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Global plastic talks collapse as oil states rebel
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c785l1nrpd1o
INTRO: Countries have failed to reach a landmark agreement on tackling plastic pollution after more than two years of negotiations. More than 200 nations met in South Korea for what was meant to be a final round of talks.
But deep divisions remained between a group of nearly 100 "high ambition" countries calling for plastic to be phased out and oil-producing nations who warned this would affect the world's development. "The objective of this treaty is to end plastic pollution not plastic itself, plastic has brought immense benefit to societies worldwide," said the Kuwait negotiators in the final hours.
In 2022, the world's nations agreed that a global treaty was needed to tackle the issue of plastic pollution particularly the impacts on the marine environment - and this should be completed within two years given the urgency of the issue.
Since 1950, more than eight billion tonnes of plastic have been produced globally but less than 10% has been recycled, estimates the United Nations. This has led to millions of tonnes entering the world's oceans and seas, posing serious risks to wildlife and their environment. Birds, fish and whales can become injured or killed if they become entangled in plastic debris or mistakenly ingest it, leading to starvation.
Plastic is also produced from fossil fuels, and is currently estimated to be responsible for 5% of global emissions - so efforts to restrict it could also help with efforts to tackle climate change.
The meeting in Busan, South Korea, was meant to be the final fifth round of negotiations but after late night talks countries were unable to resolve their differences missing their key two-year deadline. "A few critical issues prevent us from reaching a comprehensive agreement," said the talks' chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso on Sunday - the final day of talks... (MORE - details)
Evidence of primordial black holes may be hiding in planets, or even everyday objects here on Earth
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1066694
INTRO: Imagine the formation of a black hole and you’ll probably envision a massive star running out of fuel and collapsing in on itself. Yet the chaotic conditions of the early universe may have also allowed many small black holes to form long before the first stars.
These primordial black holes have been theorized for decades and could even be ever-elusive dark matter, the invisible matter that accounts for 85% of the universe’s total mass. Still, no primordial black hole has ever been observed.
New research co-led by the University at Buffalo proposes thinking both big and small to confirm their existence, suggesting that their signatures could range from very large — hollow planetoids in space — to minute — microscopic tunnels in everyday materials found on Earth, like rocks, metal and glass.
Set to be published in the December issue of Physics of the Dark Universe and available online now, the theoretical study posits that a primordial black hole trapped within a large rocky object out in the cosmos would consume its liquid core and leave it hollow. Alternatively, a faster primordial black hole might leave behind straight tunnels large enough to be visible by a microscope if passing through solid material, including material right here on Earth.
“The chances of finding these signatures are small, but searching for them would not require much resources and the potential payoff, the first evidence of a primordial black hole, would be immense,” says the study’s co-author, Dejan Stojkovic, PhD, professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “We have to think outside of the box because what has been done to find primordial black holes previously hasn’t worked.”
The study calculated how large a hollow planetoid could be without collapsing in on itself, and the likelihood of a primordial black hole passing through an object on Earth. (If you’re worried about a primordial black hole passing through you, don’t be. The study concluded it would not be fatal.)
“Because of these long odds, we have focused on solid marks that have existed for thousands, millions or even billions of years,” says co-author De-Chang Dai, PhD, of National Dong Hwa University and Case Western Reserve University.
Stojkovic’s work was supported by the National Science Foundation, while Dai’s work by the National Science and Technology Council (Taiwan)... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1066347
INTRO: A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbour was once much more like Earth than it is today.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere and inferred that its interior is too dry today for there ever to have been enough water for oceans to exist at its surface. Instead, the planet has likely been a scorching, inhospitable world for its entire history.
The results, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, have implications for understanding Earth’s uniqueness, and for the search for life on planets outside our Solar System. While many exoplanets are Venus-like, the study suggests that astronomers should narrow their focus to exoplanets which are more like Earth... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://newsroom.taylorandfrancisgroup.c...ys-expert/
PRESS RELEASE: Social media and excessive screen time cannot solely be blamed for a rise in anxiety disorders in young people, according to a sociologist after extensive research.
In Why We Worry, sociologist Roland Paulsen argues that it is too simplistic for psychologists to say screens have created new forms of addiction that isolate young people from the world. He warns that this oversimplification can get in the way of meaningful mental health interventions.
