thepeoplesrecord:

Florida’s stand-your-ground law put to test in Marissa Alexander conviction

It took 45 days for police to arrest George Zimmerman, who invoked Florida’s controversial stand-your-ground law when he shot an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin. When Marissa Alexander offered the same defense after shooting in the direction of her abusive husband, she was jailed for 20 years. It took 12 minutes for the jury to find her guilty.

While Zimmerman’s case prompted a frenzied national debate, Alexander’s story has had little national media coverage since the verdict was handed down last Friday.

Full article

(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)

theweekmagazine:

Has mankind outgrown Earth?

A new report from the World Wildlife Fund says we’re gobbling up the planet’s resources at such an alarming rate that by 2030, even a second Earth wouldn’t be enough to sustain us

Which resources are we depleting?
Renewables like fish, water, timber, and food are being used up much faster than previously thought. According to experts, mankind’s “ecological footprint” is now over 50 percent higher than it was in 2008, meaning it takes 1.5 years for Earth to regenerate the natural resources we use up annually. 

Why is our ecological footprint growing?
The world’s population, which according to the U.N. surpassed 7 billion last October, is getting too big, and the average individual is using more than he or she needs. “The excessive demands that we are putting on the planet will inevitably lead to acute water shortages, a chronic food crisis, and rising prices for energy, metals, and minerals,” says Robert Walker at the Huffington Post.

Keep reading

(via ikenbot)

hidingerections:

The Brain Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains

“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. His best estimate is 1,500 to 2,000. Worldwide, the numbers are vastly higher, though estimates on a global scale are even harder to make because neurocysticercosis is most common in poor places that lack good public-health systems. “Minimally there are 5 million cases of epilepsy from neurocysticercosis,” Nash says.

ikenbot:

Breathtaking View of Earth Taken by Russian Satellite

Think of it as an amped up version of the iconic “Blue Marble” image. A new photo of Earth from space highlights the striking beauty and intensely rich colors of our home planet.

The photo was taken by a Russian weather satellite, called Elektro-L No.1, which flies in a geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (35,700 kilometers) above the Earth’s equator.

The image was posted by James Drake on the Planet Earth website. Drake obtained the photo from the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Research Center for Earth Operative Monitoring, which manages the Elektro-L No. 1 spacecraft, after he expressed interest in animating and publishing them.

ikenbot:

Tracking Ocean Sulfur Could Help Test Gaia Hypothesis

A few months ago I posted an article on the cwl blog explaining the Gaia theory, it’s essentially a theory that states there could be an underlying system of control covering the Earth, a system that acts to the survival of the planet. Here’s a nice accompanying article by Wired delving into a new research published which attempts to prove or disprove the Gaia theory:

Geologists at the University of Maryland have published research that could help prove or disprove Gaia theory — the notion that the Earth is one single self-regulating system.

The concept dates from the 70s and was initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. It proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings comprise a single system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth. It was initially met with skepticism from the scientific community, and remains somewhat controversial, but is now an important area of research in Earth systems science and biogeochemistry.

If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth’s natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulfur compound made by organisms in the ocean should be stable enough in water to allow its transfer into the air, so it can then be returned to land. A team of geologists, geochemists and marine biologists led by Harry Oduro has developed a method of tracking the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the land, potentially yielding evidence as to how strong this cycle is.

Oduro and his colleagues tracked two compounds — dimethylsulfoniopropionate (or DMSP), which is produced by plant plankton and seaweed in the ocean, and dimethylsulphide, which has a distinctive cabbage-like smell, and is produced when marine microbes break down DMSP.

By examining the differences in the isotope ratios between the compounds over time, the researchers were able to trace unique combinations of an element’s radioactive isotopes, keeping track of them to determine the rate at which the microbes metabolize DMSP into dimethylsulfide, and therefore get clues as to how fast it’s transferred from the ocean into the atmosphere.

Full Article

laboratoryequipment:

Three Plant Proteins Could Aid Bioeconomy

Knowing the function of three plant proteins could help scientists raise seed oil yield in crops, a potential windfall for the bioeconomy. The analysis of gene activity by researchers at Iowa State Univ. and determination of protein structures by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences independently identified three related proteins that appear to be involved in fatty-acid metabolism. The researchers used thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) as the model plant.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Three-Plant-Proteins-Could-Aid-Bioeconomy-051512.aspx

socialuprooting:

Support the End Polluter Welfare Act, introduced by Bernie Sanders

At a time when we have a record debt, Congress should not continue to give away taxpayer money to the established, highly profitable fossil fuel industry.

• Fossil fuels are subsidized at nearly 6 times the rate of renewable energy. From 2002 to 2008, the US Government gave the mature fossil fuel industry over $72 billion in subsidies, while investments in the emerging renewable industry totaled $12.2 billion. 
• The fossil fuel energy industry does not need taxpayer subsidies. In 2011, the Big Five oil companies alone made $137 billion in profits. During the first quarter of 2012, the Big Five oil companies earned a combined $33.5 billion, or $368 million per day. 
• Unlike renewable energy incentives which periodically expire and require Congress to approve extensions, the fossil fuel industry has dozens of subsidies permanently engrained in the tax code from decades of successful lobbying. In 2011, the oil, gas, and coal industries spent a combined $167 million on lobbying the federal government. 

explorans:

A journalist takes a sample of polluted red water from the Jianhe River in Luoyang, Henan province, China, on December 13, 2011. According to local media, the sources of the pollution were two illegal chemical plants discharging their production wastewater into the rain sewer pipes.