A drilling derrick at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, produces an enormous gusher of crude oil, coating the landscape for hundreds of feet and signaling the advent of the American oil industry. The geyser was discovered at a depth of over 1,000 feet, flowed at an initial rate of approximately 100,000 barrels a day and took nine days to cap. Following the discovery, petroleum, which until that time had been used in the U.S. primarily as a lubricant and in kerosene for lamps, would become the main fuel source for new inventions such as cars and airplanes; coal-powered forms of transportation including ships and trains would also convert to the liquid fuel.
Crude oil, which became the world’s first trillion-dollar industry, is a natural mix of hundreds of different hydrocarbon compounds trapped in underground rock. The hydrocarbons were formed millions of years ago when tiny aquatic plants and animals died and settled on the bottoms of ancient waterways, creating a thick layer of organic material. Sediment later covered this material, putting heat and pressure on it and transforming it into the petroleum that comes out of the ground today.
(emphasis mine)
There had long been suspicions that oil might be under [“Spindletop Hill.” The area was known for its sulfur springs and bubbling gas seepages that would ignite if lit. In August 1892, George W. O’Brien, George W. Carroll, Pattillo Higgins and others formed the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company to do exploratory drilling on Spindletop Hill. The company drilled many dry holes and ran into trouble, as investors began to balk at pouring more money into drilling with no oil to show for it.
Pattillo Higgins left the company and teamed with Captain Anthony F. Lucas, the leading expert in the U.S. on salt dome formations. Lucas made a lease agreement in 1899 with the Gladys City Company and a later agreement with Higgins. Lucas drilled to 575 feet (180 m) before running out of money. He secured additional funding from John H. Galey and James M. Guffey of Pittsburgh, but the deal left Lucas with only a small share of the lease and Higgins with nothing.
Lucas continued drilling and on January 10, 1901, at a depth of 1,139 ft (347 m), what is known as the Lucas Gusher or the Lucas Geyser blew oil over 150 feet (50 m) in the air at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day (16,000 m3/d)(4,200,000 gallons). It took nine days before the well was brought under control. Spindletop was the largest gusher the world had seen and catapulted Beaumont into an oil-fueled boomtown. Beaumont’s population of 10,000 tripled in three months and eventually rose to 50,000. Speculation led land prices to increase rapidly. By the end of 1902, over 500 companies were formed and 285 active wells were in operation.
Production began to decline rapidly after 1902, and the wells produced only 10,000 barrels per day (1,600 m3/d) by 1904. On November 14, 1925, the Yount-Lee Oil Company brought in its McFaddin No. 2 at a depth of about 2,500 feet (800 m), sparking a second boom, which culminated in the field’s peak production year of 1927, during which 21,000,000 barrels (3.3 GL) were produced. Over the ten years following the McFaddin discovery, over 72,000,000 barrels (11.4 GL) of oil were produced, mostly from the newer areas of the field. Spindletop continued as a productive source of oil until about 1936. It was then mined for sulfur from the 1950s to about 1975.
In February 2006 the editors of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo met to discuss a matter of what turned out to be deadly consequence: Would they publish a satirical image of Muhammad on their cover? We were making a documentary about Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, one of the most famous cartoonists in France. So we were there, filming his conversation with his colleagues as they chose the cover. The issue that came out of this meeting – with a Cabu cartoon on the cover and the images they discussed here – turned out to be one of the most popular in the magazine’s history. Almost nine years later, gunmen stormed this very meeting and killed 10 editors and cartoonists, including three of the people in this film: Cabu, Bernard Verlhac (known as Tignous) and Georges Wolinski.
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Many of us in the econ biz were wondering how the new leaders of Congress would respond to the sharp increase in American economic growth that, we now know, began last spring. After years of insisting that President Obama is responsible for a weak economy, they couldn’t say the truth – that short-run economic performance has very little to do with who holds the White House. So what would they say?
Well, I didn’t see that one coming: They’re claiming credit. Never mind the fact that all of the good data refer to a period before the midterm elections. Mitch McConnell, the new Senate majority leader, says that he did it, that growth reflected “the expectation of a new Republican Congress.”
The response of the Democratic National Committee – “Hahahahahahaha” – seems appropriate. I mean, talk about voodoo economics: Mr. McConnell is claiming not just that he can create prosperity without, you know, actually passing any legislation, but that he can reach back in time and create prosperity before even taking power. But while Mr. McConnell’s self-aggrandizement is funny, it’s also scary, because it’s a symptom of his party’s epistemic closure. Republicans know many things that aren’t so, and no amount of contrary evidence will get them to change their minds.
