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in title, tags, annotations or urlThis Roman 'gate to hell' killed its victims with a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide | Science | AAAS - 0 views
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a deep fissure running beneath Hierapolis constantly emits volcanic carbon dioxide (CO2), which pours forth as a visible mist
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slightly heavier than air—billows out and forms a CO2 “lake” on the sheltered arena floor
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Sacrificial animals were not tall enough to keep their heads fully clear of the CO2 lake, and as they became dizzy, their heads would have dropped even lower, exposing them to higher CO2 concentrations and leading to death by asphyxiation. The priests, however, were tall enough to keep their heads above the dangerous gasses, and may have even stood on stones to add to their height
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The new findings are "tremendously exciting," says Gil Renberg, a classicist who researches Greek and Roman religious beliefs at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. "This scientific information proves the veracity of ancient sources and helps explain not only why people could enter, but also why animals would die." It's likely that at least some of the other Plutoniums worked in the same way. Renberg thinks the chemical survey methods used by Pfanz and his team could help provide a firmer idea of the exact location of the gate to hell at a site called Akaraka, also in modern-day Turkey.
The Most Powerful People in American Politics Are Over 65 - The New York Times - 0 views
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President Trump is 73. His leading rival is 77. And many of their strongest supporters — vulnerable to the coronavirus but enormously influential politically — are eligible for Social Security.
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Mr. Biden’s ability to connect with Ms. Honkala’s age group — through his résumé and more centrist tendencies, his talk of shared values and his perceived general election promise — helped him regain his footing in Nevada, surge to victory in South Carolina and catapult to his perch as the likely Democratic nominee. It was a rapid reversal of fortunes fueled by overwhelming support first from older black voters and, ultimately, from older voters more broadly, a key part of his larger coalition.
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Now that age group is top of mind for many Americans as the nation confronts the staggering costs of the coronavirus crisis. It’s a vulnerable population in terms of the outbreak — and has become the focus of the public conversation. Health officials are pleading for young people to stay home to protect their parents and grandparents, while in Texas, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor, suggested that older people might be willing to take risks in order to protect the economy, sparking a national controversy.
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Everything is bigger in Texas -- but these recent rainfall totals are super-sized - CNN - 0 views
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Victoria, Texas, received 20.28 inches of rain during the month of May, eclipsing the previous record of 14.66 inches in 1993. Nearly 14 inches of rain was measured in Houston between May 11th and June 3rd, marking the second wettest period on record for the city. Preliminary numbers also indicate Port Arthur had its wettest May on record at 15.55 inches.
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These record setting rainfall observations have left the soil saturated and river levels high, meaning any additional precipitation could trigger flash flooding
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott activated resources to respond to the anticipated heavy rain and flooding, according to a press release from his office on Friday. This includes boat squads, search and rescue boat teams, helicopters with hoist capability and high-profile vehicles.
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Source of Mysterious Gas Leak Explosion in Canadian Town Stumps Officials - The New York Times - 0 views
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Electricity is cut off. Guards sit in cars on every corner. Hundreds of people are out of their homes, some without access to their clothing or belongings.
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More than four months after the blast shuttered Wheatley’s downtown and injured 20 of the town’s 2,900 residents, the authorities still don’t know where the gas leak came from, or why it happened.
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Many are now grappling with whether the center of the town, which was formally recognized in 1865, should be permanently abandoned.
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Drought-stricken US warned of looming 'dead pool' - BBC News - 0 views
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Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead - formed by the creation of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River - is the largest reservoir in the United States and provides water to 25 million people across three states and Mexico. Here, the stunning scale of a drought in the American west has been laid plain for all to see.
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Californians have been told to conserve water at home or risk mandated water restrictions as a severe drought on the West Coast is expected to get worse during the summer months.
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People have been told to limit outdoor watering and take shorter showers. In Los Angeles, many are being asked to cut their water use by 35%. The restrictions come after California recorded the driest start to the year on record.
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Fareed Zakaria: Romney is the GOP's pretzel candidate - The Washington Post - 0 views
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shouldn’t it puzzle us that Romney is so “incompetent” (also from Noonan), given his deserved reputation for, well, competence? He founded one of this country’s most successful financial firms, turned around the flailing Salt Lake City Olympics and was a successful governor. How did he get so clumsy so fast?
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the problem is not Romney but the new Republican Party. Given the direction in which it has moved and the pressures from its most extreme — yet most powerful — elements, any nominee would face the same challenge: Can you be a serious candidate for the general election while not outraging the Republican base?
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Why won’t Romney, an intelligent man, fluent in economics, explain his economic policy? Because any sensible answer would cause a firestorm in his party.
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David Stockman: Mitt Romney and the Bain Drain - Newsweek and The Daily Beast - 1 views
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Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.
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Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
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Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case
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Matt Ridley on Climate Change and Warm Medieval Times | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com - 1 views
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A flurry of recent scientific papers has tried to measure the warmth of the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago. Scientists have long debated whether it was cooler or warmer than today, and whether the warmth was global or regional. The point for nonscientists: If recent warming has precedents, some might find it less alarming.