The author says steep increases in anxiety and depression among teenagers began long before children had exposure to social media. Using evidence-based research and real patient case studies, he suggests that many other factors are at play such as obsession with work status, too much choice and excessive focus on long-term planning.
Cases of anxiety disorders have risen because modern society has developed a learned inability to live with uncertainty, says Paulsen.
Paulsen, Associate Professor of Sociology at Lund University in Sweden, says: “Many argue that social media and screen time is the main factor behind the past decade’s rising levels of ill health among the young.
“However, it is difficult to draw such simplistic, ‘x leads to y’ connections when it comes to human well-being. For one thing, the sharp rise in mental health issues started well before the advent of smartphones.
“Screen time may well have an effect but there are a lot of things that have an effect on how we are feeling. Humanity has, on a collective level, developed an inability to live with uncertainty. What if questions are our mind’s way of dealing with uncertainty.”
Paulsen provides a comprehensive overview of how and why people experience unwanted thoughts and negative voices. He presents real-life cases involving obsessive compulsive thinking alongside philosophical, sociological and psychological theories. The book questions what it calls the now widespread medicalisation of ‘feelings’ that were once considered normal.
Paulsen also challenges the belief that ‘what if?’ thinking has always existed. The sociologist says that our ‘inner critics and eternal self-suspicions’ are a relatively young phenomena from a historical perspective. Ancient man had to live in the present because there were no crops to tend.
Now, the future has been stretched to ‘incomprehensibility’ such as thousand-year plans for radioactive waste. We obsess about the future because our ‘time horizon’ lies way beyond concrete experience, says Paulsen.
Choice and the mass production of culture and technology has also infiltrated people’s lives. The consequence is affluent people face over 200 daily choices relating to eating habits alone, and this creates anxiety about making the wrong decision.
Material wealth has enriched our lives in every aspect except one – mental well-being. The book uses data that shows the wealthier the country, the greater the risk of anxiety disorders and other mental health problems.
On the theme of social media and loneliness, the author counters the notion that technology is programmed to discourage people from meeting others face-to-face.
Paulsen says: “People who are already lonely typically go online looking for distractions and a sense of context. Once they become hooked, they make less of an effort to see others, which simply makes them even more lonely.”
The book cites data suggesting paid work does not improve health. Society has created a ‘division between winners and losers’ where the worry of what others think about job status is a real issue, not the risk in affluent countries of being able to survive without work.
RELATED (scivillage): There is reliable evidence social media harms young people
Temporary tattoo printed directly on the scalp offers easy, hair-friendly solution for measuring brainwaves
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1065769
INTRO: For the first time, scientists have invented a liquid ink that doctors can print onto a patient’s scalp to measure brain activity. The technology, presented December 2 in the Cell Press journal Cell Biomaterials, offers a promising alternative to the cumbersome process currently used for monitoring brainwaves and diagnosing neurological conditions. It also has the potential to enhance non-invasive brain-computer interface applications.
“Our innovations in sensor design, biocompatible ink, and high-speed printing pave the way for future on-body manufacturing of electronic tattoo sensors, with broad applications both within and beyond clinical settings,” says Nanshu Lu, the paper’s co-corresponding author at the University of Texas at Austin.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is an important tool for diagnosing a variety of neurological conditions, including seizures, brain tumors, epilepsy, and brain injuries. During a traditional EEG test, technicians measure the patient’s scalp with rulers and pencils, marking over a dozen spots where they will glue on electrodes, which are connected to a data-collection machine via long wires to monitor the patient’s brain activity. This setup is time consuming and cumbersome, and it can be uncomfortable for many patients, who must sit through the EEG test for hours.
Lu and her team have been pioneering the development of small sensors that track bodily signals from the surface of human skin, a technology known as electronic tattoos, or e-tattoos. Scientists have applied e-tattoos to the chest to measure heart activities, on muscles to measure how fatigued they are, and even under the armpit to measure components of sweat.
In the past, e-tattoos were usually printed on a thin layer of adhesive material before being transferred onto the skin, but this was only effective on hairless areas.
“Designing materials that are compatible with hairy skin has been a persistent challenge in e-tattoo technology,” Lu says. To overcome this, the team designed a type of liquid ink made of conductive polymers. The ink can flow through hair to reach the scalp, and once dried, it works as a thin-film sensor, picking up brain activity through the scalp... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://eos.org/articles/the-relatively-...nar-clocks
INTRO: Using Einstein's theory of general relativity, physicists found that clocks on the moon would run 56 microseconds faster than clocks on Earth. That finding will help future lunar missions navigate.
