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About Us - Youthink! Issues - Corruption. What is it? Corruption is the abuse of public power for private gain. Bribery, misappropriations of public goods, nepotism (favoring family members for jobs and contracts), and influencing the formulation of laws or regulations for private gain are common examples of corruption. Why should I care? Between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion dollars are lost globally each year to illegal activities, according to World Bank estimates. Corruption decreases the amount of wealth in a country and lowers the standard of living. Corruption affects you even if you don't come into direct contact with it. Discourages businesses from operating in a corrupt setting, reducing the overall wealth in a country.
When countries tackle corruption they increase their national incomes by as much as four times in the long term. Opportunity: People get involved in corruption when systems don't work well and they need a way to get things done regardless of the procedures and laws. What can I do? You can also: Number of Charities and Foundations Passes 1.2 Million - Government & Politics Watch. The number of charities and private foundations registered with the Internal Revenue Service increased by 4.3 percent from 2008 to 2009, reaching a total of more than 1.2 million, according to figures released by the tax agency.
The percentage increase was slightly less than the rate that had been reported for the two previous years. The IRS figures show that the number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code rose by 51,286 between 2008 and 2009. In 2009, a total of 1,238,201 charities and foundations were registered with the federal government, compared with 1,186,915 in 2008. The number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) has increased by nearly 90 percent since 1996, when the IRS counted a total of 654,186 of them. The number of all charitable organizations increased by 5.2 percent from 2007 to 2008; 6 percent from 2006 to 2007; 1.7 percent from 2005 to 2006; 3.5 percent from 2004 to 2005; and 4.8 percent from 2003 to 2004.
Nuclear Energy Basics: Why Nuclear Power? Iran: the Threat of a Nuclear War. Analysis of the current state of the conflict with Iran shows that the world faces the possibility of a new war… General Ivashov The US and its allies started the psychological preparation of world public opinion for the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons to resolve ‘the Iranian problem’.
The US propaganda machine is working hard to create the impression that a ‘surgically precise’ use of the nuclear weapon with only limited consequences is possible. However, this has been known to be untrue since the 1945 US nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the very first nuclear strike, it will become totally impossible to prevent the use of all of the available means of mass destruction. In the situation of a mass extermination of their nations, the conflicting sides will resort to whatever means they have without limitations. Currently, one can assert that peace and mankind are in great danger. Consider the military-technical aspect of the situation. 5 Signs Humans Are Still Evolving. When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today? New research suggests that, despite modern technology and industrialization, humans continue to evolve.
"It is a common misunderstanding that evolution took place a long time ago, and that to understand ourselves we must look back to the hunter-gatherer days of humans," says Dr. Virpi Lummaa from the University of Sheffield's department of animal and plant sciences. But not only are we still evolving, we're doing so even faster than before. 1.
Historically, the gene that regulated a human's ability to digest lactose shut down as they were weaned off of their mother's breast milk. A 2006 study suggests this tolerance for lactose was still developing as early as 3,000 years ago in East Africa. 2. Today, we have utensils to cut our food. 3. Doctor image via Shutterstock 4. 5. Despite advances, humans still evolving. U. SHEFFIELD (UK) — Humans continue to evolve and significant natural and sexual selection is still taking place in our species in the modern world, new research shows. Despite advancements in medicine and technology, as well as an increased prevalence of monogamy, research reveals humans are continuing to evolve just like other species. Scientists in an international collaboration, which includes the University of Sheffield, analyzed church records of about 6,000 Finnish people born between 1760-1849 to determine whether the demographic, cultural, and technological changes of the agricultural revolution affected natural and sexual selection in our species.
Project leader Virpi Lummaa, of the department of animal and plant sciences, says: “We have shown advances have not challenged the fact that our species is still evolving, just like all the other species ‘in the wild’. As for most animal species, the authors found that men and women are not equal concerning Darwinian selection. Evolution: Library: The Current Mass Extinction. Is the biosphere today on the verge of anything like the mass extinctions of the geological past? Could some equivalent of meteorite impacts or dramatic climate change be underway, as humankind's rapid destruction of natural habitats forces animals and plants out of existence?
