouse: the seals pierce breathing holes in thin ice; the bears hang around the holes looking for lunch. Even though polar bears can survive on dry land for part of the year, they ultimately depend on the ice to hunt. The rationale for concern is sound. In the past decade, Arctic temperatures have risen faster than models predicted and the ice has vanished faster. Logically, the polar bear population should have crashed. It hasn't.
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has talked up his mission to scale back its powers. It's so shortsighted, says Ian Graber-Stiehl. Federal overreach is a phrase beloved of Scott Pruitt, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency. It was a central theme in his recent high-profile interview with the New York Times. Since his appointment, Pruitt, infamous for suing the agency he now runs on 14 occasions while he was Oklahoma's Attorney General, has set the ethos of a new, post-fact EPA, one he packaged compellingly in Friday's interview as "back to basics". Pruitt is always quick to hearken back to the EPA's origins as President Nixon's focused fix for pollution, before the Obama administration began liberally interpreting statutes to regulate greenhouse gases. He wants to return the EPA to the narrower mission he romanticises. Part of that means handing power back to states. However, in his haste, Pruitt seems to have forgotten a few things: chief among them is that the EPA was created not just to reduce pollution, but to curtail states competing to lower the bar on environmental protections to attract business. Pruitt himself was accused of doing this in 2014, when contesting EPA rules that might hinder Oklahoma's Devon Energy. As someone beholden to state interests at the time, lobbying and lawsuits on behalf of businesses under the banner of "state's rights" made sense. But as head of the EPA, he should acknowledge that neither pollution nor the EPA's purview stop at state lines.
A study of 151 nations shows that the ones that do the most damage to the planet also give their citizens the best lives. Does this mean modern life is unworkable? No countries manage to live well and sustainably. Of 151 nations that have just been rated, not a single one achieves the Goldilocks feat of doing it just right – creating a good life for its inhabitants without overusing natural resources. "We didn't really find a good role model of any country doing things sustainably," says Daniel O'Neill of the University of Leeds, UK. "Our analysis is a wake-up call that we need to do things in a radically different way if we are to have any hope of achieving a good life for all people on the planet." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the worst offenders for plundering nature unsustainably are rich nations. Countries like the US provide good lives for their citizens, but break multiple environmental limits. Meanwhile, poorer countries like Vietnam tend to overuse fewer resources, but don't meet all the well-being targets for their people. O'Neill and his colleagues rated each country's sustainability by totting up how it used, produced or affected seven things. These were water, phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon dioxide emissions, material consumption, ecological footprint and land-use change. The team's analysis built on a 2009 study that defined nine "life support" systems for Earth. That study concluded that we had breached the limits for three of the systems: climate change, nitrogen and loss of biodiversity.
With new space missions come new and improved capabilities. And for those interested in what's happening to the ice on Planet Earth, we have two ventures this year that are going to make a major contribution to our understanding. Ice is the "climate canary". The loss, and the rate of that loss, tell us something about how global warming is progressing. In the Arctic, the most visible sign is the decline of sea-ice, which, measured at its minimum extent over the ocean in September, is reducing by about 14% per decade. At the other pole, the marine floes look much the same as they did in the earliest satellite imagery from the 1960s, but land ice is in a negative phase. Something on the order of 160 billion tonnes are being lost annually, with most of that mass going from the west of the White Continent. The two 2018 missions of interest that will pick up these trends and extend them into the future are Grace Follow-On and IceSat-2. The former is the successor to the highly successful US-German gravity spacecraft that operated from 2002 to 2017. Grace is actually a pair of satellites that pursue each other around the globe in formation with a separation of 220km. They accelerate and decelerate in turn as they pass over variations in the local gravity field. It is a very small effect - a change in distance equivalent to the thickness of a human hair - but discernible to the microwave ranging instrumentation carried on the satellites. Because the gravity variations are a function of changes in mass, the pair are able, literally, to weigh the ice sheets sitting below them on land as they pass overhead. Its from the first Grace mission's observations, for example, that we know Greenland is currently losing about 280 billion tonnes of ice to the ocean every year. It's a significant contribution to the 3.4mm per annum rise in global sea levels.
