The first new antibiotic to be discovered in nearly 30 years has been hailed as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the fight against the growing resistance to drugs.
Teixobactin has been found to treat many common bacterial infections such as tuberculosis, septicaemia and C. diff, and could be available within five years.
But more importantly it could pave the way for a new generation of antibiotics because of the way it was discovered...
Mainline Street →
What does it take for heroin to grab hold in the small, remote towns of America? Consider the case of Laramie, Wyoming. Five years ago, it had no heroin problem whatsoever. Now there's a bustling trade. How does this happen? How does heroin become a business?
A solar solution for 1.2 billion people without electric light →
An extra few hours of light a day, to read or get work done, can make a huge difference for a ton of people in the world. And the dream is being able to switch from expensive, toxic chemicals, to something like solar.
In West Africa, where three-quarters of the population lives without electricity, households spend as much as 20 percent of their budget on kerosene, a combustible fuel burned for lighting. Not only is kerosene expensive (the UN estimates the global population spends $23 billion each year on the stuff), it also poses serious risks: fires, burns, and pulmonary disease. The World Health Organization says that 4.3 million people die each year as a result of household air pollution created through the burning of solid fuels.
Amnesty: Nigeria massacre deadliest in history of Boko Haram →
Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the "deadliest massacre" in the history of Boko Haram.
Mike Omeri, the government spokesman on the insurgency, said fighting continued Friday for Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on Jan. 3 and attacked again on Wednesday.
...
An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
If true, "this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram's ongoing onslaught," said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International.
...
The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a March 14, 2014, attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600 people were killed that day.
The 5-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.
Adventures in Mapmaking: Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota →
US oil production has been booming the past few years, due in large part to North Dakota’s Bakken formation, a rock layer tapped through fracking. Each well travels down about two miles, then turns horizontally and snakes through the rock formation for another two miles. There were 8,406 of these Bakken wells, as of North Dakota’s latest count. If you lined them all up—including their vertical and horizontal parts—they’d loop all the way around the Earth.
As a journalist digging into the long-term potential for shale oil—how much oil it might supply, and at what economic and environmental costs—I wanted to create a map showing the extent of this drilling boom to help me look for trends. In this post, I’ll explain how I did that, but first I want to say why this matters.
...
How long can North Dakota’s boom continue? And how will it fare if oil prices remain around their current relatively low price, of about $50 a barrel? It could be that companies have stopped drilling in some areas, or started drilling in new areas. It could be that they’re drilling at much higher density in areas that are particularly attractive—especially since oil prices have dropped drastically over the past six months. Tracking how many wells have been drilled in recent months, and where they’ve been drilled, could show how companies are responding to lower oil prices. I wanted to do this to supplement my own reporting, but also to let anybody who’s interested explore the data more easily.
One of NASA's best images gets a stunning high-def remake →
Gorgeous composite photograph of the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula.
Venezuela Goes From Bizarre To Bizarro →
The word bizarre is no longer enough to describe what has been going n in Venezuela in the last few days. As the country was expecting for the much needed economic measures to be announced, instead, President Maduro announces that he is going on a trip. As he leaves, the usual shortages seeing in the country in the last two years intensify to the level of being widespread with long lines everywhere.
...
And lest you think that the lines are localized, the website http://www.runrun.esdid an interactive map showing how the huge lines were widespread from West to East in Caracas, independent of the standard of living of the people in the neighborhood.
How $50 Oil Changes Almost Everything →
The biggest collapse in energy prices since the 2008 global recession is shifting wealth and power from autocratic petro-states to industrialized consumers, which could make the world safer, according to a Berenberg Bank AG report. Surging U.S. shale supply, weakening Asian and European demand and a stronger dollar are pushing oil past threshold after threshold to a five-and-half-year low, with a dip below $40 a barrel “not out of the question,” said Rob Haworth, a Seattle-based senior investment strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management, which oversees about $120 billion.
...
“Any massive redistribution of income can raise political tensions,” Schmieding of Berenberg Bank said in the Jan. 6 report. “But, net/net, strengthening the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and India, while weakening Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, is likely to make the world a safer place in the end.”
It's an intriguing thought, but injecting chaos into the international system doesn't strike me as "likely" to make the world a safer place. I guess we'll see.