Earth Intelligence – Page 155 – Public Intelligence Blog

This is a very sobering essay. Read this carefully and it will give you information to make informed choices with how a number of chemicals enter your life, or are kept out. Click through to see the many useful graphics that accompany this report.

The Toxins That Threaten Our Brains
JAMES HAMBLIN – The Atlantic

Forty-one million IQ points. That’s what Dr. David Bellinger determined Americans have collectively forfeited as a result of exposure to lead, mercury, and organophosphate pesticides. In a 2012 paper published by the National Institutes of Health, Bellinger, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, compared intelligence quotients among children whose mothers had been exposed to these neurotoxins while pregnant to those who had not. Bellinger calculates a total loss of 16.9 million IQ points due to exposure to organophosphates, the most common pesticides used in agriculture.

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2014/03/242014/03/24

Yoda: Empowering Bacteria — Carefully?

Earth Intelligence

Scientists Tweak Genes to Give Bacteria Electrical Superpowers

By tricking E.coli into incorporating gold nanoparticles or quantum dots into their proteins, the team has crafted biofilms with a range of crazy capabilities. Some conduct electricity. Others build gold nanowires and nanorods. Others still can modify the ways in which quantum dots fluoresce. In other words, by inserting a few key sequences into the bacterial genome, the team has given ordinary bacteria extraordinary capabilities.

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RISE of the LIVING CHAIRS: MIT boffins turn E coli into futuristic material factory

In a few years your chair could be made of a living material, according to a team of MIT boffins who have worked out how to get bacteria to help them manufacture items.

The breakthrough was announced on Sunday in the Synthesis and patterning of tunable multiscale materials with engineered cells academic paper published in academic journal Nature. The research is another step in a new frontier of research that seeks to make the organic world just as programmable as the digital.

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2014/03/232014/03/23

Francis, Jesuit & Pope: Happy, Open, Thinking, Women on His Mind (Need for a Theology of Women)

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Phi Beta Iota: It is increasingly clear that The Most Holy Father Francis, a Jesuit, is likely to be one of the most important voices of this century. This one interview appears to capture the essence of the man, a sinner blessed and chosen by God, to help us all discern and then carry out God's will. We are taking the liberty of reprinting the entire interview to encourage a full reading, so many of our visitor's being reluctant to click through to unknown sites.

A Big Heart Open to God

The exclusive interview with Pope Francis

Antonio Spadar, S. J.

America, 30 September 2013

Editor’s Note: This interview with Pope Francis took place over the course of three meetings during August 2013 in Rome. The interview was conducted in person by Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal. Father Spadaro conducted the interview on behalf of La Civiltà Cattolica, America and several other major Jesuit journals around the world. The editorial teams at each of the journals prepared questions and sent them to Father Spadaro, who then consolidated and organized them. The interview was conducted in Italian. After the Italian text was officially approved, America commissioned a team of five independent experts to translate it into English. America is solely responsible for the accuracy of this translation.

Father Spadaro met the pope at the Vatican in the pope’s apartments in the Casa Santa Marta, where he has chosen to live since his election. Father Spadaro begins his account of the interview with a description of the pope’s living quarters.

Continue reading “Francis, Jesuit & Pope: Happy, Open, Thinking, Women on His Mind (Need for a Theology of Women)”

2014/03/232014/03/23

SchwartzReport: DNA = Mugshot

Advanced Cyber/IO, Earth Intelligence, Law Enforcement

This, wedded to the surveillance state is going to have a huge effect on society. It will become very difficult to evade arrest as the two technologies develop, and that will have an impact on people's behavior. This is a game changer. Click through to see the reconstructions and photos of the actual people. Amazing.

Genetic Mugshot Recreates Faces From Nothing But DNA
PETER ALDHOUS – Slate/New Scientist (U.K.)

2014/03/212014/03/21

Berto Jongman: 2014 State of the Future

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

The “State of the Future” is a comprehensive annual overview of the present global situation and prospects for humanity. It integrates forecasts, trends, and judgments of thought leaders and scholars from around the world, sharing important future possibilities to improve strategies today. Led by Jerome Glenn, the Millenium Project sponsors this collective intelligence endeavor.

Good and bad news

The report shows that the world is improving more than most pessimists realize. For example:

People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, increasingly connected, and living longer.
Child mortality rate has dropped 47% since 1990, extreme poverty in the developing world fell from 50% in 1981 to 21% in 2010, primary school completion rates grew from 81% in 1990 to 91% in 2011, only one transborder war occurred in 2013.
Nearly 40% of humanity is connected via the Internet, and life expectancy has increased 10 years over the past 20 years to reach 70.5 years today.

However, the report also warns that water tables are falling on all continents, intrastate conflicts and refugees are increasing, glaciers are melting, income gaps are increasingly obscene, coral reefs are dying, ocean acidity is increasing, ocean dead zones have doubled every decade since the 1960s, half the world’s topsoil is destroyed, youth unemployment has reached dangerous proportions, traffic jams and air pollution are strangling cities, $1–1.6 billion annually is paid in bribes, organized crime gets twice the money per year than all the military budgets combined, and half the world is potentially unstable.

Situation overview and prospects

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: 2014 State of the Future”

2014/03/212014/03/21

Jean Lievens: Berlin “Borrowing Shop” or Library of Things Surges in Popularity

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Berlin ‘borrowing shop' promotes the benefits of sharing

Leila project, billed as a ‘library of things', has proved so popular it has spawned similar initiatives across the country

The most popular items in Berlin's first “borrowing shop” are the electric drills. At least one of the local people who have registered with Leila – a little shop on Fehrbelliner Strasse, north-east of the city centre – seems to be continually fixing shelves or hanging pictures.

But it's not worth buying that person their own tools, said founder Nikolai Wolfert. “The average electric drill is used for 13 minutes in its entire lifetime – how does it make sense to buy something like that? It's much more efficient to share it.”

Wolfert, 31, came up with the idea for Leila after the Green party failed to win the 2011 Berlin elections and he started looking for ways of doing politics at a more local level. Four hundred residents have signed up to the project, which he says is less a charity shop than a “library of things”.

Members can borrow anything from board games to wine glasses, fog machines to hiking rucksacks, juicers to unicycles. All they need to do to become members is drop off an item of their own. “This is not just about doing charity out of magnanimity – the shop makes sense because it's more efficient,” Wolfert said. “We think in a decentralised way – that's how the big supermarket chains think too.”

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2014/03/21