We are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, heating the planet, but some plants are using the excess carbon dioxide to make more flowers. Every year, the amount of carbon dioxide in our air increases. This is causing dangerous climate change, but it's also giving plants a little extra carbon to work with – and some tropical plants are turning it into flowers. "Plants can convert CO2 to energy during photosynthesis," says Stephanie Pau at Florida State University in Tallahassee. "This study suggests that they are allocating that energy to flowers and reproductive activity." Pau works with scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who have been monitoring the forests of Barro Colorado Island in Panama since 1987. They noticed that they were gathering more flowers in their traps every year. At first, they thought warmer temperatures were responsible. But to be sure they compared the relative impacts of rainfall, light, temperature, carbon dioxide and El Niño activity. It turned out that carbon dioxide had the largest effect on long-term changes in flower production. El Niño activity also causes bursts in flowering, because it results in warm and sunny weather, but the effects are temporary. "It is easy to forget that the entire Earth is experiencing a drastic chemical change in our atmosphere," says Pau. "We don't see it or feel it, like we do for heat waves or droughts." She says plants can benefit from higher levels of carbon dioxide, but only "if other resources like water and nutrients are not limited", which is only rarely the case.
The U.S. clean energy sector employed 3.38 million people in 2016, 10 percent more than the 2.99 million employed in fossil fuels, according to the Department of Energy.
Exxon Mobil this week announced it will triple oil and gas production in "the nation's hottest shale field," said Clifford Krauss in The New York Times. The Permian Basin, which straddles West Texas and New Mexico, is approximately the size of South Dakota and includes "multiple layers of thick shale, easing the costs of exploration, drilling, and production." The oil company, the nation's largest, will eventually aim to produce 600,000 barrels per day by 2025. Exxon cited "the recent reduction in the corporate tax rate as one reason for its increased interest in investing more" in the Permian.
Germany's auto industry was locked in another scandal this week after it was revealed that the country's three biggest carmakers had supported a research institute that tested potentially dangerous fumes on humans and monkeys from 2013 to 2016. Funded by Volkswagen, Daimler, and BMW, the institute had 25 human volunteers breathe in nitrogen dioxide, the toxic particle found in diesel emissions. The institute, which has since been disbanded, said no one was injured in the test. In another experiment, monkeys were forced to inhale diesel exhaust from a Volkswagen Beetle and another car for hours. The tests provoked condemnation from German leaders, with a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel saying they "cannot be justified ethically in any way," In 2015, Volkswagen admitted that millions of its diesel cars were rigged with devices to beat emissions tests.
Climate change has sparked a bloody conflict in southeastern Nigeria, said Chiagozie Udeh. For the past three years, Fulani herders, who normally move just a bit southward in the winter to graze their animals, have drastically altered their migration. Because of "expansive desertification, drought, and unchecked deforestation in northern Nigeria," these nomadic tribespeople have been forced to search for foliage and water farther south in territories where they normally don't venture. But subsistence farmers in those areas accuse the herders of "wanton destruction of their crops," and hundreds have been killed in the ensuing clashes. Nigerian states have banned open-field grazing, but the herdsmen, desperate to feed their cattle and goats, ignore the law. With millions of people being displaced from increasingly arid northern Nigeria, the government must take action to resettle these climate refugees peacefully. It's time for Nigeria to start encouraging cattle ranching instead of nomadic grazing—by offering federal grants for land and access to high-yield grasses that will allow animals to be raised year after year in the same fields. The nomadic way of life can't be sustained when it encroaches on others' livelihoods. The climate is changing—Nigerians will have to change with it.


