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    In the summer of 2014, Markie Miller discovered she’d been drinking toxic coffee. Miller lives in Toledo, Ohio, where fertilizer runoff from farms had caused blooms of toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Erie, her water supply. The city issued an alert at 2 am, but by the time Miller saw it she’d already been sipping her morning drink.

    Miller started meeting with other residents to figure out how to protect their water. But what to do? You could sue a polluter (for polluting) or a government agency (for neglecting its regulatory duties), but even if you won, the damages would be too small to be an impediment. You could assemble a class action suit of hurt residents, but that’s a ponderous and uncertain process. The real problem, of course, was that the lake itself was polluted — and individuals can’t sue over that. In the eyes of the law, they don’t have “standing.” That’s when one activist raised an idea: What if the lake itself had standing? What if the citizens of Toledo passed a law giving it legal rights?

    The idea of giving personhood to nature has been slowly gaining supporters. Environmentalists have encouraged governments and courts to award rights to lakes, hills, rivers, and even individual species of plants.

    As intrigued as I am by the idea of mountains suing mining companies, though, I’m not sure the rights of nature will hold up in US courts. Corporations are against it. Even some indigenous thinkers aren’t keen on the idea, arguing that these new laws could infringe their treaty rights. And there’s some hubris here too. How do we humans know what nature wants or if it cares if humans survive?

    Still, I think the approach is worth trying. The climate crisis is fully main stage, with California burning and Florida drowning. If we’re going to forestall worse to come, we need innovation not just in tech — more clean energy, resilient cities, genetically modified crops that need less fertilizer — but in law, the rule sets that architect our behavior.

    The deep value of the personhood movement isn’t merely legal. It’s cultural. We’ve spent generations regarding the wilderness as a bottomless box of tissues, to be used and discarded at will. So we need a better way of talking about hills and forests and oceans; we need to see them with fresh eyes. Indigenous wisdom got this right, millennia ago. If we’re going to control our abuse of nature, we need to see it as our equal.

(Clive Thompson. www.wired.com, 17.12.2019. Adaptado.)

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Brazil National Museum: as much as 90% of collection destroyed in fire

Building was not insured, the museum’s deputy director said, but some pieces survived including the Bendegó meteorite.

As much as 90% of the collection at Brazil’s National Museum was destroyed in a devastating fire on Sunday and – compounding the disaster – the building was not insured, according to the museum’s deputy director.

Some pieces survived, including the famous Bendegó meteorite and a library of 500,000 books – including works dating back to the days of the Portuguese empire – which was kept in a separate annex, Cristiana Serejo told reporters in front of the building’s blackened shell.

But it was still not possible to say how much of the collection had escaped the flames, Serejo said. “It could be 10%, it could be 15, it could be 20,” she said. “We had a very big loss.”

The museum’s Egyptology collection was completely destroyed, Serejo said.

Researchers who were able to enter one area of the building in Rio de Janeiro are starting to catalogue what little is left, said Serejo, who appealed to members of the public to return any items they found. Asked if the museum was insured, she screwed up her face in mock anguish, and shook her head. “I hope we learn from this,” she said. “Other public buildings are in the same situation.”

Disponível em: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/04/brazil-national-museum-fire-collection-destroyed-notinsured> Acesso em 07 set. 2018 (Adaptado)

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Does a lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives?

    Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. And a new study says that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things.
    Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet and is believed to be in about 50% of products found in supermarkets and shops. It is important for lipstick for example because it holds colour well, has no taste and doesn’t melt at high temperatures. It’s found in shampoos, soaps, ice cream and instant noodles amongst thousands of others.
    Over the past 20 years, growing demand has seen thousands of hectares of old, tropical forests chopped down to make way for the oily palm tree plantations. But these forests are home to some of the most threatened species in the world, including the orangutan. “Orangutans are a lowland species on Bornean Sumatra and that’s where palm oil is grown. The two often clash, palm oil displaces orangutans, they are pushed into gardens where they generate conflicts with locals and that’s where you get the killings. They are incredibly versatile, but what an orangutan can’t deal with is killing. Because they are such slow breeding species, the killing has a really big impact”, the report’s lead author Erik Meijaard, told BBC News.
    Palm makes up 35% of the world’s vegetable oil supply but only takes up 10% of the world’s land allocated to producing the greasy stuff. To replace it with rapeseed, soy or sunflower seed oil would take far larger amounts of land, in fact up to nine times the amount needed for palm. It’s likely that such a move would see a displacement of diversity loss, with many more species in different places under threat. “If palm oil didn’t exist you would still have the same global demand for vegetable oil,” said Erik Meijaard.

(Matt McGrath. www.bbc.com, 26.06.2018. Adaptado.)

