Fivethirtyeight: Where Electoral Forecasts Agree And Disagree

U.S. space agency NASA has tapped 3-D printer firm Systems & Materials Research Corporation (SMRC) to create the first-ever “Star Trek”-style food replicator using 3-D printing technology. According to Quartz, NASA gave the company a six month, $125,000 grant contract to focus on developing 3-D printers that use cartridges full of carbohydrates, protein powders and oils that can be combined in layers to produce food. The tech could dramatically cut down on food waste here on Earth while making it much easier to transport nutrients in bulk through space. Grocery stores could be gradually transformed to ultra-cheap cartridge retailers while non-nutrient edible products are phased out by market forces. Of course, that’s all a radical, highly speculative version of the future, but it’s what SMRC mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor envisions for 3-D printed foods. He’s already successfully used a 3-D printer to spit out chocolate bars; an admittedly rudimentary accomplishment. One day, however, more advanced printers could be used to customize nutrition for individuals, and whole meals could be downloaded over the Internet. But that’s all still fantasy until SMRC, or some other company, steps up to fill this void that most people don’t even know exists. —— ["Stock Photo: Portrait Of Happy Family Spending Time In Pizzeria" on Shutterstock.]

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won't graduate from high school. It's 2023—and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America's economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Traveling back in time to 2013—at the moment the sequester cuts began—no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested—and won—special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon. Continue Reading »

US Rep. Mike Rogers, former SOS Terri Lynn Land top GOP poll for US SenateShelby Township Source NewspapersA new poll sets up the possibility of a three-way primary for Republicans to pick a candidate to run for retiring U.S. Sen. Carl Levin's seat in 2014. An automated poll of 1,158 likely Republican primary voters taken May 20 indicates U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers from and more »

Early humans living in South Africa made cultural and industrial leaps in periods of wetter weather, said a study Tuesday that compared the archaeological record of Man’s evolution with that of climate change. Anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, first made their appearance in Africa during the Middle Stone Age which lasted from about 280,000 to 30,000 years ago. Some of the earliest examples of human culture and technology are found in South Africa — with fossil evidence of innovative spurts whose cause has left scientists puzzled. The record reveals that a notable period of human advancement occurred about 71,500 years ago, and another between 64,000 and 59,000 years ago. Examples of such innovation include the use of symbols, linked to the development of complex language, in engravings, the manufacture and use of stone tools and personal adornment with shell jewellery. “We show for the first time that the timing of… these periods of innovation coincided with abrupt climate change,” study co-author Martin Ziegler of the Cardiff University School of Earth and Ocean Sciences told AFP of the study in the journal Nature Communications. “We found that South Africa experienced wetter conditions during these periods of cultural advance. “At the same time, large parts of sub-Saharan Africa experienced drier conditions, so that South Africa potentially acted as a refugium for early humans.” Ziegler and a team reconstructed the South African climate over the past 100,000 years using a sediment core drilled out from the country’s east coast. The core shows changes in river discharge and rainfall. “It offers for the first time the possibility to compare the archaeological record with a record of climate change over the same period and thus helps us to understand the origins of modern humans,” Ziegler said by email. Co-author Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum said the findings supported the view that population growth fuelled cultural advancement through increased human interactions. “Such climate-driven pulses in southern Africa and more widely were probably fundamental to the origin of key elements of modern human behaviour in Africa and to the subsequent dispersal of Homo sapiens from its ancestral homeland,” concluded the study.

The political appointee who headed the IRS during the US tax agency’s abusive treatment of conservative groups insisted on Tuesday that he was not involved in the scandal. US senators grilled retired IRS boss Douglas Shulman about what he readily acknowledged was “inexcusable” behavior by agents who, from 2011, singled out right-leaning groups for excessive scrutiny. The IRS actions have become one of a series of alleged abuses of executive power that have cast a shadow over President Barack Obama’s second term, and Tuesday’s hearing was not the first into the case. Last week, House lawmakers questioned outgoing IRS chief Steven Miller, who Obama had forced to resign in the wake of the revelations. “I was dismayed and I was saddened to read the inspector general’s conclusions that actions had been taken creating the appearance that the IRS was not acting as it should have,” Shulman told the Senate finance committee. “The actions outlined in that report have justifiably led to questions about the fairness of the approach taken here.” Shulman, who retired from the IRS in November, described a vast agency tasked with overseeing tax-exempt groups and carefully scrutinizing those applying for such non-profit status. But, while he said the targeting occurred between 2010 and June 2011, he insisted that “in June of 2011 I was not aware of this.” The Finance Committee chairman, Democrat Max Baucus, blasted the IRS and accused Shulman and Miller of essentially being asleep at the switch. “The IRS abandoned good judgment and lost the public’s trust,” Baucus said. Top committee Republican Orrin Hatch insisted there was “more than a hint of political bias” by IRS agents who put conservative groups with words like “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names under burdensome review. But Hatch expressed frustration with the IRS officials’ refusal to say who knew about the centralizing of the groups in its early stages, and how far up the chain of command it went. “One way or another, we’re going to learn the facts about what went on here,” Hatch said. Obama has said he knew nothing about the abuse until the internal IRS report leaked this month. The White House acknowledged Monday it was told in April that an inspector general was finalizing an audit into Internal Revenue Service abuses, but stressed that Obama aides made no attempt to intervene or influence findings. Attention turned to portions of tax law that delineate non-profit status, and discrepancies between the federal statute and the IRS regulations in determining what are known as “501(c)(4) organizations.” Such groups, which are not required to reveal their donors, spent millions of dollars to political activity in 2012, with some critics saying they played outsized roles in shaping the presidential campaign. Baucus noted that under a decades-old federal statute, such groups must “exclusively” be engaged in social welfare or community good, while the IRS regulations say the groups must be only “primarily” engaged in social welfare. “Clearly a Mack truck is being driven through a 501(c)(4) loophole,” Baucus said, arguing that once the immediate scandal clears the law itself should be reformed to make it clearer which groups should qualify. [Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) via Center for American Progress Action Fund / Flickr]