I know it's a bit of a joke trying to sell soft tops, but this is a bit different so thought somebody my be interested.
I'm about to collect a brand new JK Unlimited Wrangler Freedom edition, and it comes with a premiuim soft top (which has thicker black twill material than the standard ones that come with other JKs).
I won't be using it, so if anyone is interested, let me know.


BAT - BLOG : BATMAN TOYS and COLLECTIBLES: Awesome #BATMAN TATTOO ART Spotted in the Czech Republic!
Awesome #BATMAN TATTOO ART Spotted in the Czech Republic!
A friend of ours on the BAT-BLOG FACEBOOK Page was kind enough to share some wonderful photos showing his new Batman Tattoo Art he just got. It's the "Dark Knight Trilogy" version of the character and the artwork came out really good.
His name is Roman and he said he plans on adding a few more characters with a background of Gotham City. Sounds Awesome! We can't wait to see the finished product, but it's looking great so far!


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Why Does Alex Garland's 'Annihilation' Perpetuate the Hidden Figure of Henrietta Lacks?
Alex Garland relied on HeLa easter eggs to proffer a "key" to the Shimmer in Annihilation, but his interpretation mimics the instrumentalization decried throughout Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Short Stories: Characters Inspired by People in Politics
These five short stories — by Roxane Gay, Jeff VanderMeer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, George Saunders, and Curtis Sittenfeld — fictionalize the personal lives of American presidents, a wannabe president, and a president's spouse.
Jenny Bhatt
Fear and Loathing in the Zone: 'Annihilation's' Dreamy 'Death Drive'
Annihilation's reflections on what Freudian psychoanalysts have referred to as the 'death drive' offers an account of modern life we cannot ignore.
Alex Lindstrom
The Sound of the Shimmer: Interview with Annihilation's Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow
Emmy-nominated composer Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, music producer and founding member of Portishead, speak with PopMatters about their original score for Alex Garland's science-fiction film, Annihilation.
Thomas Britt
What 'Annihilation' Shows Us about the Future of Serious Nerd Movies
Contrary to Alex Garland's disappointment that Paramount sold his film to Netflix, it might be a good thing for film nerds.
Katherine Murray
Director Alex Garland on Nature and the Absence of Gender in 'Annihilation'
Garland discusses his personal approach to filmmaking and the beauty of nature and math -- and video games.
Bernard Boo
Designed to Disturb: 'The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories'
To limit one's readings to H. P. Lovecraft is a bit like living in a creepy old Victorian house, but never bothering to investigate the shuffling in the attic, the banging in the basement, or the whispering voices. This book explores every nook of the house.
Andrew Gilstrap
Talk About Getting Lost In a Book: Our Favorite Fiction of 2011
Read this book, pass it on to those who deserve it, and be thankful that the world contains authors like...
PopMatters Staff

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


In Reagan's case, I wouldn't count out plausible deniability, because I do think his Alzheimer's was already kicking in at the time and thus it is not impossible that he truly did not know. If this was the case, he should have resigned or been removed from office for lack of mental capability.
As for Bush, he could always claim "diminished capacity" due to substance abuse, claiming that he was unable to function as president because of alcohol abuse (and possible cocaine abuse?) In any case, this would also necessitate his removal from office on grounds of insufficient mental health for the job.
clinton was not impeached for adultry. he was impeached for lying under oath. and what of poor hillary, she gasped and could hardly breath. my-o-my poor woman. clinton was so slick he got you to feel sorry for him while all the other illegal things went on. remember how many "friends" of theres died under mysterious circumstanses?
clinton was not impeached for adultry. he was impeached for lying under oath. and what of poor hillary, she gasped and could hardly breath.
As I said, he should have taken the 5th and stayed silent, it was a mistake on his part to talk at all.
Maybe we could make Cheney the head of the Bar Association? Do we really need all the lawyers we have in this country?
What amazes me is that most people that know him in Washington, even those opposed to him politically, almost unanimously admit how intelligent he is. I personally think he has insulated himself with yes-men and has lost touch with most Americans. Reminds me of another Bush marvelling over a supermarket scanner.
My father has met him a few times, and did say he's fairly intelligent & articulate in person... and apparently has a good sense of humor. But he also thinks Bush is a bit odd, and often seems like he's not paying attention.
But all of that is irrelevant, considering what a horrible job he's done - and how stupid he appears in public, since that's all most people get to see.
In addition to the facts that have already been presented to mark6052 about Mr. Bush's so-called "wide" majority, if fewer than 10,000 voters in Ohio had voted the other way, John Kerry would be President right now. There were wide spread allegations of voter fraud in Ohio. Maybe Kerry actually is President in some parallel universe where they do things right.
More importantly, the repeated statements like "winning by millions" is a solid indication that nothing the poster says can be regarded as accurate.
Just arrange a hunting trip... problem solved.
God help us all if Gore wins!!!
I second that big time!!!!!!!
My point exactly I like to see what people like you think is best for the country, and then go off in the complete opposite direction.