At least Mr. McConnell didn’t do what many of his colleagues have done when faced with inconvenient facts: resort to conspiracy theories.
It is striking that on their first day — their very first day! — congressional Republicans moved against Social Security’s disability insurance fund, before some of them had even found the restrooms or put out their family photos.
“Well,” said Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, “that didn’t take long.”
No, indeed. And it’s worth remembering that this GOP move doesn’t just hurt an abstract entity called “Social Security.” It hurts people — living, breathing human beings.
This particular move targeted the disabled. Here’s how: The overall Social Security fund is well-funded for the next two decades or so (and easily remedied beyond that point), but the disability insurance trust fund needs a short-term cash infusion from the larger retirement account.
On December 17, a courageous act by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking in the state sent shockwaves around the world. Governor Cuomo followed acting State Health Commissioner Dr. Zucker’s recommendation based on a significant and growing body of scientific studies showing that drilling and fracking put people’s health and the environment at risk.
The impacts include health problems, water contamination, dangerous air pollution, threats to agriculture and soil quality, radioactive releases, earthquakes, and more. [..]
Despite the fact that New York’s decision is based on the best science, President Obama’s administration had the audacity to denounce the decision. Last week Obama’s Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said fracking bans make it “very difficult for the industry to figure out” rules in different areas, and stem from what she sees as bad science and misinformation. That simply doesn’t hold up to the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies from leading scientific researchers and institutions demonstrating problems and harms. And frankly, we would like to see our public officials putting public health before concerns about the oil and gas industry’s confusion.
You may ask why President Obama had Interior Secretary Jewell be the one to publicly push back on New York’s fracking ban. The answer is likely simple. She is currently polishing up regulations to frack our national forests and federal lands, expected soon. This has to stop.
This week marks the 13th anniversary of the arrival of the first post-9/11 prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, the most notorious prison on the planet. This grim anniversary, and the beginning of normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S and Cuba, serves as a reminder that we need to permanently close the prison and return the land to its rightful owners, the Cuban people. It is time to put an end to this dark chapter of United States history. [..]
The United States took Guantanamo Bay by force in 1898, during the Spanish-American War, and extracted an indefinite lease on the property from Cuba in 1903. Returning Guantanamo Bay to Cuba will begin to right more than a century of wrongs that the U.S. government has perpetrated there. Most importantly, the return of the Guantanamo Bay prison and naval base will make it harder for any future war criminals, whether in the White House, the Pentagon or the CIA and their enthusiastic cheerleaders in Congress, to use Guantanamo as their distant dungeon, to inflict torture and terror on prisoners, many of them innocent, far from the eyes of the people of the United States, and far from the reach of criminal courts.
Civil disobedience is a familiar protest tactic. From Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr, some of our most iconic reformers have engaged in nonviolent, unlawful social action.
But it isn’t always necessary to disobey the law to defy a legal regime. Critics can also press their point by adhering to directives in ways that are consistent with their literal language but inconsistent with common practice or common sense – a tactic we call “uncivil obedience”.
In the ongoing struggle over police reform, civil disobedience is now being met with uncivil obedience. After protesters outraged by the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner shut down streets, bridges and shopping malls, the head of New York City’s largest police union urged officers to pay close attention to the regulations that guide officers’ conduct. Simply by sticking to the “stupid rules”, Patrick Lynch suggested, cops could fight back against their “enemies”.
Freedom of the Press and Speech have come under attack lately from the and, strangely, from the so-called left. The vicious attack on the office of “Charlie Hebdo” was especially vicious but there are more subtle attacks on our rights from the US Department of Justice. Even though Attorney General Eric Holder has said that he would force New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal the sources for his book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” Holder approved the issue of a limited subpoena requiring Risen to testify at the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling who is being charged as a whistleblower under the 1917 Espionage Act. On January 5th in an unusual pre-trial hearing, Risen finally testified, for the first time under oath, in a Virginia federal courtroom
The terse, and at times combative, testimony prompted a lawyer for Sterling to question whether prosecutors could even proceed with their case.
There are many unequivocal statements the government cannot prove without Risen, said Edward MacMahon, a lawyer for Sterling. Sterling was indicted on unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and other charges in 2010. [..]
