Comparing U.S. & World Covers for TIME Magazine

Go to the article to see the difference. The ones for the U.S. are illustrations for a lighter-weight topic. The ones for the rest of the world are about an important topic for the world.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/25/1039957/-STUNNING-Comparing-U-S-World-Covers-for-TIME-Magazine?detail=email#

FRI NOV 25, 2011
Writing by David Harris Gershon

Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different.

Man denied life-saving surgery over 26-cent insurance dispute

Many people don't have health insurance to start with.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/-man-denied-life-saving-surgery-over-26-cent-insurance-dispute--212103627.html

Eric Pfeiffer
Aug. 13, 2013

A man seeking treatment for a life-threatening illness had his health further jeopardized when his employer and health insurance company tried to cancel his coverage over a 26-cent dispute.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that in January, 33-year-old Sergio Branco was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. Left untreated, the illness can be fatal.

When the truck driver took time off work to seek treatment under the Family and Medical Leave Act, he was told that treatment for the leukemia required a bone-marrow transplant that would cost about $500,000, even with insurance.

To make matters worse, when Branco returned to work after his federally guaranteed leave time, he was promptly laid off.

Branco and his family weren’t worried, because they knew he was eligible for extended coverage under the government’s COBRA program.

The family also launched a fundraising site for Branco’s leukemia treatments.

The monthly fee for Branco’s COBRA insurance is $518.26. When his wife sent in the first payment, she erroneously made out the check for $518, forgetting to add the 26 cents.

Thus began an extended feud among the family, Branco's former employer Russell Reid, the insurance company handling his COBRA and even the Department of Labor.

Paychex, the company handling the COBRA payments, cashed the check but did not notify the Branco family of the payment error. In the middle of Branco’s treatment, he was informed by the hospital that he didn’t have insurance.

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It took several months, but on Aug. 9, the parties involved finally agreed to put Blanco back on the COBRA coverage. Blanco’s surgery is now scheduled to take place on Friday.

"The Department of Labor said the company will reinstate him from May 'til now," Mara Branco told the paper. "They said the company did it wrong. I am super happy. It’s like a weight has lifted off my shoulder. It’s better than winning the lottery."

If you'd like to donate to the Blanco's medical fund, you can find more information here.

How the railroad owners got rich

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=50-100--150-years-ago-age-of-anxiety&page=2

From Scientific American magazine, March 2013, reprinted from 1931:

“The hours of labor exacted by some of the Brooklyn railroad companies are so many and the work is so severe that it is astonishing that men can perform the labor and live. The Brooklyn Central Railroad Company requires seventeen and a half hours of labor per day, and allows no time for procuring meals; the food necessary to sustain life being eaten in the cars. The compensation for conductors and drivers is $1.35 per day.”

Chemicals That Promote Obesity Down the Generations

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=13-P13-00032&segmentID=1

Air Date: Week of August 9, 2013

Diet and exercise are seen as the key factors that cause obesity, but new research suggests that certain chemicals called obesogens contribute to the global weight problem. Bruce Blumberg, professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California at Irvine tells host Steve Curwood that the effects of an obesogenic chemical he studied seem to persist for several generations.

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BLUMBERG: An obesogen, according to us, is a chemical that somehow causes the body to store more fat. And it can do that by making more fat cells, by putting more fat into those cells, or can do that indirectly by changing how the metabolism works or by making you hungrier, or by making you less able to sense that you’ve had enough to eat.

CURWOOD: Bruce Blumberg is a professor of Developmental Biology at UC Irvine. And here’s the startling part of his research. Not only has his team confirmed earlier work showing that certain persistent organic pollutants can act as obesegens, they have found that initial exposures can echo down through at least three generations to make animals fat. This study used the chemical TBT – tributyltin --which was widely used as anti-fouling paint until a few years ago.

BLUMBERG: So we exposed pregnant mice to very low doses of tributyltin, and we knew from our previous work that would give us an effect on the babies that were so exposed - that would be - we would call that the F-1 generation. And we asked the question what happens if we bred those babies and the babies of those babies and checked whether there were subsequent effects.

CURWOOD: And what happened?

BLUMBERG: So what we found is that the effects persisted in the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. And that some of the effects were actually stronger in the greatgrandchildren who had never been exposed.

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CURWOOD: Now this study is lab mice, how well do you think these findings might translate to humans?

BLUMBERG: 100 percent.

CURWOOD: Really?