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Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza wins second full term
By Chicago Tribune staff
Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza speaks with attendees at the Jackson County Democrats Annual Dinner during Governor J. B. Pritzker and Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton "Working Families Bus Tour" Thursday Aug. 25, 2022 in, Murphysboro, Ill. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)
Susana Mendoza succeeded Tuesday in her bid for a second full term as Illinois comptroller, fending off challengers Shannon Teresi and Deirdre McCloskey.
She was first elected as Illinois' comptroller in 2016 after winning a special election following the death of Judy Baar Topinka.
Mendoza, who has steadily moved up the ranks in Democratic politics from a state representative to Chicago city clerk, ran for Chicago mayor in 2019 but failed to garner enough votes to make the runoff election that was ultimately won by Lori Lightfoot.
Mendoza has taken credit for some of the modest rebounds the state's finances have seen in recent years. Mendoza entered the comptroller's office amid a two-year budget standoff and a growing mountain of unpaid bills under former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who through most of his single term was locked in a political stalemate with former Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan.
Now the state is mostly paying its bills within a normal 30-day cycle, and all three Wall Street ratings agencies have upgraded the state's credit, largely on the strength of budgets approved by the Democratic-controlled General Assembly and signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
McHenry County Auditor Shannon Teresi, of Crystal Lake, was first appointed McHenry County's internal auditor in 2018. A certified public accountant and certified fraud examiner, she repeatedly tried to tie Mendoza and her time in the state House to Madigan, who has pleaded not guilty to federal bribery and racketeering charges.
Teresi was initially part of a slate of Republican candidates backed by billionaire Ken Griffin in the GOP primary in June. But Teresi and treasurer candidate Tom Demmer, who both ran unopposed, were the only members of the slate to survive the primary, and Griffin left Illinois for Florida, leaving Teresi with not nearly as much fundraising as Mendoza.