On Monday, Risen said he did not want to provide any information to the government that it might be able to use as a “building block” to prove or disprove a “mosaic” it was trying to make. He made the comments just days before Sterling is scheduled to begin trial on Jan. 12.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Former U.S. President Richard Nixon is born, Howard Hughes identifies fake biography, Unmanned probe lands on moon, the Phantom of the Opera becomes the longest running Broadway show.
January 9 is the ninth day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 356 days remaining until the end of the year (357 in leap years).
On this day in 1493, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, sees three “mermaids”–in reality manatees–and describes them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” Six months earlier, Columbus (1451-1506) set off from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, hoping to find a western trade route to Asia. Instead, his voyage, the first of four he would make, led him to the Americas, or “New World.”
Mermaids, mythical half-female, half-fish creatures, have existed in seafaring cultures at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. Typically depicted as having a woman’s head and torso, a fishtail instead of legs and holding a mirror and comb, mermaids live in the ocean and, according to some legends, can take on a human shape and marry mortal men. Mermaids are closely linked to sirens, another folkloric figure, part-woman, part-bird, who live on islands and sing seductive songs to lure sailors to their deaths.
West Indian manatees are large, gray aquatic mammals with bodies that taper to a flat, paddle-shaped tail. They have two forelimbs, called flippers, with three to four nails on each flipper. Their head and face are wrinkled with whiskers on the snout.
Manatees can be found in shallow, slow-moving rivers, estuaries, saltwater bays, canals, and coastal areas – particularly where seagrass beds or freshwater vegetation flourish. Manatees are a migratory species. Within the United States, they are concentrated in Florida in the winter. In summer months, they can be found as far west as Texas and as far north as Massachusetts, but summer sightings in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina are more common. West Indian manatees can also be found in the coastal and inland waterways of Central America and along the northern coast of South America, although distribution in these areas may be discontinuous.
Manatees are gentle and slow-moving animals. Most of their time is spent eating, resting, and traveling. Manatees are completely herbivorous.
West Indian manatees have no natural enemies, and it is believed they can live 60 years or more. As with all wild animal populations, a certain percentage of manatee mortality is attributed to natural causes of death such as cold stress, gastrointestinal disease, pneumonia, and other diseases. A high number of additional fatalities are from human-related causes. Most human-related manatee fatalities occur from collisions with watercraft.
The FBI statement adds that a “potential person of interest in this investigation is a Caucasian male, approximately 40 years of age, and balding. He may be driving a 2000 or older model dirty, white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark colored bed liner, open tailgate, and a missing or covered license plate.”
Although the apparent bomber’s motives are not yet known, bombings were a common terrorist tactic during the Jim Crow era. The city of Birmingham, Alabama became known as “Bombingham” due to a rash of bombings targeting black homes and churches, including a 1963 church bombing that killed four girls. The aftermath of that bombing is depicted in the picture at the top of this post.
Nothing like stating the obvious, unless this guy was after a girlfriend or an employee of the beauty salon that also occupied the building. Coincidentally, the bombing occurred just days before the premier of the civil rights movie “Selma” in Colorado Springs. According to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Colorado Springs has a long history of radical right ideology and the state is home to no less than 17 active hate groups
A ThinkProgress search of television databases suggests CNN gave one cursory report on the incident at 6:34 a.m., while MSNBC and Fox News appear to have not mentioned the incident on air since it happened. Other networks, including Headline News, (HDLN) mentioned the incident in the morning news.
ThinkProgress searched the database TVEyes and Critical Mention from Tuesday evening through Wednesday afternoon, using the terms, “NAACP,” “colored people,” and “bomb” along with “Colorado.” It found only one mention on CNN, at 6:34 a.m., in the course of what appeared to be a scheduled interview on community-police relations. The incident was mentioned when the interviewer asked former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent Dan Bongino whether he thought the bomb in Colorado could be “seen as retaliatory” and Bongino said it was possible. Representatives from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News did not respond to ThinkProgress inquiries on their coverage of the bombing.
Outside of broadcast, CNN and other outlets did provide substantive coverage of the incident, although mostly not front-page treatment. CNN sent a breaking news tweet last night and posted a story on its website. Local and regional outlets, NBC News, and the wire services have posted stories about it. And on Rachel Maddow’s website, a morning roundup by Steve Benen included the item.
The FBI says the potential person of interest in this investigation is a white male, approximately 40 years of age and balding.
He may be driving a 2000 or older model dirty, white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark colored bed liner, open tailgate, and a missing or covered license plate.
