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Science and Technology

World Water Day. Innovations largely ignored?

Water scarcity and contamination has been recognised as a serious problem for many years. It kills people, starts wars and drives unspeakable inequality. Corporations steal water from unprotected people to produce expensive drinks or mine polluting coal. The UN has…

Benefits & risks of artificial intelligence

“Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before – as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial.” Max…

Female circumcision governor of ‘appropriate’ female sexual behaviour in the USA!

FGM in the USA – a forgotten phenomenon: an interview with Sarah Rodriguez By Milena Rampoldi, ProMosaik e.V. Female Circumcision and clitoridectomy were a quite common practice in the United States during 150 years. So FGM is not just an…

Hoovering up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

A gyre in oceanography is any large system of rotating ocean current, particularly those involved with large wind movements. Gyres are caused by the Coriolis effect; planetary spin or vorticity along with horizontal and vertical friction causing drag, that determines…

Apple vs. the FBI

Inside the Battle Snowden Calls “The Most Important Tech Case in a Decade” A major debate over privacy and online encryption has erupted after the computer giant Apple announced it will resist a court order to help the FBI break…

Argentine Social Movements Strike Back Against Monsanto

The biotechnology giant continues attempts to build its GMO seeds plant in Argentina, despite three years of unflinching popular opposition. The world’s largest GMO corporation never imagined that it would suffer one of its major setbacks in a small, rural…

Purpose in Life protects from cognitive decline

A study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2012 has just been widely reported. Its title: “Effect of Purpose in Life [PIL]on the Relation Between Alzheimer Disease Pathologic Changes on Cognitive Function in Advanced Age” The study defines…

Prof. Hawking and the machines. Hopes, fears and possible misconceptions

“Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human…

Of Democracy and Climate – Two Lessons from Paris

Human Wrongs Watch By Roberto Savio* Rome, 17 December 2015 In the space of just a few days, two fundamental lessons have come from Paris for the world about democracy and climate. The media have been dealing with them as…

1915-2015. How Einstein changed the way we understand the world 100 years ago

Clocks run faster the higher you go. This is called gravitational time dilation. Orbits precess in a way unexpected in Newton’s theory of gravity. (This has been observed in the orbit of Mercury and in binary pulsars). Rays of light…

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