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By Ava Kofman • @eyywa • 7 years ago
Not Oprah's Book Club: The Empathy Exams
The first essay of Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, from which the collection takes it title, begins with a declaration of performed pain: "My job title is medical actor, which means I get to play sick." The final, "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain," ends with a "search for possibility." It asks how we might understand this performed pain–bloody, self-inflicted, purple, feminized or otherwise–and also all pain, in all its painfulness, as real. The nine essays in between are exercises in not letting the violence of metaphor, and metaphorizing pain (the act of writing, really), overpower painful realities and the reality of pain itself. They are, as Jamison titles two paired series of shorter essays, "pain tours."
Jamison, as a participant-observer, tours us across landscapes of bodily and spiritual and psychic suffering–real and imagined, literary and literal: the mysterious formications of Morgellon's disease; Frida Kahlo's vocabulary of color as a private language of despair; a defense of the sentimental genre that emerges from the history of artificial sweeteners; a gripping reading of the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy that helped to exonerate the alleged young murderers known as the Memphis Three; a palimpsest of "the contours of two parallel geographies, one mapping the narco wars and another the landscape of literary production" in Mexico; a perverse incarnation of the Most Dangerous Game that calls itself the Barkley Marathon; a festival of miniatures for the life-sized desires of a Bolivian town.
Thanks to Jamison's writing, we are granted acute access to these strange topographies. In return, Jamison asks that we travel along with her as more than strangers. We are not given permission to stare dumbly as tourists. We are pushed beyond the voyeur's glass window into the sweaty, and uncomfortable, and contested seat of the journalist's chair–and, if we summon enough feeling, her subjects' too. Jamison tries to hold us all accountable while also often wondering aloud whether and to what extent this type of accounting is possible.
As an intellectual project, the collection reads as an inquiry into the economics of empathy. An inquiry that explicitly and brilliantly seeks more questions in the place of answers: What is the value of feeling for another if it doesn't change anything about their material situation? Can making ourselves into better feelers actually help others feel better? When might it make everything worse? How can we dwell on wounds–our own and others–in the face of the rampant accusation (our greatest fear and shame) of wound-dwelling? When does empathy slide into narcissism? Is empathy always just narcissism by another name–or is this fear of solipsism an alibi we use to get ourselves off the hook, with our doors locked, relationships confined to the contacts in our phones?
Jamison's extensive dwelling on the self–a dwelling that would so lovingly be called self-reflexivity/consciousness/charm when exhibited by her male counterparts and is perhaps too readily called narcissism for females–is daring in its willingness to dwell on the unknown. These internal debates end not with a harsh RESOLVED but with the insistently feminist curve of the question mark. That Jamison asks these questions of herself doesn't mean she has all the answers. "What good is guilt?…We ask. We like the sound of the question. It puts a crude finger on a heartbeat in us that won't stop racing, a pulse broken in sympathy. It makes us talk. It makes us talk about ourselves. It makes us confess. We want to purge something that even confession won't justify."
It's worth noting that the word "essay"–as anyone who has ever looked it up in a dictionary will condescend to tell you–comes from the French verb to try. I think this factoid is important insofar as The Empathy Exams is a series of trials: the essays examine and experiment the histories and pleasures and limits of this oddly relational feeling. They quite literally test, with a keen eye and capacious heart, our own capacity to relate to these relations, to feel with and for and through others–in short, to empathize.
They sketch out this structure of empathy–as feeling, as questionable feeling, as necessary feeling–in their form. They are all part memoir, part someone or something else's story. Jamison tries to feel with and through her subjects; we try and feel with and through her feeling. But these trials are not cumulative. There is no feel-good moral to the stories, no conclusive take-away. "Like Stevens' thirteen blackbirds, we see pain from every angle; no single posture of suffering is allowed any measure of perceptual tyranny," Jamison writes of Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" in "Grand Unified Theory," but she might as well be summarizing her own collection as well. Her perspective is likewise kaleidoscopic and firmly situated: an ecstatic panorama of observation privy to all of its own particular agonies of flesh. Remember: "We can't see suffering one way; we have to look at it from thirteen directions and that is only the beginning–then we are called forth to follow this figure out of the light."
Jamison is always present as a first person narrator and her presence on the page is the figure we follow into the light. Yet as our thoughtful guide, she sounds less like the retrospectively-omniscient-New Yorker-writer, wryly profiling (in this caricature) the personalities of "fascinating" subjects, and more like a real person thinking in real time. This means that when she's funny she's funny without the jaded edges of irony. This means that she's willing to admit when she feels like "an idiot," when she doesn't know what's going on, what she doesn't know. She processes–and takes readers through the process–of these errors not towards some higher path of ultimate truth, but rather, down the gentle slope of humility, inadequate and intimate. In "Devil's Bait" Jamison discusses the "strange sympathetic limbo" that comes with writing about Morgellon's disease, a dermal condition known to its sufferers as excruciatingly real but to the medical community as a collective delusion: "I wish I could invent a verb tense full of open spaces–a tense that didn't pretend to understand the precise mechanisms of which it spoke; a tense that could admit its own limits."
Nearly every one of her essays acknowledges, at some point and in considerable detail, its own scene of writing. Like that moment when she writes about taking a break from typing notes for her essay on the Barkley Marathon to watch the Real World in the backseat of her car (was it a station wagon?) in the pouring rain as her computer battery was just about to die. Or when, in the last moments of "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain," the last moments of the book, she writes (I cry): "Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain. I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it."