TEXTO:

    While virtually all activity, from yoga to sleeping,
requires energy, studies suggest vigorous exercise is
especially effective at burning calories. Seems obvious,
right? But it’s not just during exercise, it’s for hours after
[5] it’s concluded. And that’s where things get interesting.
    The so-called “afterburn effect” is more officially
known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption or
simply, EPOC. And it isn’t new in the world of
fitness. Several studies suggest there’s a strong
[10] correlation between the number of calories burned post
exercise and the activity’s intensity. Simply put: The
more intense the exercise, the more oxygen your body
consumes afterward.
    In one study conducted with participants who
[15] had metabolic syndrome, EPOC also had significant
positive effects—meaning this type of training could be
especially useful in combating certain health issues,
like obesity and diabetes.
    And while one study showed that your afterburn
[20] will increase significantly with duration (i.e. the longer
and more intense your workout, the more you’ll burn),
you don’t necessarily have to work out for a long time
to stimulate the effect.That’s where short, high-intensity
workouts come into play. For example, training protocols
[25] like Tabata, where 20 seconds of all-out effort is followed
by 10 seconds of rest, are one way to trigger the
afterburn; other high-intensity interval workouts
(or HIIT routines) can also get you there. The key with
any of these programs is that you need to be working
[30] hard.
    And you don’t need to stick to traditional cardio in
order to achieve an EPOC effect. Several studies have
shown that weight training with various types of
equipment can also elicit elevated EPOC—and may
[35] even be more effective than cardio training in certain
scenarios. But keep in mind: You shouldn’t engage in
this style of training more than about two to three times
per week on non-consecutive days.

TAO, David. Disponível em: https://greatist.com/fitness/afterburneffect-keep-burning-calories-after-workout. Acesso: 1 nov. 2018. Adaptado.

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How to fix inequality

Introduction

    In an age of widening inequality, the Stanford professor Walter Scheidel believes he has cracked the code on how to overcome it in his book “The Great Leveler”. The Economist’s Open Future initiative asked Mr Scheidel to reply to a number of questions.

    1. The Economist: Is society incapable of tackling income inequality peacefully?

    Walter Scheidel: No, but history shows that there are limits. There is a big difference between maintaining existing arrangements that successfully check inequality — Scandinavia is a good example — and significantly reducing it. The latter requires real change and that is always much harder to do: think of America or Britain, not to mention Brazil, China or India. The modern welfare state does a reasonably good job of compensating for inequality before taxes and transfers. However, for more substantial levelling to occur, the established order needs to be shaken up: the greater the shock to the system, the easier it becomes to reduce privilege at the top.

    2. The Economist: Are we really living in an implacable period of wealth inequality — or was the relatively equal society that followed the Second World War the real aberration?

    Walter Scheidel: When we view history over the long run, we can see that this experience was certainly a novelty. We now know that modernisation as such does not reliably reduce inequality. Many things had to come together to make this happen, such as very high income and estate taxes, strong labour unions, and intrusive regulations and controls. Since the 1980s, liberalisation and globalisation have allowed inequality to rise again. Even so, wealth concentration in Europe is nowhere near as high as it was a century ago. Like Europe, America, meanwhile, is getting there — which shows that it all depends on where you look.

    3. The Economist: How do artificial intelligence and automation fit in to your thinking? Will they be a calamity for employment and thus for equality? Or might they unleash extraordinary productivity and improvements in living standards that actually narrow inequality?

    Walter Scheidel: Ideally, we would like education to keep up with technological change to make sure workers have the skills they need to face this challenge. But in practice, there will always be losers, and even basic-income schemes can take us only so far. At the end of the day, someone owns the robots. As long as the capitalist world system is in place, it is hard to see how even huge productivity gains from greater automation would benefit society evenly instead of funnelling even more income and wealth to those who are in the best position to pocket these gains.

(The Economist. http://bit.do/eysic. Adaptado)

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Tiny viruses live in your body: what to know about viromes and what scientists are doing to protect you

  Wildlife biologists have enlisted the help of mice and other creatures as they try to better understand how viruses infect humans and how to protect them. “Most of the emerging infectious diseases that arise come from wildlife reservoir hosts,” researcher Kurt Vandegrift said in a statement from Pennsylvania State University. The university added, “One key to fighting emerging diseases is finding out before they get into humans which pathogens we’re most likely to encounter — the ones that are carried by the wild creatures we’re most likely to touch, share space with, or be bitten by.” In the U.S., that includes mice and deer ticks, for example. 

  While studying wildlife, the scientists may find viruses that could one day evolve to infect humans. Discovering them ahead of time gives experts a leg up on observing how the viruses work, creating vaccines or taking other measures. Studying animals has another benefit: learning more about their viromes — the collections of viruses in and on them — could lead to more information about the human virome. 

  Human beings are full of viruses, Penn State says. “Some of your viruses are just visiting and will be gone in a week. Most are permanent tenants. A few may even find their way into your DNA.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the university notes that we owe our placenta and thus our reproductive process to virus genes and evolution. We can also be invaded by a virus but never see an infection, or become barely sick at all while others are debilitated. 

  “We are rarely, if ever, infected by just one germ at a time,” according to Penn State, “and since pathogens change your immune system, how sick you get from a new pathogen doesn’t depend only on the ones you’re infected with now; it’s a reflection of all the infectious diseases you’ve ever had, and even in what order you had them.” The ongoing research would not be the first time animals have taught scientists a thing or two about viruses. Smallpox is now eradicated but was once a highly contagious and often deadly virus in humans. 

(Elana Glowatz. www.medicaldaily.com, 10.02.2017. Adaptado.)