BLUMBERG: The reason I say that is because tributyltin - TBT - works through a hormone receptor called PPAR gamma. And we know there are pharmaceutical drugs that target that same receptor that make people fat. So if I have a chemical tributyltin that activates the same receptor, you would expect the same effect.

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CURWOOD: One of the most startling things that’s in your report is your citation of a study that showed eight different species of animals including pets, laboratory animals, and feral rats, living in proximity to humans have become obese in parallel with the human obesity epidemic. And the odds of this being a coincidence was something like 10 million to 1 against.

Dr. Bruce Blumberg (photo: Bruce Blumberg)

BLUMBERG: 10 million to 1. Yes.

BLUMBERG: You can make the argument, if you talk to...the mainstream obesity community will make the argument that it’s all about diet and exercise, calories in and calories out. And I don’t see how you can explain the increase in obesity of animals, including wild animals, by calories in and calories out. It’s got to be something else. It has to be the nature of the calories. It has to be a chemical, an environmental factor, to which they’re exposed to now, that they were not previously exposed to, that underlies that.

CURWOOD: So who’s most susceptible to tributyltin exposure?

BLUMBERG: Tributyltin will make animals and humans fat at any stage of life. We’re particularly concerned with prenatal exposures because that’s where you have the capability to have transgenerational effects. You won’t cause, or we don’t believe that you will...exposing an adult will cause transgenerational effects on their offspring. But we know from our experiments, that exposing embryos to a chemical like tributyltin will cause transgenerational effects.

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BLUMBERG: It says to me that the most important way that we can change obesity is not by treating obese people, but by preventing them from becoming obese in the first place, by preventing these exposures, which can include chemical exposures, but it can also include exposures to improper diet. There’s a fair bit of data that says exposing mom to a high fat or junk food diet makes the babies prefer that kind of food. There’s some kind of a programming event that’s not well understood that’s going on there. So it’s not just chemical exposures. Chemical exposures and dietary factors, and the nature of diet early in life, is the area that needs to be addressed to make inroads into solving this obesity problem that we face today.

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Human and plant evolution

I had a couple of thoughts when I heard this show, related to human evolution related to plants.

(1) Humans evolved along with the plants we eat, including the toxins they contain. If we are exposed to fewer of these toxins, it may be harmful in some ways, similarly to the apparent rise in allergies due to having less contact with germs. Eg., if we make extra amounts of some substance to detoxify a toxin, when the toxin is decreased, it might have harmful effects. If we make extra amounts of a substance to make up for some that the toxin causes to be decreased, when the toxin is decreased, we may end up with too much of that substance.

(2) It has been suggested that cooking helped us develop bigger brains, by making more energy available from a given amount of food. Cooking destroys some plant toxins, so that might have had effects on human health. I would guess that we have been eating cooked food long enough to have reduced any possible negative effects. And if the body no longer needed to use as many resources to deal with toxins in our food, more resources would be available to develop a bigger brain.

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=13-P13-00032&segmentID=4

How Insects Influence Plant Evolution
Air Date: Week of August 9, 2013

From the spiciness of the chili pepper to horseradish’s bitter bite, many plant traits are evolutionary adaptations to insect attacks. Cornell biologist Anurag Agrawal explains to host Steve Curwood just how speedily plants can evolve and adapt when insect populations change.

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And for millenia, insects - such as the silk worm – have in turn helped guide the evolution and defenses of plants.
A new 5 year study from researchers at Cornell University in Science Magazine focuses on the critical role insects can play in plant evolution, and how speedy that evolution can be.
The lead author is Anurag Agrawal, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell.

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AGRAWAL: Yeah, there’s been a long history of circumstantial evidence that many of the traits plants have are adaptations to insect herbivores. If you think about the things we eat, what makes horseradish spicy? Horseradish is spicy because of a series of compounds called glucosinolates that we believe have evolved by natural selection to ward off insects. You know, the poisons that make milkweed so famous? - you know, same expectation. What’s nicotine? Nicotine is a neurotoxin of tobacco that has evolved by natural selection to ward off insects.

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CURWOOD: Please describe the specifics of your study for us – what were you looking at?

AGRAWAL: Well, what we did is we set out experimental plots here at Ithaca, New York to examine the impact insect herbivores have on the plants, and removed insects from half of the plots using an insecticide treatment, and over a very quick period of time – about five years, five generations of the plants we were studying, the common Evening Primrose, it’s a wildflower – removal of insects resulted in the evolution of two very critical plant traits: How early the plants flower and the production of a toxin in the fruits of those flowers. When we removed insects, the plants were able to relax those defenses. They flowered earlier and they produced less of those toxins in their fruits.