Her constant self-examining, self-reflective presence is more than a winning rhetorical move: it is always also an ethical stance. There is no view from nowhere here, nor are any of her critical positions unstudied.
As she wrote these articles and fiction short and long, Jamison studied at Harvard, then Iowa's Writer's Workshop for Fiction, and now Yale, where is she currently completing her PhD dissertation in English. What is so amazing about her hybridization of scholarly and creative genres is not just the risk but its results: rigorous, probing, inventive prose. She employs both the Writer's Workshop eye for fine-toothed description ("He was like a kid's drawing of God") and the academic's insistence on intervening into an existing conversation–and does so conversationally: "Wallace Stevens called sentimentality a "failure of feeling," but his syntax is ambiguous: does he mean that we've failed our feelings or that they've failed us? This ambiguity seems to circle back to Solomon's distinction…" She locates us among the small details of the world; she locates her own position within a critical dialogue; and in doing, swiftly swims us inside of these problems, too. You might even recognize–in her ritual (dis)avowals of psychic pain, of guilt and confession, of the shame of watching oneself cry–and the thrilling pleasure, your own aching secrets. I did.
We can read the essays, as they are collected and assembled here, as an ethnographic excavation–of the splintered spectacle of the self, of sentimentality as virtue rather than disease, of illness and metaphor, of dead hot shame. As a journey to the wayward center of a feeling that is always off-center. A journey that must inevitably end with the not-defense, not-apology, not-jargon theoretical framework she calls (in earnest, I hope) "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain." I like to think she calls it this because no one else would dare to totalize female pain. Which is her point. She reminds us how tiring it is and how damn tired we are of seeing Woman as nothing but a pretty picture, a never-ending bruise. That essay is a request and invitation that is also a question: "…what if some of us want to take our scars seriously?"
She is writing against the tradition that turns female suffering into a trope, that turns real cries into the aestheticized contours of the hysteric's arched spine. "I want to insist that female pain is still news. It's always news. We've never already heard it." She is writing against the dominant literary canon that makes female pain into the butt of an infinite jest. But she is also writing against our tendency as "post-wounded women" to shrug at this masculine tradition with "post-wounded" laughter. She is writing the essay I'd been waiting to read my whole life. She is writing: "There is a way of representing female consciousness that can witness pain but also witness a larger self around that pain–a self who grows larger than it scars without disowning them, who is neither wound-dwelling nor jaded, who is actually healing."
And as she sketches this self–at once a private quilt and an authoritative cenotaph, eleven fractured and oracular representations, healing, wounded, always and never broken–so too are we as readers invited to suture our own failures of feeling into the essays, to map our conscience onto the consciousness of others, to wonder what the conditions of possibility might be for feeling differently, for feeling more. With bigger hearts, arms uncrossed, arms wide open. Arms wide open: it's a cliché, but I mean it, too.
Throughout her work, Jamison encounters and cites the brightest figures of the generation before her, writers like Grealy, Carson, Sontag, Didion, and the like. I–we–will quote Jamison. We've never already heard it.
Ava Kofman is a freelance journalist. She is a guest contributor to Feministing.
Ava Kofman is a writer and researcher living in Brooklyn. She is a guest contributor to Feministing.
Ava Kofman	Ava Kofman
Feministing Reads: What We're Reading
By Dana Bolger
Oscar nominee 'Coco' is a love letter to immigrants
By Barbara Sostaita
Día de los Muertos Is Political
By Dana Bolger • @danabolger • 3 years ago
Every month we share what our team is reading. We're about four months overdue this time around (better late than never?), so without further ado, here's what's on our nightstands these days…
Sejal: This month, I read Malcolm Harris's very good Kids These Days. It's one of the first books about millennials that's actually, well, by a millennial, and I found a lot in it that resonated. Harris argues that from elementary school on, our lives are a boot camp designed to make us maximally productive workers, on the theory that we'd get a fair shot in the world if we just invest in our own human capital — all while an increasingly precarious economy makes that ...
Sejal: This month, ...
By Barbara Sostaita • @@BarbaraSostaita • 3 years ago
The Oscars are coming up this Sunday and if there's one movie I'm rooting for, it's the contender for best animated feature film, Coco.
This film is important for so many reasons; for many Latinx youth, it's the first time we're seeing our stories and heritage accurately reflected on the silver screen. And on top of celebrating and honoring Mexican culture and traditions, Coco is a movie made for Latinx children and their families during the Trump era. Released a few months after Trump rescinded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and during a time when we feel underappreciated and under attack, Coco is a love letter to immigrants.
The film tells the story of Miguel Rivera, a young ...
This film is important for so ...
Some deaths aren't considered grievable because they were never considered lives worthy of protection in the first place.
Over 10,000 people have died since the 1990s trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border as a result of inhumane and unjust government policies. Police brutality and violence claims the lives of Black people in this country every day. Puerto Rico's Hurricane Maria death toll continues to rise. We may never know how many people state apathy killed, as the bodies of hurricane victims are being burned.
For immigrants and Latinx people viewed as disposable in the eyes of the state, Día de los Muertos — a traditional Mexican holiday that's underway this week ...
Over 10,000 people have died since the 1990s trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border ...
Books▪Leslie Jamison▪memoir▪pain▪Popular Culture


