How Poverty Taxes the Brain

Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.

We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It's a scarce resource.

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

Read the entire article here.. How Poverty Taxes the Brain

Element Crucial For Life On Earth Probably Came From Mars, New Study Finds

Element Crucial For Life On Earth Probably Came From Mars, New Study Finds (via Planetsave)

Owing to the fact that it is far easier for a chunk of Mars to travel to Earth than the other way around,  it is likely that certain elements necessary to catalyze the formation of biological molecules (like RNA and DNA) came  from our neighboring…

 

Bayou Corne: The biggest ongoing disaster in the United States you haven't heard of.

(Source: Mother Jones, Daily Kos)

One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine, forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne's 350 residents—an exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.

Texas Brine's operation sits atop a three-mile-wide, mile-plus-deep salt deposit known as the Napoleonville Dome, which is sheathed by a layer of oil and natural gas, a common feature of the salt domes prevalent in Gulf Coast states. The company specializes in a process known as injection mining, and it had sunk a series of wells deep into the salt dome, flushing them out with high-pressure streams of freshwater and pumping the resulting saltwater to the surface. From there, the brine is piped and trucked to refineries along the Mississippi River and broken down into sodium hydroxide and chlorine for use in manufacturing everything from paper to medical supplies.

Bayou Corne is the biggest ongoing disaster in the United States you haven't heard of. What happened in Bayou Corne, as near as anyone can tell, is that one of the salt caverns Texas Brine hollowed out—a mine dubbed Oxy3—collapsed. The sinkhole initially spanned about an acre. Today it covers more than 24 acres and is an estimated 750 feet deep. It subsists on a diet of swamp life and cypress trees, which it occasionally swallows whole. It celebrated its first birthday recently, and like most one-year-olds, it is both growing and prone to uncontrollable burps, in which a noxious brew of crude oil and rotten debris bubbles to the surface. But the biggest danger is invisible; the collapse unlocked tens of millions of cubic feet of explosive gases, which have seeped into the aquifer and wafted up to the community. The town blames the regulators. The regulators blame Texas Brine. Texas Brine blames some other company, or maybe the regulators, or maybe just God.

Why does America have such a big prison population?

Why does America have such a big prison population? (via The Economist)

“TOO many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law-enforcement reason.” The person who said that was neither a defence lawyer, nor a prisoners’-rights advocate, nor a European looking down his nose across the…

 

Phyto Kinetic: Green Roofs for City Buses and Improved Urban Ecosystem

Source: Urban Gardens
With his project, Phyto Kinetic, Marc Grañén aims to energize drab public buses with vibrant, gardened roofs that he hopes will contribute a bit to improving the urban ecosystem. Grañén utilizes a lightweight, 7-centimeter thick hydroponic foam which is much lighter than soil, thereby significantly reducing the overall weight of the Phyto Kinetic roof. The foam retains humidity and is extremely flexible, making it easy to install regardless of the shape of the bus roof. Read More..
Phyto Kinetic: Green Roofs for City Busesbr /and Improved Urban Ecosystem

SERCO: The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of

Serco Group are the world's leading outsourcing company with a vast and diverse portfolio of government contracts. These contracts are worth billions of pounds each year and means that the control of public services are passed to this privately owned company.  Among its operations are public and private transport and traffic control, aviation, military and nuclear weapons contracts, detention centres and prisons and schools. Serco has seen a large amount of criticism involving its private prisons and detention centres.

This video from the Hungry Beast, broadcast on Australia's ABC network, give's a brief introduction to Serco and the services they run across the world.

Another video from RT examines their role in public services across the world.

Could the Government Get a Search Warrant for Your Thoughts?

Source: The Atlantic

We don't have a mind reading machine. But what if we one day did? The technique of functional MRI (fMRI), which measures changes in localized brain activity over time, can now be used to infer information regarding who we are thinking about, what we have seen, and the memories we are recalling. As the technology for inferring thought from brain activity continues to improve, the legal questions regarding its potential application in criminal and civil trials are gaining greater attention.
Last year, a Maryland man on trial for murdering his roommate tried to introduce results from an fMRI-based lie detection test to bolster his claim that the death was a suicide. Read More... http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/could-the-government-get-a-search-warrant-for-your-thoughts/278111/

Peru To Provide Free Solar Power To 2 Million Of Its Poorest Residents

Peru has initiated a new solar panel program that will provide electricity to more than 2 million of its poorest residents.

Currently, only 66% of Peru’s 24 million people has access to electricity, according to the country’s Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino. By 2016, the plan is to provide electricity to 95% of residents through The National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program.

“This program is aimed at the poorest people, those who lack access to electric lighting and still use oil lamps, spending their own resources to pay for fuels that harm their health,” he said.  Read More..
http://www.the9billion.com/2013/07/18/peru-to-provide-free-solar-power-to-2-million-of-its-poorest-residents/