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AGRAWAL: Well, it’s complicated, and I appreciate the question. Insecticides certainly have been a very valuable tool in the production of agricultural crops, and I think that what it tells us is that when we take insects out of the picture – using things like insecticides – we are encouraging plants throughout the evolutionary process to relax their defenses.

And, in fact, this is a story that I think is unfortunately really a big part of worldwide agriculture, and that is that we tend to select varieties of plants to grow that are diminished in their natural defensive capacities. If you take a wild plant that has survived out there for millions of years, it typically has a remarkable array of toxins and defense tactics to ward off pests.

About 10 percent of all plants produce hydrogen cyanide. We know hydrogen cyanide as a very general toxin – an anti-life compound – and it’s hydrogen cyanide that’s in 10 percent of the plants. It has no primary function, it doesn’t help the plant capture sunlight or produce seeds directly, what hydrogen cyanide does is it poisons insects that are trying to eat those plants.

One of the things that I think we do a little too well is we – either on purpose or inadvertently – we breed crops so that they have relaxed defenses and that increases our needs and our usage of pesticides, which I think we can all agree is problematic for the environment.

CURWOOD: Anurag Agrawal is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. Thanks so much for taking the time today!

Length of Human Pregnancies Can Vary Naturally by as Much as Five Weeks

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130806203327.htm

Aug. 6, 2013 — The length of a human pregnancy can vary naturally by as much as five weeks, according to research published online August 7 in the journal Human Reproduction.

Normally, women are given a date for the likely delivery of their baby that is calculated as 280 days after the onset of their last menstrual period. Yet only four percent of women deliver at 280 days and only 70% deliver within 10 days of their estimated due date, even when the date is calculated with the help of ultrasound.

Now, for the first time, researchers in the USA have been able to pinpoint the precise point at which a woman ovulates and a fertilised embryo implants in the womb during a naturally conceived pregnancy, and follow the pregnancy through to delivery. Using this information, they have been able to calculate the length of 125 pregnancies.

"We found that the average time from ovulation to birth was 268 days -- 38 weeks and two days," said Dr Anne Marie Jukic, a postdoctoral fellow in the Epidemiology Branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (Durham, USA), part of the National Institutes for Health. "However, even after we had excluded six pre-term births, we found that the length of the pregnancies varied by as much as 37 days.

"We were a bit surprised by this finding. We know that length of gestation varies among women, but some part of that variation has always been attributed to errors in the assignment of gestational age. Our measure of length of gestation does not include these sources of error, and yet there is still five weeks of variability. It's fascinating."

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Dementia Risk Tied to Blood Sugar Level, Even With No Diabetes

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130807204835.htm

Aug. 7, 2013 — A joint Group Health-University of Washington (UW) study in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that higher blood sugar levels are associated with higher dementia risk, even among people who do not have diabetes.

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For example, in people without diabetes, risk for dementia was 18 percent higher for people with an average glucose level of 115 milligrams per deciliter compared to those with an average glucose level of 100 mg/dl. And in people with diabetes, whose blood sugar levels are generally higher, dementia risk was 40 percent higher for people with an average glucose level of 190 mg/dl compared to those with an average glucose level of 160 mg/dl.

"The most interesting finding was that every incrementally higher glucose level was associated with a higher risk of dementia in people who did not have diabetes," said first author Paul K. Crane, MD, MPH, an associate professor of medicine at the UW School of Medicine, adjunct associate professor of health services at the UW School of Public Health, and affiliate investigator at Group Health Research Institute. "There was no threshold value for lower glucose values where risk leveled off."

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So should people try to eat less sugar -- or foods with a lower "glycemic index"? Not necessarily, Dr. Crane said: "Your body turns your food into glucose, so your blood sugar levels depend not only on what you eat but also on your individual metabolism: how your body handles your food." But he does suggest that taking walks couldn't hurt: The ACT study has previously linked physical activity to later onset and reduced risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.

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How Parents See Themselves May Affect Their Child's Brain and Stress Level

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130809115100.htm

Aug. 9, 2013 — A mother's perceived social status predicts her child's brain development and stress indicators, finds a study at Boston Children's Hospital. While previous studies going back to the 1950s have linked objective socioeconomic factors -- such as parental income or education -- to child health, achievement and brain function, the new study is the first to link brain function to maternal self-perception.

