Soda taxes work, new study finds. The $15 Minimum Wage Doesn’t Just Improve Lives. It Saves Them. Why Women Have to Wait in Longer Bathroom Lines Than Men Do. Global Thinkers 2016. Why It Takes 75 Elements To Make Your Cell Phone - Seeker - Video. That smartphone in your pocket is an incredibly complex little rectangle.
The various components required to make a cell phone work come from all over the world. In fact, the typical modern smartphone uses 75 of the 118 base elements on the periodic table. By comparison, the human body only needs about 30 functional elements. Phones need a good deal of silicon in the microchips, of course, plus aluminum in the casing and lithium in the batteries. They also require several several rare earth elements, which are notoriously difficult to mine and have led to exploitative industry practices.
Get 15% off Domain web hosting and domain names when you use coupon code DNEWS at checkout! Read More: MIT Technology Review: The All-American iPhone Yale: For metals of the smartphone age, no Plan B. Cigarette Smokers Are In Denial About Their Butts. A new survey digs into what smokers think about their butts.
The survey was commissioned by V2, an electronic cigarette company, so you may want to take the results with a puff of smoke, but the results are certainly interesting and give some insight into a littering problem that sees 1.7 billion pounds of cigarette butts discarded every year. Smokers were asked first how they dispose of their butts and then what damage, if any, they thought the discarded butts did to the environment.
When asked if they agreed with the statement that "cigarette butts are toxic," 84% of respondents said yes, they did. Despite the irony of smokers voluntarily sucking on tobacco smoke while they consider the toxicity of the leftovers, this is an important point. According to a 2011 study published in the BMJ’s journal Tobacco Control, 4.5 trillion butts are tossed every year, worldwide, and they are indeed toxic.
Can Racism Be Stopped in the Third Grade? An experiment at Fieldston, which starts when 8-year-olds are sorted by race, has some very liberal parents fuming.
Photographs by Bobby Doherty The form arrived in an email attachment on the Friday after winter break. It takes moral capital to build a village. [Editor's note: A version of this article was delivered as a speech to the Council on Foundations in October 2014.]
Wherever we look on the globe it seems to be the destiny of populations to live between two worlds: an old order that is dying but not yet dead, and a new order that is conceived but not fully born. Communities throughout the United States, for example, have been experiencing a population shift that has brought new neighbors who are fueling the economy and a new middle class of color that provides the potential for a new, stronger civic life.
But before we can fully engage them in a common effort to make our communities more of a community, they must be made to feel that they belong, that their traditions are respected, and their contributions recognized. This transition has a profound impact on organizations dedicated to building and strengthening communities.
U.S. Let’s turn the page on the East v. West sibling rivalry story. Like envious older siblings, some Canadian provinces may have experienced jealousy while watching Alberta rise to become Canada’s economic powerhouse.
Basking in its success, Alberta may have, at times, expressed some unnecessary smugness. But, as the quick plummet in the price of oil changes Alberta’s circumstances, other provinces should think twice before gloating over its falling fortunes. An oft-heard complaint is that the oil sector (strongest in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador) is subsidized with public money from all provinces.
While one can (and should) question why a successful industry more than capable of standing on its own is still receiving government support, the other side of this equation must also be taken into account. Like a family with one high-wage earning member, Canadians have financially benefited from the huge growth that, until very recently, was occurring in the western Canadian oil patch. Five months later, Rinelle Harper gives a voice to the missing and murdered.
Ever since her heart stopped, Rinelle Harper has been striving for normalcy.
She fought for her life and now she wants to live like the 16-year-old she is – spending too much time on Facebook, listening to Eminem, playing volleyball, resisting her mother’s suggestions on how to wear her long black hair. It has been nearly five months since a beaten Rinelle crawled out of Winnipeg’s freezing Assiniboine River, only to be attacked again on a footpath by two men who left her there to die. Now she is giving a voice to the murdered and missing native women who are not able to speak for themselves. She wants a national inquiry into their deaths and disappearances, and she wants native women to take care of one another – to walk in pairs, especially at night.
Hers is the quiet voice of a shy teen cast reluctantly into a public role by the ineffable luck of the survivor, but hoping to be heard all the same.