Anyone with information is asked to call the FBI Denver tip line at 303-435-7787.
Meanwhile, the right wingers are out in force pushing the need to continue spying on everyone to prevent terrorism that it so far has failed to prevent, because Al Qaeda and ISIS.
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
The brutal terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday has badly shaken France. But the French have reacted with a fierce determination to defend their freedoms. President François Hollande, speaking from outside the magazine’s office a couple of hours after the murder of 12 people, was crystal clear: This was an assault, he said, on “the expression of freedom” that is the “spirit of the republic.” [..]
President Hollande has wisely appealed for national unity. His sentiments were echoed by former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who asked the public to avoid the temptation to “lump together” terrorists with Muslims, and he called for a united front against terrorism. Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, expressed his community’s anguish over the attack. He did not mince words: “This is a deafening declaration of war,” he said.
Just days after the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the newspaper Le Monde declared: “We are all Americans.” In France, “Je suis Charlie” – “I am Charlie” – has gone viral as the words to show solidarity with the victims at Charlie Hebdo. This attack was an assault on freedom everywhere. On Wednesday, the American Embassy in Paris put that message on its social media accounts.
But this raises a real question: Apologize for what? Is the current tiff between the police and the mayor really just about protests and officers killed, or is it about something much bigger: diverging philosophies of basic fairness, the acquisition and application of power, and the structures of oppression demanding submission? [..]
It seems to me, in the New York standoff, that the mayor owes no apology for fighting to overturn stop-and-frisk, disclosing that he talked to his son about encounters with police officers, or being compassionate to protesters. That is the man New Yorkers elected.
This, to my mind, is an attack on him as an agent of change. It is a battle to see which arm has the most muscle: the one that wants to deny bias, explicit or implicit, in the exercise of its power while simultaneously clinging to that bias; or the one committed to questioning the power and acknowledging the bias. Eventually, we will have to wrestle with the question of which of those forces must win for us to be true and whole.
Tens of millions of people made New Year’s resolutions last week, but few were as creative as the one pushed through Congress yesterday. Apparently, the new Congress decided that its first order of business should be to go after workers who are no longer able to hold jobs due to injury or illness.
It did this in a technical move that is likely to escape the attention of most of the public. The Republican Congress voted to ban any reallocation of Social Security tax revenue between the retirement fund, designated for retirees and survivors, and the disability fund for disabled workers. This matters because the disability fund is projected to face a shortfall some time in 2016. If no steps are taken by that point, workers suffering from cancer, heart disease or other disabling conditions will see their benefits cut by almost 20 percent.
The easiest way to have addressed this problem would be to simply reallocate money between the funds, as has been done eleven times in the past. But the Republican Congress apparently felt that it would be better to hold disabled workers hostage in order to extract concessions on this or other programs.
The 114th Congress is officially underway, and in a move that speaks volumes about the Republican leadership’s agenda, the first order of business in the House and Senate is rubber-stamping the Keystone XL pipeline. The GOP is doing a big favor for Canadian oil interests by trampling the long-established process for making these important environmental decisions. In return, Americans get sharply increased risks to our climate and water quality. [..]
Building a pipeline that cuts clear across the country so a Canadian corporation can export dirty tar sands to the highest bidder is not in our national interest. We have an established process for approving these projects. That process has not yet concluded, so Republicans are trying to circumvent it. The question is why.
There’s been a lot of economic recovery talk lately, but most people will probably tell you that things still aren’t that great. Most Americans — 99 percent of them or so — are still struggling. Economic inequality is soaring, social mobility is declining, earnings at most income levels are stagnant or falling, and the percentage of working-age Americans who are actually working is at a record low.
And yet, as Republicans take control of the Senate and consolidate their lock on the House, they’re preparing to double down on the same policies that created this mess in the first place: austerity, taxation and deregulation.
How will Democrats respond? The economy has improved somewhat, but in an uneven and unstable way that has primarily benefited the wealthy. (And now the GOP’s even trying to take credit for that.) How will the Republicans’ opponents distinguish themselves: with clear and concrete ideas and proposals, or vague platitudes?
Republicans who now run Congress say they want to cooperate with President Obama, and point to the administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, as the model. The only problem is the TPP would be a disaster.
If you haven’t heard much about the TPP, that’s part of the problem right there. It would be the largest trade deal in history – involving countries stretching from Chile to Japan, representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy – yet it’s been devised in secret.
