Orson Catts: Director of SymbioticA;The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, Professor in Contestable Design, University of Western AustraliaHis article is at The Conversation, but his job suggests "peak Guardian".
Papua New Guinea has the highest rate of oral cancers in the world. According to the World Health Organisation, nearly one in every 500 new cases of mouth and oropharynx cancer is in Papua New Guinea and it is the nation's biggest cancer killer.A parent says:
"When my children were just six or seven they already knew how to chew," the mother-of-four continues. "I tried stopping them, they were too young. But they grew up with betel nut. We have to educate the children to not chew."
Long term exposure to the mixture dramatically increases risk.
"If a child started chewing betel nut at a very early age, he would be likely to get cancer before reaching the age of 30," said Dr Paki Molumi, surgeon at the ear, nose and throat department at Port Moresby General Hospital.
This in a country with limited and healthcare facilities, frequent drug shortages and few oncologists. At Papua New Guinea's only specialist cancer centre, radiotherapy treatments were put on hold after its only radiation specialist resigned last year.
"Most patients come to the hospital very late. Our health system is fragile and cancer services are not fully functional, so the survival rates are low."
With the popularity of betel nut on the rise, the future burden of cancer treatment on the national health system is a ticking time bomb.
I had no idea its use was a health problem to that degree.
"The government has to stop people chewing because it makes so much rubbish. Everyone spits everywhere and it makes the place dirty - it's unhygienic."What a country...
One of the motivating factors behind the ban [in Port Moresby only] was to clean up the capital from this residue. The spitting of pathogenic saliva increases the spread of disease. In a country with one of the highest infection rates of tuberculosis in the world, this habit poses huge contamination risks.
Only this president could think 4,000 nukes aren’t enough.From the body of the report:
All presidents are ignorant of certain issues when they come into office. Most are aware of their shortcomings and take care to study up on what they need to know. The uniqueness of Trump is that he has almost no self-awareness, deals with his flaws by projecting them onto others, and seems allergic to study. He has asked for his daily briefing to contain no more than three subjects, with no more than one page devoted to each, and containing only the consensus judgment with no space for dissenting views within the intelligence community. Presidents have easy access to the most highly classified information and, if they want, the most knowledgeable experts, in or out of government, on any subject. Yet Trump learns most of what he knows from Fox News and Breitbart.Seems entirely accurate.
...a concise description of what Vladimir Putin's Russia aims to achieve by interfering in elections in Germany and throughout the West this week on NPR's Fresh Air:And Jason - going to give a big "meh" in response?
- "It wants to end the European Union, which it sees as something that thwarts its ability to do corrupt deals, and do bilateral deals in Europe.
- "It wants to end NATO, because it wants the United States and its influence out of Europe.
- "More generally it seeks to undermine and dislodge liberal democracy wherever it can, partly for practical reasons because Russian companies do business using corrupt methods and it would be more useful to them to do business in states where rule of law isn't so respected and they can bribe people…
- "But I think they also seek to undermine democracy for a bigger reason — namely that democracy rhetoric, or the ideals of rule of law, and freedom of speech and freedom of decision, these are ideals that are undermining for the current Russian regime. It's an oligarchic, corrupt dictatorship, so what it fears the most is people on the streets calling for democracy. So the extent to which it can undermine its neighbors, and undermine their democracies, it's good for them. Then they can point and say, 'look, democracy is a disaster, it doesn't work for the United States, it doesn't work for Germany, so why should you want it either?'"
The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.The article notes that other women complained about him too; but he also has his defenders.
In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.
Lewis, a glacial geologist who worked at North Dakota State University in Fargo until he emigrated to Canada last year, corroborates this anecdote in a written letter to BU. He writes that after Marchant blew ash in Willenbring’s eyes, she “yelled and cursed in pain. While she was doubled over, [Marchant] looked back at the other members of the field party and gave us a comical expression that I interpreted as meaning ‘oops, that went a little too far.’” Lewis’s letter also says that he saw Marchant grab and push Willenbring at least twice.
