Tag: controversial

Quest To Use CRISPR Against Disease Gains Ground

The prospect of using the popular genome-editing tool CRISPR to treat a host of diseases in people is moving closer to reality. From a report: Medical applications of CRISPR-Cas9 had a banner year in 2019. The first results trickled in from trials testing the tool in people, and more trials launched. In the coming years, researchers are looking ahead to more…

Geoengineering Wouldn’t Be Enough to Stop Greenland From Melting

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
When the Greenland ice sheet went into a record meltdown in the summer of 2019, it raised a very terrifying specter of the future. Here was a 12.5-billion-ton mass of ice — one that’s been melting at a quickening pace since the 1980s — melting in a way scientists didn’t expect to happen for decades. While the…

Polio Eradication Program Faces Hard Choices as Endgame Strategy Falters

The “endgame” in the decadeslong campaign to eradicate polio suffered major setbacks in 2019. From a report: While the effort lost ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which recorded 116 cases of wild polio — four times the number in 2018 — an especially alarming situation developed in Africa. In 12 countries, 196 children were paralyzed not by the wild virus, but…

The US Government Has Approved Funds for Geoengineering Research

The US government has for the first time authorized funding to research geoengineering, the idea that we could counteract climate change by reflecting more of the sun’s heat away from the planet. An anonymous reader writes: The $1.4 trillion spending bills that Congress passed last week included a little-noticed provision setting aside at least $4 million for the National Oceanic and…

Astronomers Find 19 More Galaxies Missing Their Dark Matter

Iwastheone shares a report from Astronomy.com: Astronomers have discovered 19 more galaxies missing their dark matter. Instead of dark matter, these strange galaxies are mainly filled with regular matter, like the protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up everything we’re familiar with. The new find, published November 26 in Nature Astronomy, bolsters the controversial recent discovery of two other galaxies without…

India Shuts Down Internet Once Again, This Time In Assam and Meghalaya

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: India maintained a shutdown of the internet in the states of Assam and Meghalaya on Friday, now into 36 hours, to control protests over a controversial and far-reaching new citizen rule. The shutdown of the internet in Assam and Meghalaya, home to more than 32 million people, is the latest example of a…

Why Is Russia’s Suspected Internet Cable Spy Ship In the Mid-Atlantic?

“Russia’s controversial intelligence ship Yantar has been operating in the Caribbean, or mid-Atlantic, since October,” writes defense analyst H I Sutton this week in Forbes. He adds that the ship “is suspected by Western navies of being involved in operations on undersea communications cables.” Significantly, she appears to be avoiding broadcasting her position via AIS (Automated Identification System). I suspect that…

Nestle Cannot Claim Bottled Water Is ‘Essential Public Service,’ Court Rules

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Michigan’s second-highest court has dealt a legal blow to Nestle’s Ice Mountain water brand, ruling that the company’s commercial water-bottling operation is “not an essential public service” or a public water supply. The court of appeals ruling is a victory for Osceola township, a small mid-Michigan town that blocked Nestle from building…