There are many downsides to hydraulic fracturing and the natural gas it's used to harvest, but for the people who work in America's booming oil and gas fields there's a positive that outweighs a lot of the problems other people worry about. At High Country News, Jonathan Thompson writes about the financial benefits fracking holds for families, especially those where the people working don't have a college degree. With fewer and fewer well-paid manufacturing jobs, hydrocarbons are one of the few industries left where your job can improve your kid's chances of reaching a higher income bracket.
For the working class and poor, fracking is one of the last bastions of upward mobility
Scientific paper about being bitten by a weird snake
Meet the leaf-nosed snake, a peculiar Madagascan species with a gift for crypsis. Reading about it I found my way to Envenomation by the Malagasy colubrid snake Langaha madagascariensis, which turns out to be "This God Damned Snake Bit Me!" written up as a formal scientific paper. To avoid harming the snake and to prevent… READ THE REST
Sasha Sagan interviews a series of inspiring female scientists
In Violet magazine, writer Sasha Sagan, author of the must-read For Small Creatures Such As We, is interviewing a series of inspiring and diverse female scientists. First up is evolutionary biologist Dr. Michelle Trautwein, "curator of flies" at the California Academy of Sciences. followed by South African chemist/nanotechnologist Dr. Tebello Nyokong of Rhodes University, and… READ THE REST
"Our brain is better at remembering where to find brownies than cherry tomatoes."
Spatial memory is the cognitive process for remembering and recalling the location of objects in relation to yourself and other objects. Turns out, our spatial memory also evolved to more easily remember where chocolate brownies than cherry tomatoes. Makes sense to me. According to researchers at Wageningen University & Research, this is because our evolutionary… READ THE REST
In five minutes, The Zebra will tell you if you're giving away money on your car insurance
With virtually everyone watching their expenses right now, it's no surprise that our car insurance policies and those dreaded monthly rates are facing closer scrutiny than ever. With car insurance costs up twice the rate of inflation over the past decade, more than half of all drivers now say they're looking to either reduce coverage,… READ THE REST
This grammar app can fix all your typos, bad punctuation, sentence disasters, and more automatically
If you read through text composed by inferior writers, rife with spelling errors, grammar problems, fractured syntax and haphazard punctuation and you aren't appalled, then you might be the target audience for the services that WhiteSmoke provide. Rather than let writers continue scribbling out copy packed with linguistic landmines, the WhiteSmoke Grammar Checker is like… READ THE REST
This adjustable height standing desk can save you from a brutal killer: inactivity.
Scientists have found there's a danger just as impactful on your health as killers that everyone talks about like obesity or smoking. This one, though, is a lot more subtle. Researchers say that the threat posed by sitting for eight hours a day with little physical activity is just as harmful as some of the… READ THE REST
