Pratt Institute graduate Garrett Benisch has proposed using biosolids, the organic matter derived from treated sewage, to produce a compostable ballpoint pen and its ink.
Benisch, who just graduated from New York's Pratt Institute with a degree in industrial design, created the Sum Waste pen for his thesis project.
The curvy, translucent writing instrument made from biosolids was featured in the university's year-end design show and won first place in a national competition organised by research group Healthy Materials Lab.
Speaking from the headquarters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on May 9, the cabinet member Nitin Gadkari promised a rapid elimination of air pollution. “Delhi will be free of air and water pollution in the next three years,” he said. Gadkari is now the minister of road transport and highways now, but in the years before Modi first became prime minister in 2014, Gadkari was president of the BJP. He said he expected that the air would clear because of the achievements of his political party, which “has done 100 percent corruption-free, transparent, time-bound, result-oriented, and quality work.”And more about the general attitude of "we know better than experts":
Bringing air pollution down to acceptable levels—not just in New Delhi, but also throughout north India—would indeed be a tremendous accomplishment. But promising to do so within three years is absurd. China, for example, has successfully directed policymaking efforts toward reducing particle pollution, after decades of catastrophic pollution in the north and public pressure once air quality data became easily available online To do so has taken China several years (more than three), has certainly not eliminated pollution altogether, and has required facing unpleasant facts. Central Chinese officials held local governments to account for improving pollution—and moved to address the problem when statistical analysis showed that local bureaucrats were manipulating the numbers. But Gadkari’s unbelievable numbers are coming from the top.
Such absurdities have become commonplace. Gadkari’s promise echoes Modi’s claim the government could eliminate open defecation from rural India by 2019. (Open defecation rates improved, but it remains dangerously common, as independent demographic data shows.) Both numerical deadlines combine wild ambition and a good cause with needless quantitative precession and the absence of any plan that could achieve the result.
Unfortunately, the pattern extends beyond the environment. Increasingly, many of India’s leading economists and statisticians have spoken out about the dismantling of India’s systems of official statistics and expertise. Respected statisticians—including an economist whom I know personally from my time at the Delhi School of Economics—resigned from the National Statistical Commission in January, in protest of the government’s refusal to release credible unemployment data.
The government’s top economic advisors and policymakers report being as surprised as everyone else when in 2016 the prime minister, in a move remembered as “demonetization,” suddenly declared that a large fraction of India’s notes no longer counted as currency. In my own field of child health, the Economist reported that UNICEF suppressed data on child stunting because the prime minister’s home state scored poorly. I do not think any of my colleagues in sanitation research seriously believe the government’s response to a December 2018 parliamentary question, which was to insist that sanitation coverage in rural Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh is 100 percent.
The Russian Orthodox Church is debating an end to the practice of blessing large scale weapons, including nuclear missiles.
Last month, a committee on ecclesial law met in Moscow and recommended ending the practice of blessing missiles and warheads, and suggested that priests should instead bless only individual soldiers and their personal weapons.
According to a report by Religion News Service, Bishop Savva Tutunov of the Moscow Patriarchate said that it would be more appropriate to bless only the warrior who is defending their country, and their own personal weapon–instead of bombs.
“One can talk about the blessing of a warrior on military duty in defense of the fatherland,” said Tutunov.
“At the end of the corresponding ritual, the personal weapon is also blessed — precisely because it is connected to the individual person who is receiving the blessing. By the same reasoning, weapons of mass destruction should not be sanctified,” he said.
The proposal to end the blessings for larger weapons has yet to be approved by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Weapons systems, including Topol-class intercontinental ballistic missiles, are frequently blessed by members of the Russian Orthodox clergy during military parades and other events. These blessings are seen as a way of spiritually protecting the country.
A study released today provides the most complete list yet of the advantages of solar energy—from carbon sequestration to improvements for pollinator habitat. The paper offers a new framework for analyzing solar projects to better understand the full suite of benefits.And more:
The study, published in Nature Sustainability, was conducted by researchers from the University of California, Davis; Lancaster University in the United Kingdom; the Center for Biological Diversity and 10 other organizations.
It suggests a framework for understanding more completely, and ultimately quantifying, the benefits of solar energy, identifying 20 frequently overlooked advantages. For example, solar panels paired with native plant restoration can add habitat while also increasing panel efficiency.
In the report, the authors:I'm glad my common sense suggestions eventually get taken up in universities, eventually...
- Suggest a model for engineering solar energy systems that maximizes both technological and ecological benefits.
- Create a framework for characterizing 20 benefits of installations on different spaces, including rooftop solar; solar on contaminated land; solar over functional bodies of water like reservoirs, water treatment areas and irrigation canals; and solar co-located with agriculture and grazing.
