As China reduces its domestic reliance on coal, it’s building hundreds of coal-fired power plants overseas

As China reduces its domestic reliance on coal, it’s building hundreds of coal-fired power plants overseas

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The New York Times reports: Across a narrow channel from this historic port town, where baobabs tower over the forest and tiny crabs skitter in and out of the mangroves, Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China. The plan’s champions, including senior Kenyan officials, say the plant will help meet the country’s fast-growing demand for electricity and draw investment. Its critics worry that it will damage the area’s fragile marine ecosystem, threaten the livelihoods of…

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Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism

Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism

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By Tim Rogan, Aeon Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is the moral or spiritual critique. This critique rejects Homo economicus as the organising heuristic of human affairs. Human beings, it says, need more than material things to prosper. Calculating power is only a small part of what makes us who we are. Moral and spiritual relationships are first-order concerns. Material fixes such as a universal basic income will make no difference to societies in which the…

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It’s time for young Americans to assert their power at the ballot box

It’s time for young Americans to assert their power at the ballot box

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David Leonhardt writes: Voter turnout is the biggest opportunity — and biggest challenge — for the new progressive movement. The problem is easy enough to describe: Progressives don’t vote as often as conservatives do. Americans under age 30, for example, lean notably left. They are socially liberal, worried about climate change and in favor of higher taxes on the rich. But most of them don’t vote, especially outside of presidential elections. In the 2014 midterms — when Republicans took control…

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Algorithms of oppression

Algorithms of oppression

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MIT Technology Review reports: The internet might seem like a level playing field, but it isn’t. Safiya Umoja Noble came face to face with that fact one day when she used Google’s search engine to look for subjects her nieces might find interesting. She entered the term “black girls” and came back with pages dominated by pornography. Noble was horrified but not surprised. The UCLA communications professor has been arguing for years that the values of the web reflect its…

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Warren Buffett loves Apple because of consumer addiction to the iPhone

Warren Buffett loves Apple because of consumer addiction to the iPhone

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Quartz reports: Warren Buffett told CNBC that Berkshire Hathaway has purchased more shares of Apple than any other stock over the past year. It reflects the famed investor’s belief in Apple’s value as a consumer brand, not unlike Coca-Cola, Berkshire’s fourth-largest US stock holding. (Apple is now the second largest.) Buffett’s take on Apple is striking because it’s seemingly not rooted directly in a view of Apple’s technology, manufacturing, or design prowess. The Berkshire CEO didn’t mention the iPhone X’s…

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The white men seemed like lightning from heaven but their shit smelled just like ours

The white men seemed like lightning from heaven but their shit smelled just like ours

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  Sean Flynn writes: Long after missionaries and Europeans settled on the coast of New Guinea in the 19th century, the mountainous interior remained unexplored. As recently as the 1920s, outsiders believed the mountains, which run the length of the island from east to west, were too steep and rugged for anyone to live there. But when gold was discovered 40 miles inland, prospectors went north across the Coral Sea to seek their fortunes. Among them were three brothers from…

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The first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe

The first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe

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Jennifer Raff writes: Last month’s release of The Ice Bridge, an episode in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series The Nature of Things has once again revived public discussion of a controversial idea about how the Americas were peopled known as the “Solutrean hypothesis”. This idea suggests a European origin for the peoples who made the Clovis tools, the first recognized stone tool tradition in the Americas. As I was one of the experts appearing on the documentary, I want to…

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How Trump conquered Facebook — without Russian ads

How Trump conquered Facebook — without Russian ads

Antonio García Martínez writes: It’s not every day that a former work colleague gets retweeted by the president of the United States. Last Friday, Rob Goldman, a vice president inside Facebook’s Ads team, rather ill-advisedly published a series of tweets that seemed to confirm the Trump administration’s allegations regarding the recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. To wit, the tweets said that the online advertising campaign led by the shadowy Internet Research Agency was meant…

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Allowing teachers to be armed is an asinine idea, says a veteran who’s been shot in combat

Allowing teachers to be armed is an asinine idea, says a veteran who’s been shot in combat

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Matt Martin writes: Someone shooting at you, specifically trying to kill you, is probably the most terrifying life event a person could ever experience. Regardless of training, you don’t know how people will respond in life and death situations until the moment comes. You don’t know how people will react when they hear gunshots. You don’t know how people will react when the person next to them is shot. You don’t know how a person will respond when their task…

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Allegations of sexual misconduct facing celebrity atheist and liberal crusader, Lawrence Krauss

Allegations of sexual misconduct facing celebrity atheist and liberal crusader, Lawrence Krauss

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BuzzFeed reports: When Melody Hensley first met Lawrence Krauss, she was a 29-year-old makeup artist at a department store, and he was one of her intellectual idols. She ran an atheist website in her spare time and had just started volunteering for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a nonprofit group committed to promoting science and reason above faith. She was hoping to build a career in the burgeoning “skeptics” movement, and Krauss was one of its brightest luminaries. At a…

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Blockchain could reshape our world — and the far right is one step ahead

Blockchain could reshape our world — and the far right is one step ahead

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Josh Hall writes: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain reads the title of a 2017 book. From currency speculation through to verifying the provenance of food, blockchain technology is eking out space in a vast range of fields. For most people, blockchain technologies are inseparable from bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has been particularly visible in the news recently thanks to its hyper-volatility. Crypto-entrepreneurs have made and lost millions, and many people have parlayed their trading into a full-time job. But…

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The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think

The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think

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The universal sign for ‘Look over there!’ isn’t so common in some cultures. Helena Ohman/Shutterstock.com By Kensy Cooperrider, University of Chicago Octopuses have long arms and plenty of smarts, but they don’t point. Nor do chimps, gorillas or other apes, at least not in the wild. Humans, on the other hand, are prodigious pointers. Infants use the gesture before they can talk, often around 1 year of age. By 2, they’ll waddle around, their forefingers sweeping over the world like…

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Neanderthals developed art earlier than modern humans

Neanderthals developed art earlier than modern humans

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Carl Zimmer writes: The two new studies don’t just indicate that Neanderthals could make cave art and jewelry. They also establish that Neanderthals were making these things long before modern humans — a blow to the idea that they simply copied their cousins. The earliest known cave paintings made by modern humans are only about 40,000 years old, while Neanderthal cave art is at least 24,000 years older. The oldest known shell jewelry made by modern humans is about 70,000…

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Britain left Stone Age 4,500 years ago as early Britons were replaced by metalworking migrants

Britain left Stone Age 4,500 years ago as early Britons were replaced by metalworking migrants

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BBC News reports: The ancient population of Britain was almost completely replaced by newcomers about 4,500 years ago, a study shows. The findings mean modern Britons trace just a small fraction of their ancestry to the people who built Stonehenge. The astonishing result comes from analysis of DNA extracted from 400 ancient remains across Europe. The mammoth study, published in Nature, suggests the newcomers, known as Beaker people, replaced 90% of the British gene pool in a few hundred years….

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