In the study, children whose mothers saw themselves as having a low social status were more likely to have increased cortisol levels, an indicator of stress, and less activation of their hippocampus, a structure in the brain responsible for long-term memory formation (required for learning) and reducing stress responses.

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actual maternal education or income-to-needs ratio (income relative to family size) did not significantly predict cortisol levels or hippocampal activation.

The findings suggest that while actual socioeconomic status varies, how people perceive and adapt to their situation is an important factor in child development. Some of this may be culturally determined, Sheridan notes.

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Why Does the American Middle Class Continue to Struggle Financially?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130811005338.htm

Aug. 11, 2013

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consumption spending has risen most in four product categories that shape families' health, safety, and economic viability: health care, education, housing, and commuting costs.

• Prices in these four product markets have greatly outpaced both wages and prices in general.

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• Americans may be systematically pressed to overspend on housing because access to better schools, public services, and transportation infrastructure varies considerably across communities, and better-heeled communities often restrict affordable housing developments. Americans may face a relatively high well-being penalty for living in more modestly-priced homes.

• Compared to other highly-developed countries, the U.S. does considerably less to control the personal financial burden borne by households to ensure access to these products and services essential to well-being.

• Soaring tuition and health care costs are not the principal drivers of household financial distress, but they constitute the fastest-growing problem.

• Cohen argues that our penchant to blame household spending problems on wastefulness or frivolities obscures the fact that Americans increasingly face a lose-lose dilemma in which they must choose between sustainable finances and access to quality schools, child care, medical care, public safety, and employment opportunities.

Cohen, a Canadian with a business background who studied at Princeton (Ph.D. sociology, 2007), also examines how other countries tackle the provision of essential services in different and potentially less financially damaging ways. "Canada's policies control the personal financial burden of accessing essential services, which might be why household finances are in better shape there," he says.

Perfect Perseids: How to take advantage of a prime meteor show

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/perfect-perseids-how-take-advantage-prime-meteor-show-6C10883042

Alan Boyle, Science Editor NBC News
Aug. 9, 2013

August's Perseid meteor shower may be one of the most dependable sky shows of the year, but the viewing conditions can be as inconstant as the moon — literally. Fortunately, the moon's glare won't be a factor this year, which means the show should be about as good as it gets over the next few days.

The prime viewing hours should come Sunday night. Or is that Monday night? This year, some say the peak is Aug. 11-12, while others say Aug. 12-13. What's a stargazer to do??

"I can understand the confusion you mention, as the predicted peak is around 3 p.m. EDT on the 12th," Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, told NBC News in an email. "Since it occurs mid-afternoon, arguments can be made for the night of the 11th-12th, or the night of the 12th-13th. I am leaning toward the night of 11th, as there are usually more meteors seen leading up to the peak than after. ... If it were me, I'd go out both nights."

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At its peak, observers could see an average of two flashes per minute, depending on viewing conditions. This is expected to be a better-than-average year because the moon will be just a few days past its new phase. The lunar crescent will be setting early in the evening, leaving glare-free skies during the midnight-to-dawn period that's most favorable for meteor sightings.


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Are You The Blame For Soaring Concert Tickets

http://evolutionofasong.blogspot.com/2013/03/are-you-blame-for-soaring-concert.html

March 22, 2013
by Grady Shuman

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Miles Copeland, owner of Ark 21 Records and former manager of Sting, admits that Sting and other artists have a lot of control over ticket prices. If they seem greedy, Copeland says, it's because they're being ripped off every day — not by Clear Channel, but by their fans.
"Five years, 10 years, 15 years ago … every time you wanted music, you'd go to a record store and you'd have to fork out money to buy records. Well nowadays they say it's just OK to steal," Copeland said.

Steal online, that is. Apparently, many of us simply cannot resist the temptation of downloading music from the Internet. But all that free music is not without a price.

"The public ought to realize as they're complaining about ticket prices, that they're forcing ticket prices up because stealing music from the artists eliminates that source of income.

Updated Firefox brings better security

When I checked to see what version of Firefox I have, clicking on Help/About Firefox, I found that I have version 22, and that Firefox was downloading the new version. I have it set to download updates to Firefox automatically.

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/updated-firefox-brings-brighter-tail-better-security-6C10868293

Suzanne Choney NBC News
Aug. 7, 2013

Firefox 23, the newest version of the Web browser released Tuesday, has an updated look for its well-known fox logo and adds new features, including one that will help protect users from what's known as "man-in-the-middle attacks" and from eavesdroppers on Web pages labeled as secure.

