Let's Talk Abortion

 PERSONALLY...  I think all females...  all ladies...  all girls... have the fundamental right to be able to decide for themselves whether or not they want to receive an abortion.

IT IS NONE OF THE GOVERNMENT'S DAMN BUSINESS...

AND...  IT IS NO DAMN RIGHT GUARANTEED IN THE US CONSTITUTION...  unless you want to classify it as some asinine attempt at the pursuit of happiness.

The Federal Government has no business telling us what we can or cannot do with our bodies after we reach a certain age...  therefore the Supreme Court should have never heard the case from the get-go...

NOW...  do the states have a right to legislate laws pertaining to abortion?  NO...  again, it is not the business of government.

Would I pay for an abortion if I was approached by my wife or daughter asking for one?  My answer is an easy YES...  Would I like their decision...  My answer is an easy NO...  but, it is their decision, not mine.

The religious community for the most part does not believe in abortions and that is their right.  If they want to kick me out of the church because of my beliefs, then that is their right as well.

It would seem to me that a little common sense should prevail here...  we should not use government to push a religious agenda nor should we use government to fight a religious agenda...

But, this is just my opinion...  and yes, I am very religious... but I also believe in FREE WILL...  and that we have a fundamental right to do whatever it is that we want to our bodies...  and if it hurts...  then, that too is our responsibility...

Baby Dancers

Microplastics & Human Health

Scientists are certain that humans around the world are ingesting tiny pieces of plastic on a regular basis. Now, they are seeking to understand how the wide distribution of microplastics affects human health and the environment as a whole.

Eating a credit card's worth of plastic — a comparison often used to illustrate estimates that people consume about 5 grams of microplastics a week on average — sounds unhealthy on a very visceral level. Learning that those pieces of plastic could later show up in your lungs is even scarier.

Investigations into microplastics exposure and human health have confirmed that not all plastic ingested by humans comes out the other end; at least in some cases, microplastics can be absorbed into the bloodstream or trapped in the lungs.

But scientists don't yet know how the presence of microplastics in the body affects overall health, especially compared to exposures to other environmental chemicals and contaminants.

You may have heard that plastics never fully decompose. In fact, plastic waste slowly breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, creating microplastics that are so light they can be swept up by the wind.

Microplastics are defined as particles measuring no more than 5 millimeters across, which is about the size of a grain of rice. In the 20-odd years since they were named, scientists have found microplastics in virtually every environment, from ocean floors to mountain peaks, National Geographic reported.  READ MORE...

Yawn

 

Charging Electric Cars

Electric vehicles are widely seen as the future.

Ford will soon start delivering its shiny new F-150 Lightning, the electric version of its pickup truck, and other auto makers are racing to electrify their most popular models.

But many drivers considering switching to electric vehicles cite a similar concern: the hypothetical nightmare of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere without any battery left.

The Biden administration has an ambitious plan to address that. It wants to build tons of chargers so that they become as common as a gas station, and closer to the ease and speed of pumping gas.

Here's how the plan would work – and what it would mean for electric car owners and prospective buyers.
What's the plan?

The federal government will spend $5 billion dollars to build 500,000 chargers. The money will go to states, who have until late summer to submit their plans to the federal government.

The funding comes with strings attached – strings intended to ensure that this network of chargers is fast, reliable, and convenient.  READ MORE...

Duck & Cat

 

The Beginning of Outer Space

When mountaineers climb Mount Everest, they routinely carry oxygen cylinders, devices that allow them to breathe freely at high altitudes. This is necessary because the closer you get to the edge of Earth's atmosphere, the less oxygen there is available compared with the plentiful amounts found at sea level.

This is just one example of how variable Earth's atmosphere is and showcases the elemental makeup of its layers, from the troposphere, near sea level, to the exosphere, in its outermost regions. Where each layer ends and begins is defined by four key traits, according to the National Weather Service: temperature change, chemical composition, density and the movement of the gases within it.

So, with this in mind, where does Earth's atmosphere actually end? And where does space begin?

Each of the atmosphere's layers plays a role in ensuring our planet can host all manner of life, doing everything from blocking cancer-causing cosmic radiation to creating the pressure required to produce water, according to NASA.

"As you get farther from Earth, the atmosphere becomes less dense," Katrina Bossert, a space physicist at Arizona State University, told Live Science in an email. "The composition also changes, and lighter atoms and molecules begin to dominate, while heavy molecules remain closer to the Earth's surface."

