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 This is just great.

What´s new about the new science of cities?

Three quarters of Britain’s juniper is found in Scotland, where it’s important not only to local gin production but also to wildlife, such as the juniper shield bug. Plantlife Scotland has published a free guide to help both professional and amateur botanists and horticulturalists identify, survey and protect the plants. Anyone can participate in the group’s survey and guardianship project.

(via Protect British juniper or risk losing gin’s distinctive flavour (Wired UK))

Earthprints: Aletsch Glacier

One of Europe’s biggest glaciers, the Great Aletsch, coils 14 miles through the Swiss Alps - and yet this mighty river of ice could almost vanish in the lifetimes of people born today because of climate change. The glacier, 900 meters (2,950 feet) thick at one point, has retreated about 3 km (1.9 miles) since 1870 and that pace is quickening, as with many other glaciers around the globe.

That is feeding more water into the oceans and raising world sea levels. It was only after I got down onto the ice, with spikes on my boots for grip and often roped to my guide for safety, that I appreciated the full scale of the glacier, on the south side of the Jungfraujoch railway station.

And yet even the Great Aletsch glacier, the biggest in the Alps and visible from space, is under threat from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from factories, power plants and cars that are blamed for global warming. (REUTERS) Photography by Denis Balibouse/REUTERS Read: Vast Alpine glacier could almost vanish by 2100 due to warming See more photos of the Great Aletsch and our other slideshows on Yahoo News.

Ubiome is an unusual startup. The three-year-old sequences the collected microbes in the human body and sells $89 kits to those curious to understand their own microbiome better. Now uBiome founders and academics Jessica Richman and Zachary Apte — who’ve raised $6.5 million from investors like Andreessen Horowitz for the San Francisco company — are taking an even more unusual step. They’re launching an AngelList Syndicate to fund other microbiome startups.

uBiome’s Founders Launch A Microbiome Syndicate on AngelList | TechCrunch

Study: Superconducting Technologies Will Soon Be Used for Transportation, Power Storage

Want to know more about how millions of people are forced to pick cotton by the Government of Uzbekistan every year?

This video explains the issue clearly in just two minutes:

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the myriad of options in the haircare section of your local store, but it turns out that of all those products, the formula within most shampoo and conditioner doesn’t vary much across brands. 

A new Y Combinator company, Function of Beauty, is looking to change all that.

The company lets the user choose a scent and describe their own hair type, with options from straight to curly, dry to oily, and thin to coarse hair. From there, users can choose different hair goals, combining things like strengthening to heat protection to anti-frizz. 

Function of Beauty currently offers 450 million different combinations based on hair type and goals.

(via Function Of Beauty, Backed By Y Combinator, Offers Customized Shampoo And Conditioner | TechCrunch)

How To Make Solar Cells Without Toxic Materials

Researchers find non-toxic way to make thin film solar cells…

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Image: “A surfactant template guides the self-assembly of functional polymer structures in an aqueous solution” by Youngkyu Han and Renee Manning, via Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The problem comes from people whose opinions are actually misconceptions. If you think vaccines cause autism you are expressing something factually wrong, not an opinion. The fact that you may still believe that vaccines cause autism does not move your misconception into the realm of valid opinion. Nor does the fact that many other share this opinion give it any more validity… You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What’s that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that’s not what actually happened. No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.

Yes, Your Opinion Can Be Wrong | Houston Press

This whole article.

Education does not exist to persecute you. 

(via witch-boots)