If you've purchased anything online, for example, you know to make sure a Web page starts out with "https" instead of "http" before plunking your money down. The "s" means that the Web page is secure and encrypted. But sometimes https pages include content on them that is not secure. From now on, if you've hit upon such a page, Firefox will block what is known as "mixed content" by default. It's something that Internet Explorer and Chrome does as well.

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Priorities

Seen on Facebook:

If you really think that the environment is less important than the economy, try holding your breath while you count your money. - Dr. Guy McPherson

Emotional Behavior of Adults Could Be Triggered in the Womb

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130806132750.htm

Aug. 6, 2013 — Adults could be at greater risk of becoming anxious and vulnerable to poor mental health if they were deprived of certain hormones while developing in the womb according to new research by scientists at Cardiff and Cambridge universities.

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Study Questions Nature's Ability to 'Self-Correct' Climate Change

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130806203148.htm

Aug. 6, 2013 — Forests have a limited capacity to soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study from Northern Arizona University.

The study, available online in the journal New Phytologist, aimed to explore how rising atmospheric carbon dioxide could alter the carbon and nitrogen content of ecosystems.

By performing tests on subtropical woodland plots over an 11-year period, the researchers found that ecosystem carbon uptake was not significantly increased by the high CO2 treatment—in contrast to expectations. While plants did contain more carbon when CO2 levels were increased, soil actually lost carbon due to microbial decomposition; both factors essentially balanced one another out.

"Nature cannot 'self-correct' entirely against climate change, and the scientific community has been both overestimating the impact of plants and underestimating the impact of soil microorganisms in how they absorb CO2 and ultimately impact global warming," said Bruce Hungate, director of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at NAU and lead author on the study.

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An Extra Hour of TV Beyond Recommendations Diminishes Toddlers' Kindergarten Chances

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130807205042.htm

Aug. 7, 2013 — Every hourly increase in daily television watching at 29 months of age is associated with diminished vocabulary and math skills, classroom engagement (which is largely determined by attention skills), victimization by classmates, and physical prowess at kindergarten, according to Professor Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine children's hospital.

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Hurricanes and Climate Change: Huge Dangers, Huge Unknowns

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2481

Posted by: Dr. Jeff Masters, 9:57 AM GMT on August 05, 2013

Hurricane Sandy's enormous $65 billion price tag put that great storm in third place for the most expensive weather-related disaster in U.S. (and world) history. Indeed, when we look at the list of most expensive U.S. weather-related disasters since 1980, hurricanes dominate, claiming six of the top ten spots. Drought is also a formidable presence, accounting for three of the other top-ten budget-busting disasters. Thus, a critical question for society is: how will our dangerous uncontrolled experiment of dumping massive amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air affect droughts and hurricanes? For droughts, the answer is relatively straightforward--in general, dry parts of the world like the Southwest U.S. and Southern Europe are predicted to get drier. The worst droughts will get more extreme, wherever they occur, since it will be hotter. But for hurricanes, the uncertainties are greater. Since hurricanes are heat engines that extract heat energy from the oceans to power themselves, hurricane scientists are confident that the very strongest storms will get stronger by the end of the century, when Earth's land and ocean temperatures are expected to warm to levels unmatched since the Eemian Era, 115,000 years ago. Computer modelling work consistently indicates that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2–11% by 2100. But hurricanes are fussy creations, and are sensitive to wind shear and dry air. Although the strongest storms should get stronger when "perfect storm" conditions are present, these "perfect storm" conditions may become less frequent in the future, due to the presence of higher wind shear and/or more dry air. Indeed, the climate models used to formulate the 2007 IPCC report suggested that we might see the strongest hurricanes getting stronger, but a decrease in the total number of hurricanes in the Atlantic (and worldwide) later this century. However, the latest set of models used to formulate the 2013 IPCC report, due out in September, show that the total number of hurricanes both globally and in the Atlantic may increase in both number and intensity, according to a paper published in July 2013 by one of our top hurricane scientists, Dr. Kerry Emanuel of MIT. Hurricane intensity may also increase, leading to a global increase of 40% of Category 3 and stronger hurricanes by 2100. However, the uncertainties in this research are great. We really don't know how global warming will affect the number of hurricanes and their intensity.

