I heard of this tech years ago. Neat idea. There are lots of paved surfaces!
An experimental bike path that also functions as a giant solar cell has far exceeded expectations in the six months it's been in use -- and that has scientists eyeing roadways as possible sources of solar energy to power street lights, traffic systems, and electric cars.
A relatively peaceful decade has passed since the end of the Burundian Civil War. This month’s events put that peace at risk. On May 13th, General Niyombare claimed to have “overthrown” President Nkurunziza. After a particularly violent morning, the streets of Bujumbura broke into jubilant celebrations and the immediate removal of most barricades, just moments after the announcement was made.
So far, there are a reported 216 injured, 20 dead, and more than 600 protestors imprisoned. The scenario evolves rapidly, and future developments are difficult to predict. The risk of widespread violence persists.
But why should you care about a small African nation, thousands of miles away? As an American, what happens there doesn’t impact you, right?
Wrong. Here's why..."
Myanmar’s membership of ASEAN, achieved in 1997, has always been a test of the rules and norms that govern the regional body.
But the nature of that test has changed with the plight of the Rohingya, 8,000 of which are now trapped at sea – unable to make landfall in neighbouring states. ASEAN, and its members, are failing this test, a failure which will have lethal consequences for one of the most vulnerable people of the region.
In the past the test that Myanmar posed was to the diplomatic rules of ASEAN – commitments to non-intervention and sovereign equality. In the past ASEAN member states showed that they were willing to chastise Myanmar publicly when, for example in 2007, it engaged in harsh repression of the Saffron Revolution. George Yeo, then Singaporean Foreign Minister, went so far as to express his ‘revulsion’ at the crackdown – a radical and undiplomatic tone to use towards a fellow ASEAN member.
The test posed for ASEAN by the current crisis is far more existential than that they faced in the 2000s. The Rohingya expose the dangerous vacuum at the heart of ASEAN’s commitment to become people-centred. We have gone from a test of a set of diplomatic rules to a test of the very moral purpose of ASEAN as a body....
Highly amusing teardown of the "eureka!" stories we all grew up hearing about science. Turns out, it was all about hard work over long years!
THE other week I was working in my garage office when my 14-year-old daughter, Olivia, came in to tell me about Charles Darwin. Did I know that he discovered the theory of evolution after studying finches on the Galápagos Islands? I was steeped in what felt like the 37th draft of my new book, which is on the development of scientific ideas, and she was proud to contribute this tidbit of history that she had just learned in class.
Sadly, like many stories of scientific discovery, that commonly recounted tale, repeated in her biology textbook, is not true.
The popular history of science is full of such falsehoods...
An awful lot of international diplomacy lately has been downright undiplomatic.
Exhibit A: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) used Twitter to goad Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif late last month. Cotton tweeted at him: “I hear you called me out today. If you’re so confident, let’s debate the Constitution.” Cotton followed up with other tweets describing Zarif as cowardly. The Iranian foreign minister replied that “serious diplomacy, not macho personal smear, is what we need,” a response that Foreign Policy magazine labeled as trolling. This was hardly the only online provocation Zarif faced during his recent New York visit.
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What’s made diplo-trolling more common is that, unlike in previous centuries, it is hard for officials to ignore other politicians baiting them, because online the exchanges happen so quickly. In the past, it would have taken weeks for word of Senate or mayoral speeches to travel overseas, allowing foreign officials the luxury of ignoring them. Today, instant Facebook comments and Twitter replies make it difficult for anyone to pretend to ignore a troll, especially a troll who’s a member of the Senate .
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Does diplo-trolling really matter? Turkey remains a NATO ally. The same week that Cotton trolled Zarif, progress was made in the Iran nuclear negotiations. Isn’t the rest just bread and circuses? A useful distraction for officials trying to conduct actual statecraft?
Not necessarily. In the short term, social media engagement can raise the costs of negotiation. As a general rule, trolling is a weapon of the weak designed to harass the powerful into engaging their arguments; on the Iran negotiations, for example, Cotton is far less important than Zarif. This is not all bad — sometimes trolls, by engaging political leaders or spokesmen, bring transparency to a heretofore hidden set of policies. And to the trolls, this is a form of negotiation.
The problem is that crafting international agreements is hard work on a good day. Coping with online trolls simply adds to the transaction costs of negotiation. This is particularly true because the mainstream media will amplify any act of foreign policy trolling. The media loves to report on Twitter fights and put-downs.
Two years after the horrific bombing of this city’s famed marathon, a federal jury on Friday sentenced to death one of the young men responsible for the attack, turning away appeals for mercy from his attorneys and even some victims.
The jury of seven women and five men rendered its decision after deliberating for more than 14 hours...
Just last year, it seemed there was something to celebrate despite planet Earth’s ongoing honeybee apocalypse: Bee colony losses were down. Not by enough, but they were down.
“It’s better news than it could have been,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a University of Maryland entomology professor who led a survey of bee populations that reported a loss of 23 percent of bee colonies — less than 30 percent, the average from 2005 to 2013. “It’s not good news.”
Though scientists cited progress in battles against an Asian mite that has killed many an American bee, they had words of caution.
“One year does not make a trend,” Jeff Pettis, a co-author of the survey who heads the federal government’s bee research laboratory in Beltsville, Md., told the New York Times.
Turns out Pettis was right. VanEngelsdorp and other researchers at the Bee Informed Partnership, affiliated with the Department of Agriculture, just announced more than 40 percent of honeybee hives died this past year, as the Associated Press reported. The number is preliminary, but is the second-highest annual loss recorded to date.
“What we’re seeing with this bee problem is just a loud signal that there’s some bad things happening with our agro-ecosystems,” study co-author Keith Delaplane of the University of Georgia told the AP. “We just happen to notice it with the honeybee because they are so easy to count.”
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The state worst affected was Oklahoma, which lost more than 60 percent of its hives. Hawaii escaped relatively unscathed, losing less than 14 percent.
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The USDA estimated that honeybees add more than $15 billion to the value of the country’s crops per year.
One of the most important long-term issues to watch:
The study assesses the food supply available to more than 140 nations (with populations greater than 1 million) and demonstrates that food security is becoming increasingly susceptible to perturbations in demographic growth, as humanity places increasing pressure on use of limited land and water resources.
"In the past few decades there has been an intensification of international food trade and an increase in the number of countries that depend on food imports," said Paolo D'Odorico, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and one of the study's authors. "On average, about one-fourth of the food we eat is available to us through international trade. This globalization of food may contribute to the spread of the effects of local shocks in food production throughout the world."