- Make the case for understanding that as renewable energy development is ramped up to address the climate crisis, it shouldn't create unnecessary negative impacts, especially when technology and resources are available to maximize positive effects.
- Suggest how this framework might be useful in policy and regulatory decision-making in order to ensure a sustainable energy transition.
Patna: A groom was killed in celebratory gunfire during a wedding in Bihar moments after the exchange of vows....
As per the itinerary, a wedding procession reached the house of the bride on the scheduled day and this was followed by the garland exchange ritual.
While the groom was walking towards the wedding venue after the garland exchange ritual, his elder brother whipped out a pistol and started firing in celebration.Wow. An idiot brother-in-law kills the groom, and the worry is that the bride will wear the long time consequences?
Witnesses said the brother fired thrice but the gun got stuck. As he tried to clear the bullets, they fired one by one, hitting him as well as the groom. Both sustained seriously injuries in the incident and were immediately rushed to a nearby hospital. The groom succumbed to his injuries on Monday afternoon while his brother is battling for his life.
“Who will marry my daughter now? Now everyone will call her doomed,” said Kumari’s father Bhuletan Rai, sobbing inconsolably.
Celebratory gunfire go on unchecked in Bihar despite the authorities putting a ban on them. It has claimed many lives during the wedding season over the years. According to a report, 15 people have been killed or wounded in celebratory gunfire in the past six months.
In 2010 he was arrested after breaking into a bank branch in Connecticut and was charged with carrying an unlicensed firearm, burglary, trespass and carrying a firearm while intoxicated. Police said Torn had broken into the bank thinking it was his home.I have a feeling I probably read about the 2010 incident at the time, but it sure didn't stick in my memory.
After pleading guilty to a number of charges surrounding his possession of a loaded weapon while drunk, he was given a two-and-a-half-year suspended jail sentence in 2010.
Torn also infamously fought director Norman Mailer during the filming of counterculture film Maidstone. In an improvised on-camera scene, Torn — playing Mailer's brother — attacked Mailer with a hammer and attempted to strangle him. Mailer bit Torn's ear in response.
The scene made it into Maidstone's final cut and was apparently planned, but the blood shed by both actors was very real. Torn was reportedly angered by Mailer's direction.
WASHINGTON — When almost a month’s worth of rain deluged this city on Monday morning, turning streets into rivers and basements into wading pools, it showed just how vulnerable cities with aging water systems can be in the era of climate change.The rainfall overwhelmed the capital’s storm-water system, much of it built almost a century ago to handle a smaller population, far less pavement and not nearly as much water.“We’re still approaching this 21st-century problem with 20th-century infrastructure, and it’s completely inadequate,” said Constantine Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “And it’s only going to get worse.”Updating that infrastructure will be enormously expensive, experts warn, not just in Washington but around the country. That’s not only because upgrades are required. In many cases, cities are facing huge backlogs in general maintenance.
Pound per pound, babies are remarkably strong. The parent learns this the first time they proffer their finger. In a famous series of experiments in the late 19th century—of the sort one can scarcely imagine today—Louis Robinson, a surgeon at a children’s hospital in England, tested some 60 infants—many within an hour of birth—by having them hang from a suspended “walking stick.” With only two exceptions, according to one report, the infants were able to hang on, sustaining “the weight of their body for at least ten seconds.”9 Many could do it for upward of a minute. In a later-published photograph, Robinson swapped out the bar for a tree branch, to bring home his whole point: Our “arboreal ancestry.”Going back further:
As the evolutionary biologist Mary Marzke argues, our hands today were literally shaped around millions of years of using and making tools (our cerebral hemispheres, notes John Napier, author of the classic study Hands, expanded as our tool making did). The human hand became an almost perfect gripping machine. That long opposable thumb, enabling what has been termed the “power grip” and the “precision grip,” looms most obvious. But consider also the Papillary ridges, those tougher, thicker parts of the skin, found on the human heel, but also on the human palm—a vestigial souvenir from our time as quadrupeds. Their placement, as Napier writes in Hands, “corresponds with the principal areas of gripping and weight bearing, where they serve very much the same function as the treads on an automobile tire.” Eccrine glands perfectly line the papillary ridge, Napier notes, providing a grip-enhancing “lubrication system.” This sort of “frictional adaptation” does not kick in until we are around 2, writes Frank Wilson in The Hand (before then, we just grip harder).I would have guessed that men not sexually partnering much in countries like Japan or China might have activity which compensates for gripping strength loss from automation, if you get my drift. But perhaps I am wrong...
