Awkward Dinosaur Illustrations Explained! Check Out This New Book! #paleoart #awkward #dinosaurs #dinosaur

If you want to study better and learn faster or even teach, using the Feynman Technique is good starting point!

Coral reefs, bays, and Inlets, Flores Island, Indonesia

The world mocks… as it should.

‘Tobacco at a cancer summit’: Trump coal push savaged at climate conference

The Trump team was heckled and interrupted by a protest song at the UN’s climate change summit in Bonn on Monday after using its only official appearance to say fossil fuels were vital to reducing poverty around the world and to saving jobs in the US.

While Donald Trump’s special adviser on energy and environment, David Banks, said cutting emissions was a US priority, “energy security, economic prosperity are higher priorities”, he said. “The president has a responsibility to protect jobs and industry across the country.”

Other attendees at the summit condemned the argument.

“Promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit,” said Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and a UN special envoy for cities and climate change.

White House officials and business leaders appear at the event, titled The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation. Photograph: Ronald Wittek/EPA 

The World’s Parasites Are Going Extinct. Here’s Why That’s a Bad Thing

A parasite, in essence, is any organism that makes its living off another organism (think bed bugs, leeches, vampire fish and even mistletoe). These freeloaders have been rather successful: up to half of Earth’s 7.7 million known species are parasitic, and this lifestyle has evolved independently hundreds of times. But in a study published this week in the journal Science Advances, researchers warn that climate change could drive up to one-third of Earth’s parasite species to extinction by the year 2070.

Tapeworms, like this one imaged using a scanning electron micrograph, weaken their victims but don’t typically kill them. (Mediscan / Alamy)

Campbell River teen missing for almost a month

Campbell River RCMP is investigating and say the disappearance is out of character for Holling.

A Campbell River family is growing increasingly desperate to find a teen who has been missing for almost a month.

Jordan Holling hasn’t been seen since the early morning of Oct. 16, when he left a friend’s house on 16th Avenue in Campbell River to walk the few blocks home. He never arrived at his mother’s house on 17th Avenue and failed to show up for work later that day.

Continue Reading.

Then let’s make some noise, shall we? Texas has a real problem providing women with adequate healthcare. This is bad.

L.A. Times Report: High Maternal Mortality Among African-American Texans Is a ‘Quiet Crisis’

Globally, maternal mortality rates have been declining over the past several years. In America, however, the maternal death rate more than doubled between 1987 and 2013. In fact, though the United States is one of the most developed countries in the world, it’s the second to last among 31 developed countries, ahead of only Mexico, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And, according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, black women are dying at the highest rates.

More from the Los Angeles Times:

The maternal death rate in Texas after 2010 reached “levels not seen in other U.S. states,” according to a report compiled for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, based on figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Black women in Texas are dying at the highest rates of all. A 2016 joint report by the Texas Department of State Health Services’ Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force found that black mothers accounted for 11.4% of Texas births in 2011 and 2012, but 28.8% of pregnancy-related deaths.

Read the rest of the L.A. Times report here.

AI-controlled brain implants for mood disorders tested in people 

Brain implants that deliver electrical pulses tuned to a person’s feelings and behaviour are being tested in people for the first time. Two teams funded by the US military’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of ‘closed-loop’ brain implants that use algorithms to detect patterns associated with mood disorders. These devices can shock the brain back to a healthy state without input from a physician.

The work, presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Washington DC, could eventually provide a way to treat severe mental illnesses that resist current therapies. It also raises thorny ethical concerns, not least because the technique could give researchers a degree of access to a person’s inner feelings in real time.

The general approach — using a brain implant to deliver electric pulses that alter neural activity — is known as deep-brain stimulation. It is used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, but has been less successful when tested against mood disorders. Early evidence suggested that constant stimulation of certain brain regions could ease chronic depression, but a major study involving 90 people with depression found no improvement after a year of treatment.1

The scientists behind the DARPA-funded projects say that their work might succeed where earlier attempts failed, because they have designed their brain implants specifically to treat mental illness — and to switch on only when needed. “We’ve learned a lot about the limitations of our current technology,” says Edward Chang, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who is leading one of the projects.

Holtzheimer, P.E., et al. Lancet Psychiatry. 4(11):839–849. (2017)