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The Amazon in Brazil is on fire - how bad is it?

Thousands of fires are ravaging the Amazon rainforest in Brazil - the most intense blazes for almost a decade. The northern states of Roraima, Acre, Rondônia and Amazonas have been particularly badly affected. Huge fires have also been burning across the border in Bolivia, devastating swaths of the country's tropical forest and savannah. So what's happening exactly and how bad are the fires? There have been a lot of fires this year. Brazil - home to more than half the Amazon rainforest - has seen a high number of fires in 2019, Brazilian space agency data suggests. The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) says its satellite data shows an 76% increase on the same period in 2018. The official figures show more than 87,000 forest fires were recorded in Brazil in the first eight months of the year - the highest number since 2010. That compares with 49,000 in the same period in 2018. Nasa, which provides Inpe with its active fire data, confirmed recordings from its satellite sensors also indicated 2019 had been the most active year for almost a decade.

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If there is any doubt about the persistent power of literature in the face of digital culture, it should be banished by the recent climb of George Orwell's 1984 up the Amazon “Movers and Shakers” list. There is much that's resonant for us in Orwell's dystopia in the face of Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA [...]. We look to 1984 as a clear cautionary tale, even a prophecy, of systematic abuse of power taken to the end of the line. [...]

However, after “THE END” of his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell includes another chapter, an appendix, called “The Principles of Newspeak.” Since it has the trappings of a tedious scholarly treatise, readers often skip the appendix. But it changes our whole understanding of the novel. Written from some unspecified point in the future, it suggests that Big Brother was eventually defeated. The victory is attributed not to individual rebels or to The Brotherhood, an anonymous resistance group, but rather to language itself. The appendix details Oceania's attempt to replace Oldspeak, or English, with Newspeak, a linguistic shorthand that reduces the world of ideas to a set of simple, stark words. “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” It will render dissent “literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

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Scientists have long touted DNA’s potential as an ideal storage medium; it’s dense, easy to replicate, and stable over millennia. But in order to replace existing silicon‐chip or magnetic‐tape storage technologies, DNA will have to get a lot cheaper to predictably read, write, and package.

That’s where scientists like Hyunjun Park come in. He and the other cofounders of Catalog, an MIT DNA‐storage spinoff emerging out of stealth on Tuesday, are building a machine that will write a terabyte of data a day, using 500 trillion molecules of DNA.

If successful, DNA storage could be the answer to a uniquely 21st‐century problem: information overload. Five years ago humans had produced 4.4 zettabytes of data; that's set to explode to 160 zettabytes (each year!) by 2025. Current infrastructure can handle only a fraction of the coming data deluge, which is expected to consume all the world's microchip‐grade silicon by 2040.

“Today’s technology is already close to the physical limits of scaling,” says Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. “DNA has an information‐storage density several orders of magnitude higher than any other known storage technology.”

How dense exactly? Imagine formatting every movie ever made into DNA; it would be smaller than the size of a sugar cube. And it would last for 10,000 years.

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A Associação Canadense de Saúde Mental é uma organização sem fins lucrativos que combate o estigma sobre a saúde mental, promovendo ações em favor de pessoas que sofrem com doenças dessa natureza. O cartaz abaixo, direcionado à população em geral, foi publicado no site dessa associação.

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Few would deny that men and women differ physically. […] But their brains and behavior reflect no significant differences, argue many people, including some psychologists. Increasingly, it seems, it is de rigueur to reject or downplay psychological differences between the sexes – despite substantial scientific evidence that they exist.

Women tend to engage in more altruistic behavior and rate higher on certain measures of empathy. Men, on average, perform better on tasks in which they mentally rotate an object, while women can better remember the location of objects. Evolutionary theorists postulate that sex differences arose because male and female hominids faced different reproductive and survival pressures.

Men are also much more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, for instance, while rates of mood disorders and Alzheimer’s disease are higher among women. These sex differences can have important implications for understanding and treating disorders.

A recent review of sex differences in vulnerability to stress examined findings in humans and nonhuman animals on molecular as well as behavioral levels. Among those findings […] is that “boys and girls, particularly adolescents, had different responses to experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Girls had internalizing symptoms, such as self-blame, and boys engaged much more in externalizing behavior,” including acting disruptively. […] The same disorders can [therefore] produce considerably different symptoms.

Sex differences can be important in the development of medications, too. […] past efforts show that a drug tested on male animals won’t necessarily work for human females.

“No one’s saying that men and women are completely different beings. There is probably more that overlaps than is different,” [Georgia] Hodes says. “But we need to understand these differences. I think it becomes especially important when you’re trying to develop better treatments.”

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Examine o cartum de Tom Toro, publicado em seu Instagram em 22.04.2019.

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Confluence of Cultures

A professional involved in a merchant marine career gets to meet and mingle with people of different cultures and nationalities. This helps the individual to understand and function better as a team player and learn the nuances of different cultures and traditions at the same time. This automatically increases adaptability and brings about more awareness about what goes and what doesn't in a different country.