But Dale hopes readers take seriously her suggestion that in today's world Jesus, along with Islam's prophet Mohammed, would be viewed as terrorists under contemporary anti-terror laws, which she believes undermine civil liberties.Actually, I think quite a lot of people wouldn't be too concerned about a modern Mohammed getting caught up in terrorist laws. Apart from partaking in on the ground battles, he really had it in for critical poets, and was hardly one for free speech himself, to put it mildly. Quite a different kettle of fish from Jesus's one bit of aggro in the Temple.
The research by Dr. Alexandre Dumais (MD, PhD, FRCPC, psychiatrist at the Institut Philippe Pinel) and Dr. Stéphane Potvin (PhD, professor at the Université de Montréal), which studied 1,136 patients (from 18 to 40 years of age) with mental illnesses who had been seen five times during the year after discharge, took into account substance use and the onset of violent behaviour.
Previous research has already shown that a cannabis use disorder is associated with violent behaviour. According to this new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, users who reported at each follow-up visit that they continued to smoke cannabis presented an increased risk (+144%) of violent behaviour.
These results also confirm the detrimental role of chronic cannabis use in patients with mental illness. According to the principal researcher Alexandre Dumais (MD, PhD, FRCPC): "an interesting feature of our results is that the association between persistent cannabis use and violence is stronger than that associated with alcohol or cocaine."
Persistent cannabis use should therefore be considered as an indicator of future violent behaviour in patients who leave a psychiatric hospital for follow-up in an outpatient clinic, although the researcher points out that this behaviour tends to fade with time.
"This decrease could be explained by better adherence to treatment (the patient becomes more involved in their treatment over time) and by better support from their entourage. Even though we observed that violent behaviour tended to decrease during follow-up periods, the association remained statistically significant," noted Dr. Dumais.
But the Seasteading Institute and the new for-profit spin-off, Blue Frontiers, have racked up some real-world achievements in the past year. They signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of French Polynesia in January that lays the groundwork for the construction of their prototype. And they gained momentum from a conference of interested parties in Tahiti in May, which hundreds of people attended. The project's focus has shifted from building a libertarian oasis to hosting experiments in governance styles and showcasing a smorgasbord of sustainable technologies for, among other things, desalination, renewable energy and floating food-production. The shift has brought some gravitas to the undertaking, and some ecologists have taken interest in the possibilities of full-time floating laboratories.
“There’s no point in vilifying Bregretters,” Mike Galsworthy, a scientist who founded the prominent anti-Brexit groups Scientists for EU and Healthier in the EU, told me. “Bregretters do have to accept some responsibility for this mess we’re now in, but blame also clearly lies both with Cameron for calling a referendum in the first place, and the 40-year dominance of euroskeptic media,” including Brexit-friendly outlets like The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and, from Rupert Murdoch’s media portfolio, The Sun and The Sunday Times. “When Murdoch was asked why he was so anti-Europe he said: ‘That’s easy—when I go to Downing Street they do as I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice,’” Galsworthy told me. These outlets are rife with Euromyths. (Perhaps the most legendary example is the bendy banana euromyth, which claimed that EU regulators banned imports into Britain of bananas that were bent out of shape. This turned out to be false—EU regulations simply stated that the pricing of bananas should be different according to their shape—but it may have had an impact on some people’s decisions to vote Leave, like the infamous Banana Lady.)Sure, businessmen are often motivated by power and money; but what's pretty sickening about Rupert is that to get his power, he trades in direct manipulation of the public.
I had been on the station for a week, and was getting better at knowing where I was when I first woke up. If I had a headache, I knew it was because I had drifted too far from the vent blowing clean air at my face. I was often still disoriented about how my body was positioned: I would wake up convinced that I was upside down, because in the dark and without gravity, my inner ear took a random guess as to how my body was positioned in the small space. When I turned on a light, I had a sort of visual illusion that the room was rotating rapidly as it reoriented itself around me, though I knew it was actually my brain readjusting in response to new sensory input.
The light in my crew quarters took a minute to warm up to full brightness. The space was just barely big enough for me and my sleeping bag, two laptops, some clothes, toiletries, photos of Amiko and my daughters, a few paperback books. I looked at my schedule for today. I clicked through new emails, stretched and yawned, then fished around in my toiletries bag, attached to the wall down by my left knee, for my toothpaste and toothbrush. I brushed, still in my sleeping bag, then swallowed the toothpaste and chased it with a sip of water out of a bag with a straw. There wasn't really a good way to spit in space.