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Q: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException' occurred in PresentationFramework.dll I run a simple C# WPF application that uses a browser embedded in it. I have created a event when the browser navigates to the given url. But this bug comes during runtime:

An unhandled exception of type 'System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException' occurred
  in PresentationFramework.dll

Additional information: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
The code is as follows,
public MainWindow()
{
    // Some initialisation
    webBrowser.Navigate(requiredUrl);
}

private void webBrowser_Navigated(object sender, NavigationEventArgs e)
{
    // Actions related to navigation
}

Its throwing the Exception.

A: Nevermind,the problem is solved..
Move the webBrowser.Navigate(requiredUrl) to Windows_Loaded event.
       private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
       {
         // Some code
          webBrowser.Navigate(requiredUrl);
       }

It's working fine now.
I think as Andy said the window needs a valid handle for the browser .
So it not working inside the MainWindow() function,as the handle for browser is not created in it.

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text:
<!DOCTYPE html>

    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <meta name="description" content="PhD student at FIT CTU researching in dynamic languages and optimizing virtual machines.">
    <meta name="author" content="Petr Maj">

    <title>Petr Maj</title>

    <link href="css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
    <link href="css/scrolling-nav.css" rel="stylesheet">
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                <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".navbar-ex1-collapse">
                    Toggle navigation

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                 About

                        Research

                        CV

                        Teaching

                        Contact

                                    I am a PhD student at FIT CTU in Prague, advised by Jan Janousek. Formerly, I worked in Silicon Valley for 0xdata co-founded by Cliff Click on distributed scalable big data analytics and SN Systems in Bristol, UK on SONY Playstation 3 and PS Vita compilers & toolchains.

I am interested in design, analysis and optimalization of programming languages (mostly dynamic, currently R), big code & synthesis and embedded systems.

I hold masters degree from FEE CTU in Prague, I have been a graduate student at Purdue, IN, and I have spent a year at the University of Bristol, UK.

Papers & Posters

A fast abstract syntax tree interpreter for R

Kalibera T., Maj, P., Morandat, F., Vitek, J.; VEE 2014

testR – R language test driven specification poster

Maj P., Kalibera T., Vitek J.; UseR! 2013, Best technical presentation award.

A family of real- time Java benchmarks

Kalibera, T., Hagelberg, J., Maj, P., Pizlo, F., Titzer, B. and Vitek, J.; Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 23: n/a. Doi: 10.1002/cpe.1677, 2011

Schism: Fragmentation-Tolerant Real-Time Garbage Collection

Pizlo F., Ziarek L., Maj P., Hosking A., Vitek J., Blanton E.; PLDI 2010

High-level Programming of Embedded Hard Real-Time Systems

Pizlo F., Ziarek L., Blanton E., Maj P., Vitek J.; EuroSYS 2010

Conferences

2017

                            ECOOP
                            Artifact Evaluation

2016

                            ECOOP
                            SV co-chair

                            PLDI
                             Artifact Evaluation

2015

                            ECOOP
                            Housing chair

2014

                            PLDI
                            SV

2013

                            UseR!
                            Best technical poster award

                            SPLASH
                            SV

                            DALI (Dynamic Languages for Scalable Data Analytics)
                            by invitation

2010

                            VEESC (Virtual Execution Environments for Scientific Computing)
                            by invitation

2009

                            OOPSLA
                            SV

Education

2016 - 2020 (expected) : PhD

FIT CTU Prague. Advised by Jan Janousek. Expected thesis title: Speculative Optimizations of Dynamic Languages

2009 - 2010 (cancelled) : PhD

Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. Advised by Jan Vitek. Cancelled for personal resons. GPA after first year 3.93. Qual exams from Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Algorithm Design, Analysis and Implementation.