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Until the late 1990s, researchers generally agreed that the MWP was warmer than today and that the "Little Ice Age" of 1500-1800 was colder. Then in 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopted the "hockey stick" graph devised by Michael Mann at the University of Virginia and colleagues. Using temperature indicators such as tree rings and lake sediments, the graph rewrote history by showing little warmth in the 11th century and little cold in the 17th, but a sharp spike in late-20th-century temperatures. That graph helped to persuade many people (such as me) that recent temperature rises were unprecedented in scale and speed in at least 1,400 years.
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Four recent studies have now rehabilitated the MWP as a period of unusual warmth, though they disagree on whether it was as warm or warmer than today.
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Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years - Yahoo! Weather - 0 views
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it took 4,000 years for the world to warm about 1.25 degrees from the end of the ice age to about 7,000 years ago. The same fossil-based data suggest a similar level of warming occurring in just one generation: from the 1920s to the 1940s.
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scientists may have to go back 125,000 years to find warmer temperatures potentially rivaling today's.
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the climate had been gently warming out of the ice age with a slow cooling that started about 6,000 years ago. Then the cooling reversed with a vengeance. The study shows the recent heat spike "has no precedent as far back as we can go with any confidence, 11,000 years arguably,"
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Boko Haram Using More Children as Suicide Bombers, Unicef Says - The New York Times - 0 views
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Boko Haram Using More Children as Suicide Bombers, Unicef Says
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One of every five suicide bombers deployed by Boko Haram in the past two years has been a child, usually a girl, according to a report released Tuesday by Unicef.
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The youngest bomber so far was thought to be 8 years old.
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How the Mormons Make Money - Businessweek - 0 views
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“The Mormon Church is very different than any other church. … Traditional Christianity and Judaism make a clear distinction between what is spiritual and what is temporal, while Mormon theology specifically denies that there is such a distinction.”
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To Latter-day Saints, opening megamalls, operating a billion-dollar media and insurance conglomerate, and running a Polynesian theme park are all part of doing God’s work. Says Quinn: “In the Mormon [leadership’s] worldview, it’s as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the old phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as it is to make a million dollars.”
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“There are religious groups that own radio stations, but they don’t also own cattle ranches. There are religious groups that own retreats, but they don’t also own insurance companies,” says Ryan Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa and co-author of the recently published book Could I Vote for a Mormon for President? “Given their array of corporate interests, it would probably make more sense to refer to them as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Holdings Inc.”
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Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? | Mother Jones - 0 views
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There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
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Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.
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at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?
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Studying Impact of 'Superstorm' on California - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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California faces the risk not just of devastating earthquakes but also of a catastrophic storm that could tear at the coasts, inundate the Central Valley and cause four to five times as much economic damage as a large quake, scientists and emergency planners warn.
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such a storm could cause up to $300 billion in damage. The scientists’ models estimate that almost one-fourth of the houses in California could experience some flood damage from one.
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150 years ago, over a few weeks in the winter of 1861-62, enough rain fell to inundate a stretch of the Central Valley 300 miles long and 20 miles wide, from north of Sacramento south to Bakersfield, near the eastern desert. The storms lasted 45 days, creating lakes in parts of the Mojave Desert and, according to a survey account, “turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea, forcing the state capital to be moved from Sacramento to San Francisco for a time, and requiring Gov. Leland Stanford to take a rowboat to his inauguration.”
How Uber Is Changing Night Life in Los Angeles - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“It became very clear to me that I could use Uber and have the kind of life I wanted,” he said. “I feel like I found a way to take the best parts of my New York lifestyle, and incorporate them in L.A.”
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Mr. O’Connell is part of a growing contingent of urbanites who have made Ubering (it’s as much a verb as “Googling”) an indispensable part of their day and especially their night life. Untethered from their vehicles, Angelenos are suddenly free to drink, party and walk places.
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If you’re going to go to a party, you either don’t drink or you Uber there and Uber back, and problem solved.”
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Walmart's Visible Hand - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Conservatives — with the backing, I have to admit, of many economists — normally argue that the market for labor is like the market for anything else. The law of supply and demand, they say, determines the level of wages, and the invisible hand of the market will punish anyone who tries to defy this law.
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Specifically, this view implies that any attempt to push up wages will either fail or have bad consequences. Setting a minimum wage, it’s claimed, will reduce employment and create a labor surplus, the same way attempts to put floors under the prices of agricultural commodities used to lead to butter mountains, wine lakes and so on
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Pressuring employers to pay more, or encouraging workers to organize into unions, will have the same effect.
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The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.
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In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
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From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.
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Oklahoma cases solved: DNA tests used. - 0 views
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Developments in the field of DNA research and technology have resulted in an overall greater understanding of the truth of the past. Human remains of six people who died in 2013 were tested for DNA and have effectively been identified. These technological and scientific advancements allow us to have a more complete, truthful understanding of the past.
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