What time is it on the Moon?
In April 2024, the White House issued a challenge to scientists to establish a lunar time standard, looking ahead to increased international presence on the Moon and potential human bases as part of NASA's Artemis initiative. The real question being puzzled over isn't "What time is it?" but, rather, "How quickly does time pass?"
What time a clock reads can be set by any timekeeper, but physics determines how quickly time passes. In the early years of the 20th century, Albert Einstein determined that two observers won't agree on how long an hour is if they aren't moving at the same speed in the same direction. That disagreement also holds between a person on Earth's surface and another in orbit or on the Moon.
"If we are on the Moon, clocks are going to tick differently [than on Earth]," said theoretical physicist Bijunath Patla of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo. He noted that the Moon's motion relative to ours makes clocks run slower than Earth standard, but its lower gravity leads to clocks running faster. "So these are two competing effects, and the net result of this is a 56-microseconds-per-day drift." (That's 0.000056 second.)
Patla and his NIST physicist colleague Neil Ashby used Einstein’s theory of general relativity to calculate this number, an improvement over previous analyses. They published their results in the Astronomical Journal..... (MORE - details)
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/famous-...d-34226429
RELEASE: Dead authors are going to narrate their own books from beyond the grave. Book publishers are set to use artificial intelligence to create the real voices of late writers to read their tales in audiobooks.
Among the famous names being lined up are Agatha Christie voicing Miss Marple and JRR Tolkien narrating "The Lord Of The Rings".
Boffins have created advanced AI software in a technological revolution that could change the audiobook industry. Publishing execs are working with the estates of deceased authors to secure the rights to archive tapes, such as radio interviews, to sample their voices.
AI bots will listen through the hours of clips and learn to mimic the authors’ voices before reading aloud published works. Jon Watt, chairman of the Audio Publishers Group, told The Bookseller magazine’s FutureBook conference: “AI voices can be generated from licensed samples for a specific human voice.”
Mr Watt added that publishers would be able to “create an authorised voice replica”.
Don't forget Pol Pot in Cambodia. Well over 1.3 million people executed and buried in mass graves. Heaps of skulls piled up everywhere in some of the old news footage.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/politi...communism/
INTRO (excerpts): The story of communism is one of the greatest tragedies in modern history. The movement grew, above all, out of horror at the terrible human toll of early capitalism. [...] In the decades after The Communist Manifesto appeared, a plethora of organizations -- from electoral parties to workingmen’s leagues to secret societies and terrorist groups -- took shape, committed to making the theory a reality. Modern socialist as well as communist movements trace their descent from them...
[...] But the actual communist regimes that came into being in the 20th century violated the theory, silenced the debates, betrayed the hope, and never achieved the goals. Industrial workers did not seize power in the advanced capitalist states. Instead, in the most important cases, groups of ruthless militants seized power in heavily agrarian states driven to collapse by world war -- above all, Russia in 1917 and China in 1949. Then, facing opposition from without and division from within, they resorted to dictatorship, terror, and ultimately mass murder to impose their vision of the future by force.
Yet the hope did not immediately expire, and around the globe millions continued to rally to the communist cause and believe in its promise, even as millions of others suffered and perished at the hands of communists. But eventually, little was left of the communist states but cumbersome, repressive bureaucracies that could neither compete with capitalist economies nor keep the allegiance of their own populations. In the end, they either collapsed under their own weight (as in Europe) or made unholy bargains with capitalism so that their leaders could remain in charge (as in Asia).
Today, 107 years after the first great communist revolution, the country in which it took place has become a corrupt, aggressive, quasi-fascist dictatorship. Other remnants of communist power include the strange, pharaonic totalitarianism of North Korea, the repressive state capitalism of China and Vietnam, and a desperate Cuba bending under the weight of its own corrupt elite and the long, cruel US embargo. No one who still hopes to counteract the enormous damage that unfettered capitalism continues to wreak upon the world can afford to overlook or explain away this somber and dispiriting record... (MORE - details)
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George Bernard Shaw: I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not a bit of it.
[...] All they want to know is: Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? [...] They ask "Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"
[...] Thus, you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and learning... He promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of chains. --The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