2007 - 2009 : MEng, s.c.l.

FEE CTU Prague. Thesis title: Source Code Plagiarism Detection Dean's award for outstanding Master thesis

2006 - 2007 : Erasmus studentship

University of Bristol, UK. 1st class degree from major subjects taken. Advised by Henk Muller

Work Experience

2013 - 2015 : Researcher in the field of virtual machines (independent contractor)

                                Author of FlaiR – a static and dynamic analysis framework for the R language. One of the developers of the FastR VM and runtime for the R language. Responsible for the static and dynamic analysis of the R code and related optimizations. Author of TestR framework for R language test driven specification, testing and benchmarking R Vms. Design and implementation of continuous program analysis framework, optimizations and invalidation. Mentoring junior researchers.

2012 : Senior Developer at 0xdata. inc.

                                Working on the design & implementation of almost all parts of the distributed non SQL big data store and analytics framework including core messaging, user-level API, distributed execution, initial implementation of R-like distributed queries on the cloud system.

2010 - 2012 : Compiler Engineer at SNSystems Ltd.

                                Responsible for correcting bugs & developing new features for the SN compiler that is used by most developers for Sony Playstation 3, PSP and PS Vita. Apart from the compiler, also responsible for implementing PS Vita assembler from scratch (main developer).

Full CV is also available.

Teaching

Build a JIT with LLVM (PLISS 2017, Fall 2016), with Jan Vitek and Oli Fluckiger

                                Source code available at github.

Code Generation (Spring 2017, Spring 2016) TA

                                Theoretical and practical aspects of an optimizing compiler backend implementation (using LLVM). MI-GEN (in Czech)

LLVM Compiler System (CTU, Fall 2016)

				Introduction to the LLVM compiler and its use as an optimizing JIT for dynamic languages (MI-LCF).

Programming Paradigms (Fall 2016) TA

                                λ calculus, Lisp and Prolog. BI-PAA (in Czech)

                                I am also teaching english version.

Please arrange consultations for current courses by email.

I have always enjoyed teaching and in the past, I taught Java, C++, Virtual Macgines and Embedded systems at university, or high school level. In 2015 I was awarded Google CodeWeek funding for embedded programming for high school kids at Arcibiskupske Gymnazium in Prague.

                        Petr Maj

                        Department of Theoretical Computer Science

                        Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University

                        Thakurova 9, 16000 Praha 6

                        Czech Republic

                        petamaj [the usual email character here] fit [dot] cvut [dot] cz

                        h-index: 4

                        Linked-In

                        petamaj@github

                        peta@bitbucket

        Created using Bootstrap, Scrolling Nav from Start Bootstrap and Glyphicons.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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Zika Virus one zero one: What We all know, What We're Making an attempt To learn
Posted on January 13, 2020 by Adam Bell
Enlarge this imageThe Aedes mosquito can distribute Zika virus in combination with dengue fever and chikungunya virus. The virus was 1st noticed inside the Americas in 2014.Common History Archive/UIG by using Getty Imageshide captiontoggle captionUniversal Background Archive/UIG through Getty ImagesThe Aedes mosquito can distribute Zika virus together with dengue fever and chikungunya virus. The virus was 1st noticed inside the Americas in 2014.Common History Archive/UIG by way of Getty ImagesNote: This post was up to date on February five. As a lot more information relates to light-weight about Zika virus, there will be even further updates. What is actually Inside of a Viral Name? Why could it be known as Zika virus? Because it was first found in the Zika forest in Uganda (Zika usually means "overgrown" within the nearby language).A at the time obscure sickne s has become earning headlines. 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