Dan Taylor, - Building a Better World
Stephan: Here is the latest research on brain activity and sleep. It is telling us something very important about the importance of sleep. I hope you listen to it.
Scientists have just made a huge finding about sleep that suggests the way you’re sleeping is potentially causing great damage to your brain. Researchers at Marche Polytechnic University in Italy found that a lack of sleep can cause parts of the brain synapses to be “eaten” by other brain cells, meaning your brain is basically eating itself if you aren’t getting enough sleep.
Astrocytes essentially are cells in the brain that clean out other cells, and the scientists who studied the brains of mice found these cells were much more active when the mice didn’t get enough sleep.
Scientists have long known the importance of sleep, warning the public that chronic sleep deprivation increases plaques in the brain that may cause Alzheimer’s, according to one study.
“We show for the first time that portions of synapses are literally eaten by astrocytes because of sleep loss,” Michele Bellesi, the main researchers involved in the study, told New Scientist. “They are like old pieces of furniture, and so probably need more attention and cleaning.”
The abstract from the paper follows below.
We previously found that Mertk […]
1 Comment
Stephan: Industrial chemical mono-culture agriculture, research data increasingly makes clear, is a failed model and we need to change it. Here's the latest.
Farmers fertilize a field in California’s Imperial Valley.
Credit: Stuart Rankin
The food industry and big agricultural concerns are driving climate change and at the same time threatening to undermine efforts to feed the world’s growing population, according to GRAIN, an organisation that supports small farmers.
Particularly singled out for criticism are the large chemical fertiliser producers that have gained access to the United Nations talks on climate change. GRAIN accuses them of behaving like the fossil fuel companies did in the 1990s, pushing false information in the hope of delaying real action on climate change.
The evidence is detailed in a book – “The Great Climate Robbery: How the food system drives climate change and what we can do about it,” published by GRAIN. It is a comprehensive account of the unrelenting and largely successful campaign by big […]
1 Comment
Jonathan Swan and Amy Harder , 25 May 2017 - AXIOS
Stephan: The United States is drifting off the geopolitical center stage, with remarkable rapidity. The Republican Party and its creature the Trump Administration, are simply in a different fact-free reality than the rest of the developed world.
This is going to produce terrific effects in the U.S., in my view. Consider just the economic implications. We will not lead in technological development. We will not prosper with hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Non-carbon jobs will increase to be sure, because independent of the Republican Party and Trump, the collective intention of the culture is shifting to non-carbon. But it will impede the transition and reduce our stature in the world.
This is a good assessment about where things stand.
Remains of trees in a coastal ghost forest display rising sea levels on Assateague Island in Virginia. A new study suggests that sea levels have risen faster since 1993 than in previous decades.
Credit: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
President Trump has privately told multiple people, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, that he plans to leave the Paris agreement on climate change, according to three sources with direct knowledge.
Publicly, Trump’s position is that he has not made up his mind and when we asked the White House about these private comments, Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks said, “I think his tweet was clear. He will make a decision this week.”
Why this matters: Pulling out of Paris is the biggest thing Trump could to do unravel Obama’s climate policies. It also sends a stark and combative signal to the rest of the world that working with other nations on climate change isn’t a priority to the Trump administration. And pulling out threatens to unravel the ambition of the entire deal, given how integral former President Obama was in making it come together in […]
2 Comments
Robert Mickey, Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Ahmad Way, - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: As important as what this essay says, is the fact the it has been published by one of the most prestigious geopolitical journals in the country, read by establishment Washington, and around the world. I have never seen an essay like this under this imprimatur. It is telling us something important about the crisis we are going through.
I agree with this essay and note that it is one of the first publications other than my own I have read that addresses the real challenge, "Few democracies have survived transitions in which historically dominant ethnic groups lose their majority status." Being born White will no longer confer privilege, and being born male will no longer bestow privilege. It is a major factor in creating the fear fugue that is paralyzing the 81% of Trump voters who still support him, and the politicians who feed on those voters like vampires.
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States—a man who has praised dictators, encouraged violence among supporters, threatened to jail his rival, and labeled the mainstream media as “the enemy”—has raised fears that the United States may be heading toward authoritarianism. While predictions of a descent into fascism are overblown, the Trump presidency could push the United States into a mild form of what we call “competitive authoritarianism”—a system in which meaningful democratic institutions exist yet the government abuses state power to disadvantage its opponents.
But the challenges facing American democracy have been emerging for decades, long before Trump arrived on the scene. Since the 1980s, deepening polarization and the radicalization of the Republican Party have weakened the institutional foundations that have long safeguarded U.S. democracy—making a Trump presidency considerably more dangerous today than it would have been in previous decades.
There is little reason to expect Americans’ commitment to democracy to serve as a safeguard against democratic erosion.
Paradoxically, the polarizing dynamics that now threaten democracy are rooted in the United States’ […]
1 Comment
Nathan DiCamillo , - Newsweek
Stephan: The amount of beef consumed in hamburgers is a staggering multiple millions of tons, and it takes 1,300 gallons of water to produce on 8-ounce hamburger. So developing an acceptable veggieburger while it may seem trivial is, in fact, a significant social acupuncture fostering wellbeing. And we may be there. Here's the story.
Forget what you know about veggie burgers. Impossible Foods is one of two companies creating plant-based burgers that look, taste and bleed like real meat.
Six years ago, Dr. Pat Brown and a team of researchers set out on a culinary Mission: Impossible. Their goal was to create an “uncompromisingly delicious” meat from plant-based materials. Last year, they debuted their Impossible Burger, which looks, tastes and bleeds like meat. In March, Impossible Foods announced its first partnership with a chain restaurant, Bareburger.
Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable foods, says Impossible Foods is one of two companies creating plant-based burgers that taste like meat. While veggie burgers have been around for decades, these sustainable food companies want to create meatless burgers that compete in the meat world, he explains. “What Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods did was say, ‘Look, meat is made up of lipids and amino acids […]
No Comments