Gripping, then, is a deep part of our biology and evolution as a species. It’s also part of a long story in which we have been getting weaker for millions of years, largely because of a decline in physical activity. The human skeleton, for example, is “relatively gracile” (weak) compared to hominoids.12 Those infants tested by Robinson, stout hangers-on though they may have been, can hardly compete with infant monkeys, who can hang on for upward of a half hour. Why? Because they need to. “Modern infants,” as one researcher notes, “as well as their fairly recent human antecedents, do not need to hang on with their hands and feet from the moment of birth.”13
Indicating that the ways Facebook can continue to erode trust in its products are evidently limitless, Bloomberg reported Monday that the social media network has used specialized toolkits to monitor and shepherd the public’s opinion of the company and its top brass. This reportedly involved the use of two programs: one titled Stormchaser and another dubbed Night’s Watch, evidently a Game of Thrones reference.
Citing former employees and internal documents, Bloomberg reported that Stormchaser has been used by Facebook employees since 2016 to track viral content involving everything from “Delete Facebook” campaigns to claims that Zuckerberg is an alien (big if true).
Reagan National Airport, an official observing site, saw 2.79 inches of rain in just one hour, beating a 1945 record of 2.05 inches, The Washington Post reported.That's climate change for you, after 1 degree globally.
Extreme precipitation has been proposed to scale with the water vapor content in the atmosphere. The Clausius‐Clapeyron (CC) relation describes the rate of change of saturated water vapor pressure with temperature as approximately 7% °C−1 and sets a scale for change in precipitation extremes in the absence of large changes to circulation patterns [Trenberth et al., 2003; Pall et al., 2007]. Analysis of observed annual maximum daily precipitation over land areas with sufficient data samples indicates an increase with global mean temperature of about 6%–8% °C−1 [Westra et al., 2013]. However, observational relations between precipitation extremes and temperature (or dew point temperature) show that subdaily precipitation extremes may intensify more than is anticipated based upon currently available modeling and theory [e.g., Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010]. This seems to be a property of convective precipitation and may be explained by the latent heat released within storms invigorating vertical motion. This mechanism is thought to generate greater increases in hourly rainfall intensities [Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Berg et al., 2009; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010; Westra et al., 2014; Blenkinsop et al., 2015; Lepore et al., 2015], with a stronger response in convective systems than in stratiform systems [Berg et al., 2013]. This suggests that hourly extremes will probably intensify more with global warming than daily extremes [e.g., Utsumi et al., 2011; Westra et al., 2014].
Almost all patrons at music festivals take illicit substances, with MDMA the "drug of choice", an inquest into the deaths of six young people was told yesterday.
The coronial inquest heard that NSW Ministry of Health data indicated up to 90 cent of young festival patrons used drugs.
We’ve long governed by hope: a better life. In its loftiest state, postwar liberalism was expected to have a cleansing effect on countries’ social climate, liberating people from prejudice and small-mindedness. The liberal appeal spanned the ideological spectrum. In the United States and Europe, centrist governments of the left and right ruled.I tend to think that this is too pessimistic. I reckon that the West has had a fright over two things - immigration surges from war torn and economically savaged regions, ironically sometimes contributed to by interventions from the West; and the unevenness in global economic growth (also, somewhat ironically, caused by the globalisation as promoted by Western economists as a good thing overall - which it is.)
It is this promise of a morally elevated electorate that Putin panned. The trouble, professor Putin lectured to the Financial Times, is that many people have lost faith in the liberal idea. They have moved on. Now, Putin and his fellow travelers, including President Trump and others, propose that we govern by fear: a dread of outsiders.No one should suppose that Putin’s nationalistic substitute for lapsed liberalism will make the world a kinder, gentler or more stable place. The liberal ideal presumed, perhaps naively, that people could be brought together by common interests and common values. The nationalistic alternative takes as its starting point the view that there will be winners and losers.People feel threatened. Liberal high-mindedness has created a backlash by justifying policies and practices that are unpopular with large swaths of the population — open borders, unwanted immigration, globalization and multiculturalism. Liberal policies “come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population,” Putin said.People value their national identities. They generally fear policies and practices that would erode these identities. One question in a 2016 Pew study asked whether increases in the number of ethnic groups, races and nationalities made their countries “a worse place to live.” Large shares of Greeks (63 percent), Italians (53 percent) and Germans (31 percent) said “yes.”We are straddled between two systems. The daunting task is to salvage the best of postwar liberalism while, at the same time, acknowledging the importance of national identities and sovereignty. It may be a mission impossible.
Built on a site located 45 kilometres east of Greater Cairo, the city will feature a new presidential palace, a new parliament, a central bank and business district, an airport and a massive theme park, alongside housing for 6.5m people.
