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Water securityInterstate Water Wars Are Heating Up Along with the Climate
Interstate water disputes are as American as apple pie. States often think a neighboring state is using more than its fair share from a river, lake or aquifer that crosses borders. Climate stresses are raising the stakes.
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Conspiracy theory“Deprogramming” QAnon Followers Ignores Free Will and Why They Adopted the Beliefs in the First Place
Recent calls to deprogram QAnon conspiracy followers are steeped in discredited notions about brainwashing. As popularly imagined, brainwashing is a coercive procedure that programs new long-term personality changes. Deprogramming, also coercive, is thought to undo brainwashing. Such deprogramming conversations do little to help us understand why people adopt QAnon beliefs. A deprogramming discourse fails to understand religious recruitment and conversion and excuses those spreading QAnon beliefs from accountability.
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GunsEpidemic of Firearm Injury Spurs New Wave of Research
Fifty-five years ago, America’s death toll from automobile crashes was sky-high. Nearly 50,000 people died every year from motor vehicle crashes, at a time when the nation’s population was much smaller than today. But with help from data generated by legions of researchers, the country’s policymakers and industry made changes that brought the number killed and injured down dramatically. Experts welcome new federal funding for more injury prevention research to reduce the toll of a leading cause of death while respecting Second Amendment rights.
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VirusesNew Tool Assesses Risk of Wild-Life Origin Viruses
Researchers have a developed a new framework and interactive web tool, SpillOver, which “estimates a risk score for wildlife-origin viruses, creating a comparative risk assessment of viruses with uncharacterized zoonotic spillover potential alongside those already known to be zoonotic.”
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ARGUMENT: Water crisisThe U.S. Water and Wastewater Crisis – How Many Wake-up Calls Are Enough?
In February, much of Texas plunged into darkness when the state’s electricity grid failed due to extreme cold weather conditions. What started as a foreseeable blackout quickly became a life-threatening calamity. “This catastrophe illustrates what happens when aging and inadequate infrastructure is hit by extreme rain or snow—an increasingly regular occurrence due to climate change,” Lucía Falcón Palomar, Obinna Maduka, and JoAnn Kamuf Ward write. “And, the matter extends well beyond Texas. It is easy to forget that, within U.S. borders, communities have long endured the conditions seen in Texas in February.”
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Public healthWhat Has the Pandemic Revealed about the U.S. Health Care System — and What Needs to Change?
With vaccinations for Covid-19 now underway across the nation, seven MIT scholars engaged in health and health care research share their views on what the pandemic has revealed about the U.S. health care system — and what needs to change.
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Nuclear wasteRetaining Knowledge of Nuclear Waste Management
Sandia National Laboratories have begun their second year of a project to capture important, hard-to-explain nuclear waste management knowledge from retirement-age employees to help new employees get up to speed faster. The project has experts share their experience with and knowledge of storage, transportation, and disposal with next generation scientists.
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Toxic leaksFlorida Governor Working to Prevent “Catastrophic Flood” of Toxic Wastewater in Tampa Area
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has vowed to prevent a “catastrophic flood” near the major city of Tampa. A leaking toxic wastewater reservoir has the potential to cause an environmental crisis in the region.
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BiosecurityMonitoring Current and Future Biological Threats
DHS S&T has awarded $199,648 to Mesur.io Inc., for analysis and reporting of outbreak-related data. The Mesur.io project proposes to adapt their Earthstream Platform to provide DHS and NBIC with data that tracks metrics related to an outbreak or emergence to predict various risks of a biological threat.
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Health securityU.K. Launches the U.K. Health Security Agency
On Thursday, 1 April, the U.K. launched the U.K. Health Security Agency, tasked with protecting the U.K. from future health threats and ensure the U.K. can respond to pandemics quickly and at greater scale. The primary focus for UKHSA in its initial phase of operation will be the continued fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, but the longer term goal is to work with global partners in an effort to create “a more robust international health architecture that will protect future generations.”
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China & bioweaponsBiohazard: A Look at China’s Biological Capabilities and the Recent Coronavirus Outbreak
When people think about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they tend to think of things that go “boom.” The bigger the weapon, the bigger the boom, and the worse the impact. However, not all weapons need a big boom to be effective. Every day, millions of people are affected by a weapon that has the potential to do far more damage than a nuclear bomb, a weapon we cannot see, a weapon we call germs.
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ARGUMENT: PathogensPathogens Have the World’s Attention
The novel coronavirus has demonstrated just how devastating a transmissible pathogen can be—and just how difficult to contain. Nathan Levine and Chris Li write that “the sobering truth is that, as deadly diseases go, the world got lucky. The global case fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 2 percent. One need only compare this to SARS (10 percent), smallpox (30 percent), pulmonary anthrax (80 percent), or Ebola (90 percent) to consider that the coronavirus could easily have been much, much worse.”
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Youths & gunsIntentional Youth Firearm Injuries Linked to Sociodemographic Factors
Firearm injuries are a leading and preventable cause of injury and death among youth - responsible for an estimated 5,000 deaths and 22,000 non-fatal injury hospital visits each year in American kids. The researchers identified distinct risk profiles for individuals aged 21 and younger, who arrived at emergency departments with firearm injuries over an 8-year period.
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Youths & gunsOne in Five Colorado High School Students Has Access to Firearms
Twenty percent of high school students in Colorado have easy access to a handgun, according to a new study. “Our findings highlight that it is relatively easy to access a handgun in Colorado for high school students. This finding, combined with the high prevalence of feeling sad or depressed and suicide attempts, is concerning for the safety of adolescents,” said the lead author of the study.
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Food securityClimate Change Has Cost 7 years of Ag Productivity Growth
Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a Cornell-led study shows that global farming productivity is 21 percent lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.
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More headlines
The long view
ARGUMENT: PathogensPathogens Have the World’s Attention
The novel coronavirus has demonstrated just how devastating a transmissible pathogen can be—and just how difficult to contain. Nathan Levine and Chris Li write that “the sobering truth is that, as deadly diseases go, the world got lucky. The global case fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 2 percent. One need only compare this to SARS (10 percent), smallpox (30 percent), pulmonary anthrax (80 percent), or Ebola (90 percent) to consider that the coronavirus could easily have been much, much worse.”
ARGUMENT: Water crisisThe U.S. Water and Wastewater Crisis – How Many Wake-up Calls Are Enough?
In February, much of Texas plunged into darkness when the state’s electricity grid failed due to extreme cold weather conditions. What started as a foreseeable blackout quickly became a life-threatening calamity. “This catastrophe illustrates what happens when aging and inadequate infrastructure is hit by extreme rain or snow—an increasingly regular occurrence due to climate change,” Lucía Falcón Palomar, Obinna Maduka, and JoAnn Kamuf Ward write. “And, the matter extends well beyond Texas. It is easy to forget that, within U.S. borders, communities have long endured the conditions seen in Texas in February.”