Why most of the world’s oil needs to stay in the ground

Why most of the world’s oil needs to stay in the ground

The Guardian reports: The vast majority of fossil fuel reserves owned today by countries and companies must remain in the ground if the climate crisis is to be ended, an analysis has found. The research found 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves could not be extracted if there was to be even a 50% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C, the temperature beyond which the worst climate impacts hit. The scientific study is the first…

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Can an omnipresent virus be turned into a manageable risk?

Can an omnipresent virus be turned into a manageable risk?

Scott Gottlieb writes: This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the virus doesn’t mean it’s finished with us. In our large, open, and globally connected society, getting to zero COVID, the goal that Australia and New Zealand have pursued, is as politically unrealistic as it is biologically implausible. Americans are…

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Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

The New York Times reports: More than three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook trumpeted a plan to share data with researchers about how people interacted with posts and links on the social network, so that the academics could study misinformation on the site. Researchers have used the data for the past two years for numerous studies examining the spread of false and misleading information. But the information shared by Facebook had a major flaw, according to internal emails and…

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On the evidence for fungal intelligence

On the evidence for fungal intelligence

Nicholas P Money writes: Mushrooms and other kinds of fungi are often associated with witchcraft and are the subjects of longstanding superstitions. Witches dance inside fairy rings of mushrooms according to German folklore, while a French fable warns that anyone foolish enough to step inside these ‘sorcerer’s rings’ will be cursed by enormous toads with bulging eyes. These impressions come from the poisonous and psychoactive peculiarities of some species, as well as the overnight appearance of toadstool ring-formations. Given the…

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The easy part of the hard problem of consciousness

The easy part of the hard problem of consciousness

Tam Hunt writes: How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren’t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make up what’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness, coined some years ago by the philosopher David Chalmers. There is no widely accepted solution to this. But, fortunately, we can break the problem down: If we can tackle what you might call the easy part of the hard problem, then…

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The war on terrorism — the greatest failure in American history

The war on terrorism — the greatest failure in American history

Dylan Matthews writes: There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including…

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‘Righteous’ drone strike in Kabul killed aid worker and seven children, investigation finds

‘Righteous’ drone strike in Kabul killed aid worker and seven children, investigation finds

  The New York Times reports: It was the last known missile fired by the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the military called it a “righteous strike” — a drone attack after hours of surveillance on Aug. 29 against a vehicle that American officials thought contained an ISIS bomb and posed an imminent threat to troops at Kabul’s airport. But a New York Times investigation of video evidence, along with interviews with more than a dozen…

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How mass killings by U.S. forces after 9/11 boosted support for the Taliban

How mass killings by U.S. forces after 9/11 boosted support for the Taliban

The Guardian reports: The men of Zangabad village, Panjwai district lined up on the eve of 11 September to count and remember their dead, the dozens of relatives who they say were killed at the hands of the foreign forces that first appeared in their midst nearly 20 years ago. Their cluster of mud houses, fields and pomegranate orchards was the site of perhaps the most notorious massacre of the war, when US SSgt Robert Bales walked out of a…

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9/11 made the media whitewash what really happened in Bush v. Gore

9/11 made the media whitewash what really happened in Bush v. Gore

Jonathan Chait writes: By now nearly everybody, with the exception of a handful of Bush administration leftovers, understands that the September 11 attacks induced some form of mass psychosis into the American polity. The contours of this understanding vary. Nearly everybody now agrees that the post-9/11 impulse to divide the world into a Manichaean contest between Islamic terrorism and democracy was tragically misguided. A smaller group of Americans understands that the rally-around-the-flag atmosphere canonized and empowered a series of deeply…

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Biden vaccine mandate raises longstanding legal questions, experts say

Biden vaccine mandate raises longstanding legal questions, experts say

USA Today reports: Throughout the pandemic, public health experts have frequently pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts to justify state vaccine mandates. But experts say that case is unlikely to have much influence over the legal challenges raised to the new Biden administration policy. Henning Jacobson, a pastor from Cambridge, Mass., refused a smallpox vaccination during an outbreak of the disease in 1905, citing bad reactions he had to shots in the past. He was…

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Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be authorized for children aged 5-11 but may pose risk for boys

Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be authorized for children aged 5-11 but may pose risk for boys

The Guardian reports: Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim. Their analysis of medical data suggests that boys aged 12 to 15, with no underlying medical conditions, are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid over a four-month period. Most children who…

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In speech taking on Trump, Christie calls on Republicans to renounce conspiracy theories and discredit extremists ‘in our midst’

In speech taking on Trump, Christie calls on Republicans to renounce conspiracy theories and discredit extremists ‘in our midst’

CBS News reports: Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who was once a close adviser to former President Trump, told Republicans gathered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Thursday evening that the party must “face the realities of the 2020 election,” discredit the “extremists in our midst” and “renounce the conspiracy theories.” While Mr. Trump remains popular among a significant segment of Republicans not yet weary of his false claims of election fraud, Christie addressed those who are. “We need…

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The wealth lobby is buying up Democrats to defeat Biden’s tax reform

The wealth lobby is buying up Democrats to defeat Biden’s tax reform

Jonathan Chait writes: Last week, Democratic senator turned anti-tax lobbyist Heidi Heitkamp, who represented North Dakota for one term before losing in 2018, appeared on CNBC to make a surprisingly emotional appeal against President Biden’s plan to close a notorious loophole for the wealthy. The loophole, called “stepped-up basis” or “the angel-of-death loophole,” allows capital gains to escape any tax at all as long as the owners pass the asset on to their heirs before they sell it. Heitkamp’s thoughts…

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The California recall could be a road map for Democrats

The California recall could be a road map for Democrats

Ronald Brownstein writes: California Governor Gavin Newsom is confronting the toughest challenge Democrats may face in next year’s midterm election—and guiding his party toward a possible solution as the Republican-driven recall against him enters its final days. One key reason the president’s party historically fares so poorly in midterm elections is that its supporters turn out at lower rates than voters of the party not in the White House. Polling earlier this summer showed that Newsom faced an especially acute…

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