Austria and Slovenia Set All-time Heat Records; Record Heat in Shanghai, China

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2483

Posted by: Dr. Jeff Masters, 11:09 PM GMT on August 08, 2013

A historic heat wave is underway in Central Europe, where both both Austria and Slovenia set all-time national heat records on August 8. Three locations in Austria passed the 40°C (104°F) mark, beating the former national record of 39.9°C (103.8°F) set just last week, on August 3rd at Dellach im Drautal. The hottest spot today (yet to be officially confirmed), was Neusiedl/See, with a 40.6°C (105.1°F) reading. Slovenia also surpassed its national heat record on August 8, with a 40.8°C (105.4°F) reading at Cerklje ob Krki (former record: 40.6°C (105.1°F) at Crnomelj on July 5, 1950.) Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, has now passed its all-time heat record for six consecutive days with the highest reading being 40.2°C (104.4°) on August 8th. Records go back 150 years at this station.

China's most populous city, Shanghai, broke its all-time record for hottest temperature on record for the second time this summer on August 7, when the mercury topped out at 40.8°C (105.4°F). The previous record was set just the day before (40.6°C/105.1°F), and also on July 26th. Prior to this summer, the record for Shanghai was 40.2°C (104.4°F) during the summer of 1934. Records in Shanghai date back to 1872. Today (August 8th), the temperature peaked at 40.2°C (104.4°F), so Shanghai has had its four hottest days in its history this summer. Extreme heat was also experienced over South Korea and Japan today, and wunderground's weather historian Christopher C. Burt has the details in his latest post. Many more all-time heat records may have fallen in both Central Europe and East Asia, and Chris plans to update his post with all the latest records on Friday.

Extensive credit for researching these records goes to weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, who maintains a comprehensive set of extreme temperature records on his web site.

Sleep deprivation linked to junk food cravings

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/08/06/poor-sleep-junk-food/

UC Berkeley
By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | August 6, 2013

A sleepless night makes us more likely to reach for doughnuts or pizza than for whole grains and leafy green vegetables, suggests a new study from UC Berkeley that examines the brain regions that control food choices. The findings shed new light on the link between poor sleep and obesity.

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“What we have discovered is that high-level brain regions required for complex judgments and decisions become blunted by a lack of sleep, while more primal brain structures that control motivation and desire are amplified,” said Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience and senior author of the study published today (Tuesday, Aug. 6) in the journal Nature Communications.

Moreover, he added, “high-calorie foods also became significantly more desirable when participants were sleep-deprived. This combination of altered brain activity and decision-making may help explain why people who sleep less also tend to be overweight or obese.”

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‘American Carbon’ Enters World Economy And Atmosphere At Fastest Pace Ever

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/06/2418971/american-carbon-fastest-pace-ever/

By Joe Romm on August 6, 2013

The UK Guardian has a must-read piece for those who believe the shale gas revolution will save us from climate catastrophe, “The rise and rise of American carbon.”

As illustrated in this chart, while U.S. carbon emissions have dropped somewhat in recent years — thanks to energy efficiency, renewables, the recession, and shale gas — America’s contribution to the global problem of ever-rising carbon production and consumption grows unabated.

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Whatever benefit the shale-gas revolution has had in reducing US emissions — a benefit that would appear to be seriously vitiated by huge methane leaks according to yet another major NOAA study — it has also been vitiated by our continued coal extraction for export.

And that is entirely separate from the issue of how much of our carbon emissions we have outsourced to China by virtue of our exploding trade deficit with the biggest carbon polluter in the world. We know in the case of Britain that that “the increase in carbon emissions from goods produced overseas that are then used in Britain are now outstripping the gains made in cutting emissions here.”

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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/us-emissions-extraction-fracking

Duncan Clark
theguardian.com, Monday 5 August 2013

You've probably heard that US carbon emissions have been falling.

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On the other hand, you may also have heard that US coal exports have increased as its domestic emissions have fallen.

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To explore this issue I propose considering an unfamiliar metric: not carbon emissions but carbon extraction. After all, the climate doesn't care where a unit of carbon is burned; just whether it comes out of the ground and enters the atmosphere. It makes sense to ask, therefore, whether the US is now extracting more or less carbon than it was before the shale gas boom. Has coal production fallen enough to offset rising gas production?

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Now let's stack all those fuels on top of each other to see total carbon extraction. The resulting graph shows that that there has been no decline in the amount of carbon the US is taking out of the ground. In fact, the trend is upwards. The latest year for which full data is available – 2011 – is the highest level on record, at 5288 MT of potential CO2, a fraction higher that the previous peak in 2008. Despite or because of the shale gas revolution, 'American carbon' is flowing into the global economy and atmosphere faster than ever.

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