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The Fracking Science Compendium by Physicians for Social Responsibility shows overwhelming harms. Learn more below: 

http://concernedhealthny.org/compendium/ http://www.psr.org/resources/fracking-compendium.html

One thousand different words for water

Researcher puts New Guinea’s numerous languages online

New Guinea is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, with more than 1000 distinct languages crammed into an area not much larger than the state of Texas.

Despite this rich variety—for comparison, Europe contains about 280 languages—linguists have only analyzed the grammatical structures of a fraction of the South Pacific island’s languages. Now, Simon Greenhill, a linguist at Australian National University in Canberra, is trying to remedy that situation, by gathering together hundreds of thousands of words from published surveys, book chapters, and articles, as well as the accounts of early European explorers, and putting them into an online database called TransNewGuinea.org.

Updated daily, the site already contains glossaries for more than 1000 languages from 23 different language families, including 145,000 words. There are roughly 1000 different words for “water,” as well as for “louse,” and linguists and language enthusiasts can view all the languages by geographic origin in an interactive map.

Greenhill introduced the scientific community to the site(PDF) this week in the journal PLOS ONE; already, he has used the database to look for clues about how the different languages are related. Through comparative, historical, and computational analyses of the data, he hopes the linguistic community will now use the site to solve long-standing questions about how New Guinean populations expanded and spread their culture. 

Three quarters of Britain’s juniper is found in Scotland, where it’s important not only to local gin production but also to wildlife, such as the juniper shield bug. Plantlife Scotland has published a free guide to help both professional and amateur botanists and horticulturalists identify, survey and protect the plants. Anyone can participate in the group’s survey and guardianship project.

(via Protect British juniper or risk losing gin’s distinctive flavour (Wired UK))

One of the World’s Most Powerful Central Bankers Is Worried About Climate Change

The governor of the Bank of England warns about risks to global financial stability.

A new speech about climate change is fascinating both for what it says and who said it.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, declared that the warming climate presented major risks for the global economy and global financial stability, and that businesses and regulators needed to move more quickly to try to contain the potential economic damage even though it may seem uncertain and far off.

His warning, delivered in a 4,400-word speech with ample footnotes on Tuesday, is the latest example of how climate change has moved beyond theoretical scientific debates to the start of practical planning for safeguarding the economy and business.

“We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors — imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix,” he said. “In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”

Mr. Carney calls the economic challenges around climate the “tragedy of the horizon,” in contrast to the long-noted economic phenomenon of the “tragedy of the commons.” That is, the costs of a warming climate come on a time scale and with an uncertainty that go beyond the usual multiyear business cycle, beyond political cycles of presidential and parliamentary elections, or as he puts it, beyond “the horizon of technocratic authorities, like central banks, who are bound by their mandates.”

It might seem odd for a central banker to be talking about a long-term problem of global climate, all the more so when the global economy is looking rather shaky. After all, the job is typically to worry about price inflation and the banking system.

But if you back up and define a central banker’s job a little more broadly — to worrying about the economy and the stability of the financial system writ large — it quickly becomes clear why climate matters.

Good read from NYTimes.

The Companies That Are Doing The Most (And Least) About The Climate

Governments aren’t doing much to halt global warming but there is hope in the business world. Here are the companies that are facing up to the challenge.

Not my usual climate post. But, BMW is #1.

A look inside the world's first underground park, the Lowline

Over the weekend a test lab for the world’s first underground park opened its doors to visitors in New York. Housed in the former Essex Street Market building in Manhattan, it is the first step toward making former NASA engineer James Ramsey's idea for the Lowline a reality. His plans for the Lowline propose transforming a disused trolley terminal into a subterranean park using innovative solar technology.

I think it’s a cool engineering experiment but if he really is pursuing this to give green spaces to under served urban communities, then proposing it to be built in LES is fallacy. That area already has parks close by and is inhabited by at least the upper 30% (economically) of the city. What would be spectacular is if the technology they’ve developed for channelling sunlight could be used in subway stations that people already use. Plants and sunlight there would make the lives of millions of commuters across the subway network so much better. This disused trolley place should be made into an urban farm me thinks :)

Poverty is a tax on cognition

In an outstanding lecture at the London School of Economics, Macarthur “genius award” recipient Sendhil Mullainathan explains his research on the psychology of scarcity, a subject that he’s also written an excellent book about.

Mullainathan begins by establishing the idea that your cognition is limited – you can only think about a limited number of things at one time, and when the number of things you have to pay attention to goes beyond a certain threshold, you start making errors. Then he explains how poor people have a lot more things they have to pay attention to. In the UK, we make fun of politicians for being so out of touch that they don’t know the price of a pint of milk – but poor people have to keep track of the price of everything they require. There’s no room for error. Spend too much on the milk and you can’t afford the bread.

That’s just one of the many taxes on the cognitive load of poor people. David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules details another: figuring out what rich people are thinking. Poor people who piss off rich people face reprisals far beyond those that rich people can expect from each other or from poor people.

This isn’t unique to cash-poverty. Mullainathan asks his audience to recall what life is like when they’re “time poor” – on a deadline or otherwise overburdened. This scarcity can focus your attention, yes: we’ve all had miraculous work-sprints to meet a deadline. But it does so at the expense of thoughtful attention to longer-term (but equally important) priorities: that’s why we stress-eat, skip the gym when our workload is spiking, and miss our kids’ sports’ games when the pressure is on at work.

The experimental literature shows startling parallels between the two conditions: time scarcity and cash scarcity. This leads to a series of policy proscriptions that are brilliant (for example, when we create means-tested benefits that require poor people to go through difficult bureaucratic processes, we’re taxing their scarcest and most precious resource). He also recounts how this parallel is useful in creating an empathic link between rich and powerful people like hedge fund managers and the poorest people alive.

Read the rest

700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative

Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?

Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but researchers aren’t sure who made them.

The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino’s limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino’s ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.

But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. Read more.

Plankton Are Multiplying Like Crazy Due to Warming

The population of a microscopic marine alga in the north Atlantic Ocean apparently is booming due to climate change, but scientists — who’ve been caught off-guard by the development — aren’t sure what it means for the aquatic environment. Details

The Moon Parka - A jacket made of synthetic spider silk

Remember the Japanese biomaterials company Spiber? In 2013, they presented a cocktail dress made of Qmonos (from the Japanese word kumonosu meaning ‘spider web’), their present 11-year-10-design-iterations-and-656-gene-synthesis synthetic version of stronger than steel and more flexible than nylon lightweight spider silk.

Snip from geek.com:

The end result of all that research is a method for producing artificial spider silk through a fermentation process using bioengineered microorganisms to produce the silk proteins. A real spider can only produce so much silk, but an engineered cell that does nothing but spit out silk proteins can be used to scale production up quickly.

Now they presented in collaboration with The North Face a new prototype called The Moon Parka, which is currently touring North Face stores across Japan. It’s intended to show that practical applications of spider silk are possible (cost is now 1/53,000 of what it was in 2008). Spiber aims to deliver the final product next year. Presumably only in Japan. But fingers crossed for a worldwide rollout at reasonable prices.

Watch their promo-launch video below:

[North Face x Spiber] [Spiber] [picture by North Face]