Lobbyists from America’s biggest corporations and Wall Street’s biggest banks have been involved but not the American public. That’s a recipe for fatter profits and bigger paychecks at the top, but not a good deal for most of us, or even for most of the rest of the world.
When we talk about Entropy and its increase, it pays to keep in mind that we are talking about a a theoretically ‘closed’ system.
Like, oh say, The Universe. All that was or ever will be.
Locally it is not only entirely possible that new inputs (opening the system) will result in the spontaneous rise of complexity, it may even be likely!
Darwin didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point. But he didn’t require God, either, and that was enough to drive some people mad.
Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place – which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.
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If England’s theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that thermodynamics disproves evolution (here, for example), the exact opposite of what England’s work is designed to show – that thermodynamics drives evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living matter.
Most important in this regard is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any closed process, there is an increase in the total entropy (roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists reason, ergo – a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word “closed,” of course.
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Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going on can be found here.
The driving flow of energy – whether from the sun or some other source – can give rise to what are known as dissipative structures, which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that flows through them. Russian-born Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing the concept. All living things are dissipative structures, as are many non-living things as well – cyclones, hurricanes and tornados, for example.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Not long after two mild earthquakes jolted the normally steady terrain outside Youngstown, Ohio, last March, geologists quickly decided that hydraulic fracturing operations at new oil-and-gas wells in the area had set off the tremors.
Now a detailed study has concluded that the earthquakes were not isolated events, but merely the largest of scores of quakes that rattled the area around the wells for more than a week.
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The number and intensity of fracking-related quakes have risen as the practice has boomed. In Oklahoma, for example, quakes have increased sharply in recent years, including the state’s largest ever, a magnitude 5.7 tremor, in 2011. Both state and federal experts have said fracking is contributing to the increase there, not only because of the fracking itself, but also because of the proliferation of related wells into which fracking waste is injected. Those injection wells receive much more waste, and are filled under high pressure more often, than oil or gas wells, and the sheer volume of pressurized liquids has been shown to widen cracks in faults, raising the chances of slippage and earthquakes.
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In Poland Township, an analysis of seismological data found 77 well-related earthquakes from March 4 to March 12, the four largest of them on March 10. All occurred about 1.9 miles underground, along a horizontal fault that at times ran less than a half-mile under wells where fracking was underway.
The regulations, the heart of President Obama’s climate change agenda, are based on the Clean Air Act and require states to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants. Each state may create its own plan for how to do so, but the requirements have the potential for shutting hundreds of coal-fired power plants.
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“We certainly hope that every state feels like it’s in their best interest to create a plan,” Ms. McCabe said. “But we have an obligation under the Clean Air Act, should there be states that don’t submit plans, to be sure we’re ready.”
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Ms. McCabe said she expected the E.P.A. to release final versions of the climate change regulations by midsummer, when it would also issue the proposed model rule for states.
Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two, depending on how the habitable zone of a star is defined.
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So far, Kepler has discovered 4,175 potential planets, and 1,004 of them have been confirmed as real, according to Michele Johnson, a spokeswoman for NASA’s Ames Research Center, which operates Kepler.
Most of them, however, including those announced Tuesday, are hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.
“We can count as many as we like,” said Sara Seager, a planet theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new work, “but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”
Calling Aldo Rebelo a climate-change skeptic would be putting it mildly. In his days as a fiery legislator in the Communist Party of Brazil, he [railed against ] those who say human activity is warming the globe and called the international environmental movement “nothing less, in its geopolitical essence, than the bridgehead of imperialism.”
Though many Brazilians have grown used to such pronouncements from Mr. Rebelo, 58, his appointment this month as minister of science by President Dilma Rousseff is causing alarm among climate scientists and environmentalists here, a country that has been seeking to assert leadership in global climate talks.
“At first I thought this was some sort of mistake, that he was playing musical chairs and landed in the wrong chair,” said Márcio Santilli, a founder of Instituto Socioambiental, one of Brazil’s leading environmental groups. “Unfortunately, there he is, overseeing Brazilian science at a very delicate juncture when Brazil’s carbon emissions are on the rise again.”
The White House on Tuesday made it clear that President Obama would veto a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, setting up an immediate clash with Republicans just as they assume control of Congress.
“The president threatening to veto the first bipartisan infrastructure bill of the new Congress must come as a shock to the American people who spoke loudly in November in favor of bipartisan accomplishments,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the new majority leader, said on Tuesday.