As you move up in the atmosphere, the pressure, or the weight of the atmosphere above you, weakens rapidly. Even though commercial planes have pressurized cabins, rapid changes in altitude can affect the slim eustachian tubes connecting the ear with the nose and throat. "This is why your ears may pop during takeoff in an airplane," said Matthew Igel, an adjunct professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Davis.  READ MORE...

Weaving

Butterflies

160,000 People Complained to Delta

Domenica Rohrborn contacted me a few weeks ago.  Did I realize, she asked, what's been going on?  I confess I don't always realize what's going on. Perhaps that's because I rely on Twitter to inform me at all times.  Rohrborn, however, wanted me to focus. She explained that something was going on in the airline world, something that had been going on for a long time.

You see, when you get on a plane, expecting the flight attendant to smile at you, welcome you, and maybe even offer you a drink -- if you're munificent or flying on corporate dollars -- the flight attendant isn't being paid.  "I've started a petition," Rohborn, a former flight attendant explained.

A petition? Oh, that's going to work, I thought. How many times do people start petitions and nothing ever happens? (Most of the time.) But I clicked on the link and there were 120,000 people complaining about this situation, which hails back to the times of railroads.

Yes, flight attendant schedules mimicked railroad schedules. Hence, as Rohrborn explained: "We only get clocked for our flight times. When the pilots pull the breaks. Not when we have customers on board or delays or mechanicals. Even though we are required by the FAA to complete specific job-related safety procedures and interact with customers."

This may seem slightly ludicrous. It may also be something of which airlines took advantage for decades.  Which made a Delta Air Lines announcement last week so very strange. Suddenly, from the bright blue skies, Delta declared it would now pay flight attendants for boarding.  This isn't full pay, you understand. The airline will pay 50% of the standard hourly rate for boarding. Which is 50% more than the nothing they were paid before.

Naturally, I asked Rohrborn what she thought. Did I mention her petition now has more than 160,000 signatures?  She told me this was "an absolutely historic win."

However, she added: "The rules for this new boarding pay scale aren't completely ideal -- flight attendants still have unpaid time and have to be at the aircraft earlier. There's not much clarity about other incentives that they usually see.

It doesn't cover mechanicals or delays or airport sits. Really, we should be paid 100% of our hourly rate for this time since we are 100% present and working, and are 100% able to be terminated.  And then there's the possibility that something will be taken from the flight attendants as a twisted balancing act. READ MORE...

Rolling Ball

 

High Marijuana Use Linked to Heart Attacks

Smoking marijuana at least once a month is linked to an elevated risk of heart attack, according to a new study among nearly 160,000 people in the U.K.

The research, published Friday in the journal Cell, looked at more than 11,000 people between ages 40 and 69 who said they smoked marijuana at least once a month. The scientists then compared that group to 122,000 other people in the same age bracket who did not smoke marijuana at all, and nearly 23,000 more who smoked less frequently.


The study authors controlled for age, gender and body mass index — three factors that influence the risk of heart disease — and found that people who smoked marijuana frequently were more likely than people who did not to have a first heart attack before age 50. Having one heart attack increases the lifelong risk of having another or developing heart failure.

The findings align with other similar research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already warns that smoking marijuana could lead to an increased risk of heart disease, and a 2021 study identified an association between heart attacks and marijuana use in young adults. But the new study goes a step further, since it also attempts to figure out why smoking weed can lead to heart problems.

To investigate that, the researchers studied how THC affects both human stem cells and mice stem cells. It's already known that when people smoke marijuana, THC binds with a receptor in the brain, which is what gives the feeling of being high. In their lab studies, the team found that THC also binds to that receptor in blood vessels.

So the researchers suggested that using THC frequently could activate that receptor in a way that leads to inflammation in blood vessels, which in turn can accelerate a buildup of plaque in the arteries that can lead to a heart attack.  READ MORE...

Deer & Kittens

 

Counter Brain Aging

Summary: Using whole-brain virtual models, researchers simulate the effects of non-invasive neurostimulation on the aging brain. The computational models shed light on the dynamics of brain changes as a result of aging.

Source: Human Brain Project

Human Brain Project researchers have used whole-brain virtual models to simulate what happens when neurostimulation is applied to aging human brains.

These models provide new insight into how the dynamics of a healthy brain change as it grows old, and crucially, could help identify new targets and strategies for therapeutic neurostimulation.

