Новости за 27.02.2017

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Plants power life on Earth. They are the original food source supplying energy to almost all living organisms and the basis of the fossil fuels that feed the power demands of the modern world. But burning the remnants of long-dead forests is changing the world in dangerous ways. Can we better harness the power of living plants today?

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The denouement of the recent Hollywood blockbuster Sully is a courtroom drama with a difference. On trial is the eponymous Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Sully), based on the real pilot who saved the lives of 155 passengers and crew by successfully landing his plane on the river Hudson in January 2009 after a bird hit stalled both engines.

What does a staple food such as bread have to do with global warming? For a start, to make loaves on an industrial scale, you’ll need powerful milling and kneading machines and a huge oven, heated to 230℃ or more. This uses a lot of energy. The flour, yeast and salt must also be shipped in and, finally, the finished loaves are delivered to stores – all in trucks powered by petrol.

Onlookers the world over are trying to understand Trump's behaviour. Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock

The notion that Donald Trump is “mentally ill” is circulating more frantically than ever, with various mental health practitioners voicing unusually public concerns that someone with an unsound or disordered mind is in high office. One such figure is John Gartner, a psychologist with 20 years’ worth of experience at Johns Hopkins Medical School, who has now garnered almost 30,000 signatures on a Change.org petition:

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A friend of mine recently gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, but within months she was at the end of her tether with sleep deprivation. Like many parents, she was confused by conflicting advice from midwives, nurses and well-meaning friends – not to mention the many books available. But as a professor of psychology who specialises in sleep research, my advice was to consider the science, then make a choice that suits the whole family. This advice is shared... Читать дальше...

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The actor Mark Wahlberg was supposed to be aboard one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, but a scheduling change meant that he fortuitously ended up missing the doomed flight. Some years later, in an interview with Men’s Journal, he mused on what might have transpired, had he actually taken the flight:

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Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing American journalist who is proud of his abusive online posts, was permanently banned from Twitter last year after a particularly offensive tirade. Yiannopoulos has often been described as a professional troll. So what makes a troll – professional or otherwise – tick?

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If you had been a canny investor back in 2008, you could have done a lot worse than make a substantial bet on upmarket ice cream futures. The price of vanilla beans has rocketed from as little as US$25 per kilo eight years ago up to US$240 at the end of 2016. Some forecasts predict it will reach as much as US$450 per kilo by the middle of 2017. Even by the standards of volatile prices in agricultural commodities such as rice and grains this is exceptional.

Here’s a mystery about Facebook. The people in California who run the world’s largest social network (1.9 billion users at last count) have been trying to explain and defend what they do. In an essay of more than 5,000 words written in a style which reads as if it is the work of many hands, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg explains his wish to build a “global community”.

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When the dinosaurs were wiped off the face of the planet, how did they leave? Was it a slow, plodding decline or a short sharp bang? Back in the 1960s and 1970s, debate about this question was mainly taking place on the ground, at fossil sites in places like Montana. Paleontologist Robert Sloan and his colleagues documented evidence for the long-term decline of dinosaurs over a 10m to 20m-year period. Dinosaurs had been losing out, ever so slowly, to the rising mammals, mainly as a result of cooling climates. Читать дальше...

On looking up the word “irony” in a dictionary, one would be unsurprised to see a picture of a member of Britain’s unelected upper house indignantly asserting that “you either believe in democracy or you don’t”. Yet that is what the debate over Brexit in the House of Lords produced. In the midst of proceedings, former chancellor Norman Lamont, now a Conservative peer, stood to warn that if peers obstructed the government’s Article 50 bill, they would be disrespecting the June vote to leave the European Union. Читать дальше...

Donald Trump has declared war on anonymous sources and wants to ban their use by journalists. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 24, he said: “You will see stories dry up like you have never seen before.”

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The British curry industry is responsible for 100,000 jobs and contributes more than £4 billion to the UK economy. But it’s now feared that up to a third of all Indian restaurants could disappear because of tougher immigration laws.

This was supposed to be the most political Academy Awards in history. One man was expected to overshadow the ceremony: and not the gold one that stands 8½ inches tall.

Couples that I’ve spoken to who have been split apart by Britain’s immigration system are facing a huge legal, financial and emotional burden that is putting real stress on their family lives.

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Organisation is big business. Whether our lives – all those inboxes and calendars – or how companies are structured, a multi-billion dollar industry helps to meet this need.

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. John Constable, 1830-1. Tate, CC BY-NC-ND

To what extent can we use works of landscape art as proxy data for what the environment was actually like at the time of painting? Artists such as Claude Monet and John Constable can be trusted if care is taken to understand what the artist was trying to achieve. Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is a case in point.

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The vast majority of us are constantly connected to the things we like and those we are close to through technology – to the point where we may even have problems managing without it. So when something as exciting as virtual reality (VR) comes along, it can quickly become part of our already tech-reliant lives, providing us with multiple new possibilities, including for falling in love.

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When it comes to reducing carbon emissions, one of the biggest hurdles is the world’s addiction to flying. And this is only going to get more intense as developing countries grow bigger middle classes who want to explore the world for business and pleasure.

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Germany has ambitious plans for both electric cars and renewable energy. But it can’t deliver both. As things stand, Germany’s well-meaning but contradictory ambitions would actually boost emissions by an amount comparable with the present-day emissions of the entire country of Uruguay or the state of Montana.