Ashley Book of Knots: Every Practical Knot--What It Looks Like, Who Uses It, Where It Comes From, and How to Tie It | IndieBound.org
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385040259

Scientists discover fractal patterns in a quantum material
Article, Comments

https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling

What does this map reveal?
1. Where your food comes from

Now, residents in each county can see how they are connected to all other counties in the country via food transfers. Overall, there are 9.5 million links between counties on our map.

All Americans, from urban to rural are connected through the food system. Consumers all rely on distant producers, agricultural processing plants, food storage like grain silos and grocery stores, and food transportation systems.

For example, the map shows how a shipment of corn starts at a farm in Illinois, travels to a grain elevator in Iowa before heading to a feedlot in Kansas, and then travels in animal products being sent to grocery stores in Chicago.
2. Where the food hubs are

At over 17 million tons of food, Los Angeles County received more food than any other county in 2012, our study year. It shipped out even more: 22 million tons.

California’s Fresno County and Stanislaus County are the next largest, respectively. In fact, many of the counties that shipped and received the most food were located in California. This is due to the several large urban centers, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the productive Central Valley in California.

...

3. How food travels from place to place

We also looked at how much food is transported between one county and another.

Many of the largest food transport links were within California. This indicates that there is a lot of internal food movement within the state.

One of the largest links is from Niagara County to Erie County in New York. That’s due to the flow of food through an important international overland port with Canada.

Some of the other largest links were inside the counties themselves. This is because of moving food items around for manufacturing within a county—for example, milk gets off a truck at a large depot and is then shipped to a yogurt facility, then the yogurt is moved to a grocery distribution warehouse, all within the same county.

The food supply chain relies on a complex web of interconnected infrastructure. For example, a lot of grain produced throughout the Midwest is transported to the Port of New Orleans for export. This primarily occurs via the waterways of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The infrastructure along these waterways—such as locks 52 and 53—are critical, but have not been overhauled since their construction in 1929. They represent a serious bottleneck, slowing down innumerable supply chains nationwide, including that of grain. If they were to fail entirely, then commodity transport and supply chains would be completely disrupted.

Railroads are also important for moving grain. Fresh produce, on the other hand, is often moved around the country by refrigerated truck. This is due to the need to keep fresh fruits and vegetables—relatively high value agricultural products—cool until they reach the consumer. In future work, we hope to evaluate the specific infrastructure that is critical to the U.S. food supply chain.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES).
...
If evolution is not to be explained solely in terms of changes in gene frequencies; if previously rejected mechanisms such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics turn out to be important after all; and if organisms are acknowledged to bias evolution through development, learning and other forms of plasticity – does all this mean a radically different and profoundly richer account of evolution is emerging? No one knows: but from the perspective of our adapting dog-walker, evolution is looking less like a gentle genetic stroll, and more like a frantic struggle by genes to keep up with strident developmental processes.

https://aeon.co/essays/science-in-flux-is-a-revolution-brewing-in-evolutionary-theory

Even ancient genomes have ghosts within them. The Denisovan genome bears the traces of ancient mixture, not only from Neanderthals but with another even more divergent group – some speculate it might have been Homo erectus. Everywhere geneticists look, they see populations more different than any living people, mixing with each other in small fractions. It is no evolutionary tree. Our evolutionary history is like a braided stream.

How could science have missed this?

https://aeon.co/ideas/human-evolution-is-more-a-muddy-delta-than-a-branching-tree

https://www.drawdown.org/scenarios

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

Eighty of the solutions in this book already exist and are scaling to become competitive alternatives to now dominant, high-emitting technologies. They are economically viable, proven to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon dioxide, and have the potential to spread throughout the world.

Our approach was to collect as much data from a variety of vetted, widely-cited sources as possible, using our models to assess different potential pathways for global adoption. Since no individual organization, model, or researcher can claim to accurately know the future, or how every technology or practice will perform in every corner of the world, we gathered a wide range projections from multiple sources. This approach allowed us to generate reasonable, defensible guesses at how these solutions can grow and what their impacts could be.

Each solution is modeled based on a comparison between a reference case, assuming little change over the next thirty years, and three scenarios reflecting increasingly more accelerated global adoption.

Plausible Scenario: the case in which solutions on the Drawdown list are adopted at a realistically vigorous rate over the time period under investigation, adjusting for estimated economic and population growth.

Drawdown Scenario: the case in which the adoption of solutions is optimized to achieve drawdown by 2050.

Optimum Scenario: the case in which solutions achieve their maximum potential, fully replacing conventional technologies and practices within a limited, competitive market.

The data derived from models was then inputted into sector-level integration models to generate final results for all solutions within an in global system.

Six-hundred tons of oil has contaminated Brazil’s coast, and authorities have no idea where it’s coming from | National Post
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/authorities-cant-find-source-of-hundreds-of-tons-of-oil-contaminating-brazils-coast

I would say thay the article blaming Venezuela is political, considering the local political landscape, where Bolsonaro pretty much swore to tear up the environment going in. The one which says that they don't know where it is coming from is likely more accurate although he is probably being deceptive. Bolsonaro has been considered responsible for Amazon fires, after he put big business in charge of ecological policies, amongst other disturbing things. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/01/bolsonaro-environment-agriculture-ministries-amazon

https://news.mongabay.com/2018/12/bolsonaro-shapes-administration-amazon-indigenous-and-landless-at-risk/#

Tony Santoro's Guide to Illegal Tree-Planting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvtqKMxZ95s