Increasingly, researchers are doing the numbers, and saying, yes, if present trends continue, a mass extinction is very likely underway. The evidence is pieced together from details drawn from all over the world, but it adds up to a disturbing picture. This time, unlike the past, it's not a chance asteroid collision, nor a chain of climatic circumstances alone that's at fault. Instead, it is chiefly the activities of an ever-growing human population, in concert with long-term environmental change.
The typical rate of extinction differs for different groups of organisms. Therein lies the concern biologists have for many of today's species. What Is the Oldest Living Animal Species on Earth? - mobile wiseGEEK. Massive asteroid might hit Earth in 2182, warn scientists. By Niall Firth Updated: 13:21 GMT, 28 July 2010 A massive asteroid might crash into Earth in the year 2182, scientists have warned. The asteroid, called 1999 RQ36, has a 1-in-1,000 chance of actually hitting the Earth at some point before the year 2200, but is most likely to hit us on 24th September 2182.
It was first discovered in 1999 and is more than 1,800 feet across. If an asteroid of this size hit the Earth it would cause widespread devastation and possible mass extinction. And scientists say that any attempt to try and divert the asteroid will have to take place more than 100 years before it is due to hit to have any chance of success. Artist's impression of the Chicxulub crater on the Yukatan peninsula in Mexico. If the asteroid had not been spotted until after 2080 it would be impossible to divert it from its target, they warned in a new research paper.
How to deflect an asteroid The asteroid is now behind the Sun and will next be observable only in the spring of 2011. Fred Guterl: 8 Ways Humans Could Cause Our Own Extinction. Doomsayers come, and they go. In the 18th century, Thomas Malthus predicted that the human population would outpace its ability to feed itself. Paul Erlich picked up that theme in the 1960s, but since then the world population has doubled.
So what has changed? Our own success as a species has created new a terrifying risks that didn't exist a few decades ago. By our dominating presence on the planet, we are in danger of upsetting climate systems in ways we don't fully understand. As the world becomes more global, we are putting ourselves in more intimate contact with other species, creating opportunities for new emergent diseases. No single one of these issues is necessarily a world ender. In the book The Fate of the Species [Bloombury, $25.99] I delve into what these risks are.
The meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago shows how dramatic an extinction event can be. Cyber attacks. We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction - Ross Andersen. Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.
Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. Of course there are also existential risks that are not extinction risks. How so? Risking human extinction. By Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member John Leslie, 1999. Abstract Of all humans so far, roughly ten per cent are alive with you and me. If human extinction occurred soon, our position in population history would have been fairly ordinary. But if, in contrast, humankind survived for many more centuries, perhaps colonizing the galaxy, then we could easily be among the earliest 0.001 per cent of all humans who will ever have lived.
This could seem a very surprising position to be in — a point which is crucial to a “doomsday argument” originated by the cosmologist Brandon Carter. People who accept the argument, even in a weakened form which takes account of the fact that the world is probably indeterministic, will re-estimate the size of the threats to humankind, showing increased reluctance to believe that humans will survive for very long.
Paper What chance has the human race of surviving the coming century, and perhaps further centuries? VHEMT. Nuclear Holocaust Really Is The Sum Of All Fears. "The Hiroshima bomb exploded with a force of about 13 kilotons of TNT. Basically, it incinerated a city. The H-bombs developed in the next decade were roughly 1,000 times more powerful. " It's important to know however (and the vast majority do not), that the damage done does not increase in linear proportion with weapon yield, but in proportion to the 2/3 power of the yield.
That means that going from 10 to 100 kilotons (and most strategic nukes on all sides are under 1 megaton) increases the damage not by 10 times, but by about 4.1 times. Also, if you wish to thoroughly flatten a broad area (like Los Angeles), several lower yield nukes, properly spread out, will buy you more damage than one big, unwieldy one, even if it's of the same total yield. (100 megaton devices are possible, and a 58 megaton device has actually been detonated [the Soviet bomber crew barely got far enough away from it], but you've reached a point of diminishing returns, well before that.