On My Visit to New Zealand: Can Christchurch Heal Our Collective Wounds? | Ramzy Baroud

Dr. Ramzy BaroudRamzy Baroud -- World News Trust March 25, 2019 I visited the city of Christchurch on May 23, 2018, as part of a larger speaking tour in New Zealand that also took me to Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton and Dunedin. New Zealand is an exceptional country, different from other countries that are often lumped under the generalized designation of the "western world." Almost immediately ...

UN report on global warming carries life-or-death warning | Seth Borenstein

Oct. 8, 2018 (Phys.org) -- Preventing an extra single degree of heat could make a life-or-death difference in the next few decades for multitudes of people and ecosystems on this fast-warming planet, an international panel of scientists reported Sunday. But they provide little hope the world will rise to the challenge. The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its g ...

America and Russia, Part I: Stirrings in the Borderlands | John Michael Greer

Oct. 3, 2018 (EcoSophia.net) -- To my mind, one of the main sources of collective stupidity in modern American society is our pervasive bad habit of short-term thinking. It’s embarrassingly rare for anyone in American public life to stop and say aloud, “Hold it. What’s going to happen if we keep on doing this for more than a few more years?” Now, of course, one of the reasons so few people do thi ...

End of Hegemony: UN Must Reflect Changing World Order | Ramzy Baroud

Dr. Ramzy BaroudRamzy Baroud -- World News Trust Oct. 3, 2018 There is a rational explanation of why India and Brazil, two countries with vast populations and large and growing economies, are not permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The Council -- made up of five permanent and 10 rotating members -- was designed to reflect a world order that was birthed from the horrif ...

Unhealthy lifestyle responsible for 45,000 predicted cases of bowel cancer in next decade | Claire M Vajdic

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Sept. 25, 2018 (MedicalXpress) -- A large proportion of bowel cancers in Australia are preventable by adopting a healthy lifestyle -- particularly for men, a new study shows. A study by researchers from the University of New South Wales' Centre for Big Data Research in Health found that current rates of smoking, overweight and obesity and excessive alcohol consumption co ...

Globally, 1.4 billion adults at risk of disease from lack of physical activity | Regina Guthold

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Sept. 5, 2018 (MedicalXpress) -- More than a quarter (1.4 billion) of the world's adult population were insufficiently active in 2016, putting them at greater risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and some cancers, according to the first study to estimate global physical activity trends over time. The study was undertaken by researchers from the Worl ...

Monotreme and marsupial brain hemispheres communicated before development of corpus callosum | Bob Yirka

White matter fiber architecture of the brain. Credit: Human Connectome Project. Sept. 4, 2018 (Phys.org) -- Mammalian brain hemispheres had a means of communicating long before the development of the corpus callosum, a study suggests. A team of researchers with The University of Queensland conducted mammalian brain studies using MRIs. They published their findings in Proceedings of the National A ...

Quantum weirdness in 'chicken or egg' paradox | Jacqui Romero

Sept. 3, 2018 (Phys.org) -- The "chicken or egg" paradox was first proposed by philosophers in Ancient Greece to describe the problem of determining cause-and-effect. Now, a team of physicists from The University of Queensland and the NÉEL Institute has shown that, as far as quantum physics is concerned, the chicken and the egg can both come first. Dr. Jacqui Romero from the ARC Centre of Excelle ...

New study reveals why women take sexy selfies | Isabelle Dubach

Credit: University of New South Wales Aug. 27, 2018 (Phys.org) -- A new study has revealed the science behind sexy selfies, showing that women tend to sexualize themselves in environments with greater economic inequality, rather than where they might be oppressed because of their gender. In the University of New South Wales study -- published in the prestigious journal PNAS -- the team analyzed t ...

Nuclear Calendar -- August 26, 2018 | FCNL

Nuclear Calendar -- Friends Committee on National Legislation Aug. 26, 2018 Aug. 28 4:30-5:30 p.m., Francis Gavin, Johns Hopkins University, "Rethinking American grand strategy in the age of Trump," Arundel House, 6 Temple Place, London. Register interest online. Aug. 31 Application deadline for GW-NSWG Congressional Nuclear Security Fellowship. Sep. 3 12:30-1:30 p.m., Mark Hibbs, Carnegie Endowm ...

Evaluating creativity in computational co-creative systems | Ingrid Fadelli

Three main trends in creative systems: creativity support tools, fully autonomous systems and co-creative systems. Credit: Karimi et al. Aug. 8, 2018 (TechXplore) -- Computer programs assist humans in a variety of ways, including in their creative endeavors. Researchers at UNC Charlotte and the University of Sydney have recently developed a new framework for evaluating creativity in co-creative s ...