UC Berkeley researchers have discovered a new way to switch the polarization of nanomagnets, paving the way for
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Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan by F. H. King (Dover, \$17). This book, first published in 1911, is an account of King’s studies of the enduring small peasant farms of three Asian countries. How did the people keep their land productive for 4,000 years? By returning all "wastes" to the soil, leaving the fertility cycle intact.
Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith (Island Press, \$60). Published in 1929, Tree Crops confronts the error we made when we "carried to the hills the agriculture of the flat plain." This is another "travel book": Smith, a Columbia University geographer, seeks and finds better ways to interact with the land.
An Agricultural Testament by Sir Albert Howard (Benediction, \$23). Published in 1943, this is one of the major books written by Howard, a British scientist who worked in India for decades. It argues, rightly, that farming can be made to last only by obeying the laws and incorporating the systems of nature. "Mother Earth never attempts to farm without livestock," Howard wrote. "There is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another."
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (Ballantine, \$8). Leopold’s masterwork, posthumously published in 1949, begins with close observation of the plant and animal life on the author’s Wisconsin farm and then expands across North America. The book ultimately proposes a "land ethic" by which a human society might live in harmony with the biotic community.
Home Place: Essays on Ecology by Stan Rowe (NeWest Press, \$20). This book insists upon the importance of the ecosphere (not the biosphere, a term that refers only to the living environment) as the inescapable context of our life. Rowe wrote that we should "live on the annual interest and leave the land’s capital alone."
Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson (Counterpoint, \$17). A scientist and advocate, Wes Jackson is fully and honorably the heir of the foregoing five writers. This 2011 book addresses "the problem of agriculture" and the prospects for practical solutions.
—Wendell Berry’s newest essay collection, Our Only World, makes an urgent plea for an end to destructive land use practices.
Research into recreational drugs still carries a bad rap, following the anti-drug crusades of the Reagan years and beyond. But such research may be one of the most important scientific investigations happening today.
Here's why: the most popular recreational drugs, particularly alcohol, are atrocious. If pharmaceutical chemists could invent a less toxic replacement for alcohol, the social benefits could be enormous.
Despite the common phrase "drugs and alcohol," which seems to imply that alcohol is merely in a related category, alcohol is definitely a drug. Indeed, as Mark Kleiman writes, alcohol is more like the ur-drug: the oldest, most common, and most widely abused drug in the world.
It's also very often terrible. It can be extremely hard on the body. Heavy long-term use damages practically every organ, especially the heart, the brain, and the liver. Chronic overuse can cause slew of different kinds of brain damage; severe memory loss; cardiovascular disease and strokes; cirrhosis of the liver; cancer of the mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, liver, colon, and breast; high blood pressure; pancreatitis; and dozens of other problems.
Contrast that with another hard drug, heroin. Though heroin is very addictive, and a lot easier to overdose on, long-term use is largely non-toxic to the body (setting aside the risk of contaminants). Even its infamous withdrawal is not as bad. Indeed, alcohol withdrawals are perhaps the worst of any drug, with the possible exception of some benzodiazepines. Heroin withdrawal is excruciating, but severe alcoholics in withdrawal often simply die of seizures or delirium tremens.
Roughly 18 million Americans have an alcohol use disorder, and about half the country has a close family member with a current or previous alcohol addiction.
Something like a third of convicted people in jail or prison were drinking when they committed their crime, and nearly 40 percent of violent criminals. Two-thirds of domestic violence victims report alcohol was involved. That doesn't necessarily mean all those crimes would not have happened without alcohol, but given its effects on impulse control, it's safe to say it was a big factor.
Worldwide in 2012, according to the World Health Organization, alcohol caused 3.3 million deaths, or 5.9 percent of the total. But alcohol was responsible for about a quarter of all deaths among people aged 20 to 39. In the U.S., alcohol accounts for almost 90,000 deaths yearly; it is the third-place finisher among causes of preventable death.
Alcohol also has many benefits. In minor doses it has some protective effects on the cardiovascular system, and may reduce the risk of kidney stones and gallstones.
Its primary benefits are probably social, however. Alcohol lubricates gatherings. Loosened inhibitions help people strike up conversations and become friends. Dedicated communities get great pleasure out of the complex flavors of scotch, beer, wine, and other drinks. And as I will be the first to testify, a nice buzz feels pretty good! I am certainly not in favor of reinstating full-scale prohibition.
But that brings us to the question: would it be possible to discover another drug with similar properties to alcohol, but without its toxic side effects? Dr. David Nutt is working on that question right now. Like the famed drug chemist Alexander Shulgin, who developed more than 200 new psychedelic drugs, Nutt has filed for patents on some 85 different compounds, and claims to have a new one called "alcosynth" that mimics alcohol's buzz without the long-term damage. He's got another that can apparently help people sober up quickly and prevent hangovers.
Of course, any new drug needs extensive study before it could possibly be used on a wide scale. And as we've seen with alcohol or tobacco, setting up a giant profitable industry dedicated to pushing drugs on people is highly problematic. As with marijuana, stiff regulations to deliberately keep such a business small and inefficient would be a good start. The idea would be to make it cheap and available enough to stop a black market from developing, but only just barely, as cheap drugs enable addiction.
But as I argued with respect to MDMA and psychedelics, alcohol replacement is some of the lowest-hanging scientific fruit out there. Dr. Nutt is currently looking for funding to do studies on his new drugs; private foundations and governments everywhere should pony up the cash, and look for more candidates. And while there will undoubtedly be some risk involved, it's important to remember that our current situation is already very bad, with millions of people suffering and dying. A replacement drug doesn't have to be a miracle drug — just better than booze.
After years of uninterrupted success, wind power experienced a bit of a pause around the start of this decade. Prices for hardware reversed a decline and bounced upwards slightly, with installations dropping accordingly. But a new report from the Department of Energy shows that this bounce is now over. The price paid for wind-generated electricity has now reached an all-time low, and construction is bouncing back. Still, regulatory uncertainty may now be creating a boom/bust cycle for wind.
The report starts by reviewing the size of the wind market in the US. In 2014, it represented a quarter of the new additions to the US' generating capacity, a bit down from the average of 2007-2014, when it represented a third. Just under five GigaWatts were installed by the US, placing it third, and well behind China's 23GW. China now has nearly doubled the US 66GW of cumulative capacity.
Because of the US' excellent wind resources, however, it led the world in generating electricity last year. As a percentage of a country's total electricity generated by wind, the US ranked 15th, at roughly five percent. There are sharp regional differences however, with nine states generating more than double that percentage of their electricity using wind, led by Iowa, which generated 29 percent of its energy from the air.
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This dramatic outburst from the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko occured on August 12, just hours before perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. Completing an orbit of the Sun once every 6.45 years, perihelion distance for this periodic comet is about 1.3 astronomical units (AU), still outside the orbit of planet Earth (at 1 AU). The stark image of the 4 kilometer wide, double-lobed nucleus in bright sunlight and dark shadows was taken by the Rosetta spacecraft's science camera about 325 kilometers away. Too close to see the comet's growing tail, Rosetta maintains its ringside seat to watch the nucleus warm and become more active in coming weeks, as primordial ices sublimating from the surface produce jets of gas and dust. Of course, dust from the nucleus of periodic comet Swift-Tuttle, whose last perihelion passage was in 1992 at a distance of 0.96 AU, fell to Earth just this week.A multitude of professional drivers suffer from back problems. One cause: driver seats that are inadequately adjusted to
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