As the brain ages, it “reorganizes” itself: its neurodynamics and the connections between neurons change dramatically, often resulting in a decrease of cognitive functions. Noninvasive brain stimulation techniques, such as applying electrical or magnetic currents, have recently emerged as possible treatments for neurological and degenerative disorders, contrasting and mitigating the natural effects of aging.

However, large scale experimental studies on healthy human brains have obvious ethical implications. A group of Spanish researchers, led by Gustavo Deco from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, were able to overcome these limitations with the help of modeling and simulation.

Their study was published in Cerebral Cortex and used neuroimaging data of 620 healthy adults, collected during previous research – half of them aged over 65 years, the other half below 65 years.

The team looked for key differences between the brain states of the two groups, and identified a brain state similar to the so-called “rich club” region, a network of 12 brain hubs well connected with each other.  READ MORE...

Card Shuffling

Hello

Time Does Not Exist (?)

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock.

But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously.

How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: Even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual.

A crisis in physics
Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the Universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics describes how things work in the incredibly tiny world of particles and particle interactions. General relativity describes the big picture of gravity and how objects move.

Both theories work extremely well in their own right, but the two are thought to conflict with one another. Though the exact nature of the conflict is controversial, scientists generally agree both theories need to be replaced with a new, more general theory.

Physicists want to produce a theory of "quantum gravity" that replaces general relativity and quantum mechanics, while capturing the extraordinary success of both. Such a theory would explain how gravity's big picture works at the miniature scale of particles.

Time in quantum gravity
It turns out that producing a theory of quantum gravity is extraordinarily difficult.

One attempt to overcome the conflict between the two theories is string theory. String theory replaces particles with strings vibrating in as many as 11 dimensions.  READ MORE...

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

 

When Parents Take Antibiotics

Summary: Zebrafish study finds antibiotics can have detrimental effects on the descendants of those exposed to them, including weaker immune systems.

Source: University of Southern Denmark

Antibiotics have once proclaimed the salvation of the world. Today, researchers fear that antibiotics could become a threat to public health and the natural environment.

Since its invention, we have used antibiotics in such large doses and so often that more and more of us become resistant, and thus otherwise common and harmless infections can become life-threatening for us.

In recent years, research has also shown that just being exposed to antibiotics can have a negative effect; both on the organism being exposed and on the offspring of the organism.

Always in our water

And we are many, both humans and animals, who are exposed to antibiotics. Antibiotics are often found in wastewater, groundwater, surface water, and even bottled water and are thus difficult not to come into contact with.

“The half-life of antibiotics is quite short – it is out of the water again after hours or days – but since large amounts are continuously released into our water, we consider antibiotics as pseudo persistent water pollution,” says Elvis Genbo Xu, who is an expert in ecotoxicology and assistant professor at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark.

He is the co-corresponding author of a new study on the undesirable effects of antibiotics, published in Environmental Science & Technology.  READ MORE...

An Itch

 

Hybernation in Space

Sending humans virtually anywhere in space beyond the Moon pushes logistics of health, food, and psychology to limits we're only just beginning to grasp.

A staple solution to these problems in science fiction is to simply put the void-travelers to bed for a while. In a sleep-like state akin to hibernation or torpor, metabolism drops, and the mind is spared the boredom of waiting out endless empty hours.

Unlike faster-than-light travel and wormholes, the premise of putting astronauts into a form of hibernation feels like it's within grasp. Enough so that even the European Space Agency is seriously looking into the science behind it.

Implications of a new study by a trio of researchers from Chile now reveal a mathematical hurdle to turning the potential of long-term human stasis into reality, one that might mean it's as forever beyond our reach.

Roberto F. Nespolo and Carlos Mejias from the Millennium Institute for Integrative Biology and Francisco Bozinovic from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile set out to unravel the relationship between body mass and energy expenditure in animals that hibernate.

They discovered a minimum level of metabolism that allows cells to persist under cold, low-oxygen conditions. For relatively heavy animals like us, the energy savings we might expect from entering a deep, hibernation-like state would be negligible.

In fact, we'd probably be better off just napping our days away the old-fashioned way.

The word hibernation often invokes images of a bear tucked away in a den for a long winter's rest.  READ MORE...

Flash

 

All Nighter

 

All About the Democrats

Flashy

 

Free Speech or Disinformation?

In a Friday piece for Time magazine, the outlet’s national correspondent Charlotte Alter dismissed Elon Musk’s quest for free speech on Twitter as a white male "obsession," and merely an entrepreneurial way to acquire influence and power in the world.

She also claimed that Musk’s idea of free speech is about the right to spread "disinformation" and has nothing to do with the Founding Fathers' original intent.

