Magazine Posts

"The first thing to remember is that the great philosophers were only human. Then you can start disagreeing with them."...... Keeping in mind that "each giant of philosophy was a human being trying to figure out life by doing just what you do: reading, thinking, observing, writing"....  Read more

"More than 450 people are dying of COVID-19 in the U.S. each day as of late August 2022......  "When COVID-19 vaccines first became available, public officials, community organizations and policymakers mobilized to get shots into arms. including significant investments in making vaccines accessible to Black, Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native populations.... ....... But boosters are a different story"....... Read more

"Data from last year’s survey at this point seems to confirm that there was a massive decline in the number of young snow crab in the Eastern Bering Sea — something like 99% fewer female snow crab showed up in the survey from 2021" .... Read more

 "Beneath Cappadocia's crumbling surface, a marvel of equally gargantuan proportions lay hidden away for centuries; a subterranean city that could conceal the whereabouts of up to 20,000 inhabitants for months at a time"   Read more

Photo credit: Halil Sayim 

"The Nonprofit, RIP Medical Debt was launched in 2014. They started raising money from donors to buy up debt on secondary markets — where hospitals sell debt for pennies on the dollar to companies that profit when they collect on that debt....... To date, RIP has purchased $6.7 billion in unpaid debt and relieved 3.6 million people of debt. The group says retiring $100 in debt costs an average of $1.... Read the full NPR article

"Since the Paris agreement, the six largest US banks – Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs – have provided $1.4tn in financing to the fossil fuel industry" Read full article

"Earth warming has not been uniform, with some regions warming at a far greater pace. One such region is the Arctic..... which has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world over the past 43 years. This means the Arctic is on average around 3℃ warmer than it was in 1980....... This is alarming, because the Arctic contains sensitive and delicately balanced climate components that, if pushed too hard, will respond with global consequences" ... Read more

"A vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) design created at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has wound up in the hands of a Chinese company, which has since gone on to become the largest manufacturer of VRFBs in the world" The US, which owns the patent and invested $15 million of taxpayer dollars into its development, reportedly has no domestic production site for the novel VRFBs" ..... Read more at The Register

"While many American students and their parents worry that the next mass shooting could happen at their school, schools are also facing a number of other threats that do not involve guns. Many of these threats are related to the mental health of educators and students" .... Read more

"Proteins are the building blocks of life, chains of amino acids that can twist and bend into a mind-boggling variety of shapes. Last year, DeepMind AI cracked a 50-year-old problem of protein folding and published the protein structures for 20 species – including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans. Now, it's Alphafold AI has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200M proteins.... .. AI is paving the way for the development of new medicines or technologies to tackle global challenges such as famine or pollution" Read more
Image Credit: DeepMind

Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression were a leading cause of global health problems even before the spread of COVID-19; however, they’ve gotten worse........  worldwide  rates have increased by an overwhelming 25%. In the U.S., 4 in 10 adults have reported symptoms of anxiety or depression during the pandemic, compared with 1 in 10 from January to June 2019..... Read more

Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States and supplies water to Millions of people across seven states, tribal lines and northern Mexico. Many of these areas are experiencing some level of drought.

Source: : NASA Earth Observatory. (July 2000, 2021, 2022) ... Read more