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In Startling Reversal, Scientific American Counsels People to ‘Chill Out’ over Global Warming


 

Apocalyptic scenarios attributed to global warming are simply false and the human race will be able to accommodate whatever “climate change” throws at us, claims a remarkably sober new essay in Scientific American.

 

By Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.
Breitbart.com

The essay, penned by John Horgan, the director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, analyzes two recent reports by “ecomodernists” who reject climate panic and frame the question of climate change and humanity’s ability to cope with it in radically new terms.

One of the reports, a work called “Enlightened Environmentalism” by Harvard iconoclast Steven Pinker, urges people to regain some much-needed perspective on climate, especially in the context of the overwhelming material benefits of industrialization.

Pooh-poohing “the mainstream environmental movement, and the radicalism and fatalism it encourages,” Pinker argues that humanity can solve problems related to climate change the same way it has solved myriad other problems, by harnessing “the benevolent forces of modernity.”

Separating himself from environmentalists who seem to detest modernity, Pinker asserts that industrialization “has been good for humanity.”

“It has fed billions, doubled lifespans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children. It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts,” he says.

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And just as human ingenuity has allowed us to overcome countless obstacles in the past, he notes, it is more than reasonable to suppose it will do so in the future as well.

The second report put forward by Horgan is a recent article by Will Boisvert titled “The Conquest of Climate,” which contends that the “consequences for human well-being will be small” even if human greenhouse emissions significantly warm the planet.

Boisvert, who has been described as a “left-wing environmental expert, is no “climate denier,” yet he calls for climate alarmists to take a deep breath and step back from doomsday forecasts that likely have little to do with what will actually take place in the future.

As an example, the author pokes fun at a 2016 Newsweek article announcing that “Climate change could cause half a million deaths in 2050 due to reduced food availability.”

The story, based on a Lancet study, made dire forecasts regarding the effects of climate change on agriculture, while failing to note that the study actually predicts much more abundant food availability in 2050 thanks to advances in agricultural productivity. These advances will “dwarf the effects of climate change,” he contends, and the “poorest countries will benefit most.”

Like Pinkers, Boisvert tries to factor in what climate alarmists ignore: the capability of human beings to react to changing scenarios in remarkably ingenious ways.

“Throughout history humans not only weathered climate crises but deliberately flung ourselves into them as we migrated away from our African homeland into deserts, mountains, floodplains and taiga,” he writes, before embarking on an excursus into the striking cleverness of the Inuit in adapting to a hostile environment.

The current climate change “crisis” that has ecologists’ knickers in a knot, just isn’t that big a deal, he argues. It is merely the “latest episode in humanity’s ongoing conquest of extreme climates,” which will likewise “amount to just another problem in economic and technological development, and a middling-scale one at that.”

While climate skeptics will welcome this gust of common sense wafting in from the Scientific American, establishment climate alarmists will undoubtedly seek to quash the news, knowing it could affect not only the funding they depend on, but the ideologically driven political programs they seek to impose on the world.

After all, if the world is not under imminent peril from climate change, who will listen to—and fund—the prophets of doom?

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Video: Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Is Not A Pollutant

It is in fact the breath of life


Short video on experiments that prove CO2 is not a pollutant and climate alarmists would have you believe.  It is in fact "the breath of life."

 

 
 
 
 
 
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Video: Most People Don't Even Realize What's Coming


Will you get lost in the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Most people I asked don't even know what that is, but it's happening all around us right now. This system is about technological evolution... evolving us.

 

 
 
 
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Scientists Say They Have Created the Closest Thing To A New Life Form


Editor's Note: This stuff is just crazy. These people have ZERO idea what damage this can do to all life on this planet. We already have massive health problems caused by GMOs.

 

  • Scientists say two new, laboratory-built ‘letters’ can survive harmoniously alongside the natural alphabet of DNA in a cell.
  • They hope this new artificial pair of amino acids will eventually help them invent drugs that last longer and work better.
  • Their results were published online in the journal Nature.  
Scientists have just built the first fully-functioning, artificial instruction system for creating new matter inside living cells — a find that could one day make it possible to create more precise, effective, and longer-lasting drugs.

The duo of synthetic ‘X’ and ‘Y’ bases, created at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California, can integrate seamlessly into the DNA of E. coli, and function inside of a living cell. These tiny amino acids are distinct from our own 'A-T' (adenine – thymine) and 'G-C' (guanine – cytosine) pairs — the amino acids that combine and form the basis for all genetic information in the natural world.

“I would not call this a new lifeform — but it’s the closest thing anyone has ever made,” TSRI Professor Floyd Romesberg, who led the research, wrote in a release.

He said it’s like our genetic "alphabet" only had four vowels, and now, we’ve added two more artificial letters into the mix — and with them, the ability to make whole new sounds and words that we would have never encountered in the natural world.