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A State Department analysis of the project, released last January, concluded that it would not significantly increase the rate of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, noting that producers would extract oil sands petroleum and move it to market with or without construction of the pipeline. The review estimated that Keystone would support 42,000 temporary jobs over its two-year construction period – about 3,900 of them in construction, the rest in indirect support jobs, such as food service. It estimated that it would create 35 permanent jobs.
Pancake lovers, take heart. In the coming weeks, maple farmers throughout Quebec, Vermont and elsewhere in the syrup belt will dust off their metal spiles for another harvest season, and some scientists are predicting that the sugary sap will flow even more freely than usual.
That’s because this year, the region is likely to have what is known in botany as a mast year – a time every few years when perennial trees like sugar maples synchronize their seed cycles, and flower as one. Low-seed years usually lead to mass blooms, and may bode particularly well for the maple syrup industry.
In a paper published recently in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, ecologists at Tufts University near Boston suggest that syrup and seed production are linked. Because 2014 was a low seed year for maples, the scientists reason, maple trees invested spare energy into producing more carbohydrates. This year, the trees will use those carbs to flower – and fill sugar makers’ pails with rich, sweet sap.
The agency has asked a team of scientists in Philadelphia to look more closely at the active ingredient in Miralax and similar generic products, called polyethylene glycol 3350, or PEG 3350. While outlining the scope of the research, the agency also disclosed that its scientists had discovered trace amounts of two potential toxins in batches of Miralax tested six years ago.
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Buried in the agency’s brief to researchers, issued last year, was some disquieting news. The F.D.A. said that it had tested eight batches of Miralax and found tiny amounts of ethylene glycol (EG) and diethylene glycol (DEG), ingredients in antifreeze, in all of them. The agency said the toxins were impurities resulting from the manufacturing process.
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As it turns out, extremely small amounts of DEG and EG are permitted in finished drug products, and the F.D.A. considers the laxatives “safe to use in accordance with approved labeling” – that is, only by adults for not longer than seven days.
This is going to be the year of the smartwatch. Thanks to several incredible boundary-smashing technological vaults, Apple will soon release a product that looks like a wristwatch but is really So Much More Than That. The Apple Watch will display your Facebook updates. It will tell you who is calling your phone. It will let you show photos to people, even if each photo is the size of a postage stamp and the only way to let anyone actually see it is to awkwardly hold your arm out in a berserk mockery of a CIA stress position while they grab it and squint.
The Apple Watch apparently solves a problem. The problem? Sometimes people have to take their telephones out of their pockets. Why would you want to do that, when all the information in the world could be permanently located at the bottom of your arm, on a tiny screen that you have to navigate by twisting a crown so hopelessly minuscule that it makes you look like a drunk bear in boxing gloves trying to pick a needle off the deck of a listing ship?
If the rise of the smartwatch has taught me anything, it is that I am perfectly happy with my dumbwatch. The one I can strap to my wrist and look at sometimes if I am not in the immediate vicinity of a clock. My watch can do one thing really well. The Apple Watch, meanwhile, will let you do a million things that you can already do elsewhere, but in a slightly more difficult way. Unless it’s run out of battery, that is, which it probably has because it’s an Apple product.
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Technology is still brilliant, and completely necessary. If I didn’t have a map of the entire world inside my phone all the time, there’s a fairly reasonable chance that I would still be fruitlessly wandering around continental Europe, starved and frothing because I couldn’t find my way back to the hotel that I had checked into somewhere in the middle of 2012. If I couldn’t look up recipes from my phone, I guarantee that I would be dead from excessive oven-chip consumption by now. Try to part me from my phone, and I would probably have quite an ugly tantrum in front of you.
But when you get to the point, as I did recently, where you are buying lightbulbs that can only be switched on and off from your phone, it is time for an intervention. Things like that – and smartwatches, and everything else – sound cool, but they just end up making things more complicated than they need to be. You can do without them. Your smartphone isn’t your entire life.
Over the next year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will determine whether the iconic black-and-orange butterflies deserve the federal protections that come with being listed an endangered or threatened species.
By some estimates, the monarch butterfly population has declined by 90 percent over the past two decades, from about 1 billion butterflies in the mid-1990s to just 35 million individuals last winter.
That loss is “so staggering that in human-population terms it would be like losing every living person in the United States except those in Florida and Ohio,” Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.
On this day in 1901, a gusher signals start of U.S. oil industry
When we talk about Entropy and its increase, it pays to keep in mind that we are talking about a a theoretically ‘closed’ system.
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