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Archive for December 10th, 2012
Q&A: Making Toilets Fashionable
Posted by Inter Press Service: Fatima Asmal-Motala on December 10th, 2012
Inter Press Service: When the founder of the World Toilet Organisation Jack Sim turned 40, he literally began counting how many more days he had to live and felt a sense of urgency to do meaningful things with the remainder of his life.
"Can you imagine a person coming into this world and spending his life only helping himself? When this person dies, his life has had no meaning, so why did he bother coming here?" he asks.
"The toilet was completely neglected in Singapore (his home country). I realised it was the...
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Chasing ice: glaciers in retreat
Posted by Telegraph: Jessamy Calkin on December 10th, 2012
Telegraph: When the photographer James Balog reached Iceland's Solheim Glacier in October 2005, he couldn't believe his eyes. He had photographed the glacier only six months earlier for the New Yorker magazine, then anchored and marked all his camera positions with sticks and piles of rocks. The glacier had been receding by several hundred feet a year, but by October it had moved so far that Balog thought he had made a mistake. For three hours he and his assistant compared prints of their earlier shots, thinking...
U.S. Agricultural Research Is Faltering, Report Warns
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 10th, 2012
New York Times: A blue-ribbon panel of scientific and technology advisers to President Obama warns that the nation risks losing its longstanding supremacy in food production because research in agriculture has not kept up with new challenges like climate change, depleted land and water resources and emerging pests, pathogens and invasive plants.
The president`s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, chaired by John P. Holdren, director of the White House office of science and technology policy, and Eric...