Alter began her piece by insinuating that Musk should have put his $44 billion into something more worthwhile than what he sees as "free speech," a phrase she put in scare quotes throughout the piece.

She wrote, "They say that something is worth what someone will pay for it. If that’s true, then protecting ‘free speech,’ which Elon Musk has cited as a central reason he agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion this week, may be worth twice as much as solving America’s homelessness problem, and seven times as much as solving world hunger."

She added, "It’s worth more (to him, at least) than educating every child in nearly 50 countries, more than the GDP of Serbia, Jordan, or Paraguay."

The author then proceeded to wonder why a rich techie like Musk would even care about freedom of speech and how it "had become paramount concern of the techno-moral universe."

She asked, "Why does Musk care so much about this? Why would a guy who has pushed the boundaries of electric-vehicle manufacturing and plumbed the limits of commercial space flight care about who can say what on Twitter?"

She then cited professor of communication at Stanford University Fred Turner for the answer, who agreed, "It does seem to be a dominant obsession with the most elite." He stated, "[F]ree speech seems to be much more of an obsession among men," and part of "the entrepreneurial push: I did it in business, I did it in space, and now I’m going to do it in the world."  READ MORE...

Timelapse

 

Wealth Literacy VERSUS Financial Literacy

In today’s society, there is much discussion about how young individuals are financially illiterate, as if financial knowledge were sufficient to enable them to accumulate money.

However, despite the fact that millions of individuals have read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” one of the best financial literacy books available, there is a disconnect between the basic ideas of financial literacy and their application in the pursuit of financial independence. There is still a bridge to wealth-building that novels such as “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” have failed to cross, and it is somewhere out there.

This is not a bridge of financial literacy, but rather a bridge of financial wealth literacy. In the event that I were the president of a university, I would make certain that my business program included the following courses:

(1) What is Leverage and How Does It Work?

(2) The Four Pillars of Financial Success

(3) How to Make Money Investing

(4) Cryptocurrency , Gold and Precious Metals

(5) How to Make the Most of Your Time

(6) Exposing and dispelling common investment myths; and

(7) Networking

Following the completion of the fundamental curriculum, I would deliver numerous more classes, including the following:

(1) The Relationship Between Politics and Investing; and (2) The Relationship Between Politics and Investing
in
(2) Taking Advantage of Technology to Increase Wealth

The knowledge gained from all of these courses would provide an adequate basis for building wealth without the need for considerable trial and error, hardship, or outright failure on the part of young adults. Instead, traditional institutions of higher learning do not provide such courses at any level and instead remain entrenched in curricula that are geared toward theory rather than application, such as statistics, economics 101, marketing, and financial management.  READ MORE...

Cat Fall

 

Floating Cities of the Future

The world’s first prototype floating city that adapts to sea level rise has just been unveiled at UN headquarters in New York.

OCEANIX Busan, in South Korea, aims to provide breakthrough technology for coastal cities facing land shortages and the threat of climate change.

When built, the three interconnected platforms, totalling 15.5 acres, will provide homes for a community of 12,000 people.

It’s one of many solutions being found to the growing issue of rising sea levels.

Housing the growing global population is one of the key challenges facing policymakers today - and one made even more challenging by climate change.

Without curbing emissions, it’s predicted more than 800 million people, living in 570 cities around the world, could be at risk from sea level rise by 2050, according to the C40 network of global cities addressing climate change.

The network estimates the cost of rising sea levels and inland flooding could reach $1 trillion by mid-century.

But it’s hoped that this sustainable floating city prototype could go some way to solving the problem of providing safe homes for vulnerable coastal communities.

‘Solutions to global challenges’
OCEANIX Busan, based in the waters off South Korea’s second-largest city, was recently unveiled at the UN headquarters in New York. It’s a collaboration between UN-Habitat, the Busan Metropolitan City, and OCEANIX, a blue tech company based in New York.

“We cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s tools. We need to innovate solutions to global challenges. But in this drive for innovation, let’s be inclusive and equitable and ensure we leave no one and no place behind,” Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Maimunah Mohd Sharif said at the launch.

The floating city is designed as three interconnected platforms, totalling 15.5 acres, that will initially provide homes for a community of 12,000 people, potentially rising to 100,000, with construction due to start in 2023.

Each of the platforms has a specific purpose - living, research, and lodging - while the link-span bridges that connect them to the land create a sheltered lagoon, providing space for recreation on the water.  READ MORE...