Romesberg told Business Insider that perhaps the most remarkable thing about the artificial X-Y pair is that it can co-exist alongside natural DNA pairs. And from the cellular level, they function just like those natural pairs: retrieving information and pumping out proteins — the materials we use for making new cells and building life.The researchers hope this means that one day, the artificially-made amino acids could be used to create new kinds of targeted drugs for humans that have fewer side effects, work more effectively, or last longer. 

This is something Romesberg has been working on since 2014, when he co-founded biotechnology company Synthorx, which he created to engineer new kinds of drugs. Back then, his team was able to store X-Y pairs in a cell, but didn’t yet know how to retrieve the information inside them and create new proteins. After much trial and error, the team figured out how to do all that, pumping out artificial proteins that could be used to generate new drugs.

But the discovery is incremental. Because these new letters are synthetic, “the cell can't grow if we don't provide them,” Romesberg said. That's both good news and bad news. It makes the find less scary, because there’s no chance that these X’s and Y’s could escape the cell, going off and multiplying on their own outside.

But it also means the X's and Y's always have to be manufactured by scientists. So while these new letters might help us make some new genetic "words," they're not quite like natural life. 

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Video: Lifelike Animatronic Abraham Lincoln!


This incredibly lifelike animatronic Abraham Lincoln is the work of Garner Holt Productions, which has been making robots for theme parks, museums, and other attractions for 40 years. We get up close to this robot and chat with its creator, Garner Holt, about the state of animatronics you see in places like Disneyland and what's to come.
 

 
 
 
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Expanding DNA's Alphabet Lets Cells Produce Novel Proteins


Editor's Note: This stuff is insane. MAN-MADE DNA!? It's a fact that allergies and other ailments have exploded because of GMOs which which have been genetically altered rendering natural food unrecognizable by our digestive systems. So let's create more adulterated things on the level of DNA that will reek havoc in the natural world.

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists are expanding the genetic code of life, using man-made DNA to create a semi-synthetic strain of bacteria — and new research shows those altered microbes actually worked to produce proteins unlike those found in nature.

It's a step toward designer drug development.

One of the first lessons in high school biology: All life is made up of four DNA building blocks known by the letters A, T, C and G. Paired together, they form DNA's ladder-like rungs. Now there's a new rung on that ladder.

A team at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, expanded the genetic alphabet, creating two artificial DNA "letters" called X and Y. A few years ago, the researchers brewed up a type of E. coli bacteria commonly used for lab research that contained both natural DNA and this new artificial base pair — storing extra genetic information inside cells.

The next challenge: Normal DNA contains the coding for cells to form proteins that do the work of life. Could cells carrying this weird genomic hybrid work the same way?

Sure enough, the altered cells glowed green as they produced a fluorescent protein containing unnatural amino acids, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"We can make proteins that are built of more things than they normally are," explained Scripps chemist Floyd Romesberg, who leads the project.

While programming the green germs offered evidence that the approach can work, eventually "we would like to get proteins that do new things," he said.

That's an ultimate goal in the field of synthetic biology — designing organisms that work differently from the way nature intended so scientists can harness them to create designer drugs, biofuels or a range of other products. Scripps' technology has been licensed by a biotech company Romesberg co-founded, Synthorx Inc., that aims to make novel protein-based drugs.

The new work traced the biological steps as the altered E. coli read the artificial genetic code and assembled the pieces for a new protein, with the same efficiency as if using normal DNA.

The result is a platform that offers a way to increase the diversity of proteins made inside living cells, said Jef Boeke, a synthetic biology researcher at New York University who wasn't involved in Scripps' work.

This bacterial strain was "modified in a really dramatic and unusual way at these positions in its genome," Boeke said. "And that's what makes it different from every other organism on the planet today."

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Video: Why Superintelligent AI Could Be the Last Human Invention | Max Tegmark


MAX TEGMARK: Hollywood movies make people worry about the wrong things in terms of super intelligence. What we should really worry about is not malice but competence, where we have machines that are smarter than us whose goals just aren’t aligned with ours. For example, I don’t hate ants, I don’t go out of my way to stomp an ant if I see one on the sidewalk, but if I’m in charge of this hydroelectric dam construction and just as I’m going to flood this valley with water I see an ant hill there, tough luck for the ants. Their goals weren’t aligned with mine and because I’m smarter it’s going to be my goals, not the ant’s goals, that get fulfilled. We never want to put humanity in the role of those ants.

 

 
 
 
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Video: Meet the People Building Their Own Internet in Detroit


When it comes to the internet, our connections are generally controlled by telecom companies. But a group of people in Detroit is trying to change that. Motherboard met with the members of the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), a group that is building their own wireless networks from the ground up in order to provide affordable and high-speed internet to prevent the creation of a digital class system.

 

 
 
 
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