Decline and fall of the Italian villa: Haunting images of the forgotten palaces which are now spectacular ruins

• Photographer charts decline of country homes from Piedmont to Tuscany
•  
• Believed to be more than 300 ghost villages - 'paesi fantasma' - in Italy

By Nick Enoch
PUBLISHED: 08:14 EST, 1 August 2012 | UPDATED: 09:11 EST, 1 August 2012 


A grand staircase lies in ruins - the steps have crumbled; its ornate railings covered in dust. On the decaying, bare walls, a splash of coloured panelling provides the last vestige of splendour.

This once-great Italian villa would most likely have been home to nobility during the Renaissance - but now, it and many others have been abandoned.
Yet there is still beauty to be found - frescoes depicting angels and rustic scenes, and vaulted ceilings which have managed to ward off the ravages of time.

To document their sad demise, photographer Thomas Jorion has roamed the north of the country - from Piedmont and Lombardy to Tuscany and Emilia Romagna - for his gallery series, entitled Forgotten Palaces.
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Nuclear decay: Haunting images show the remnants of the Manhattan Project mission to build first atomic bomb

 

 

End of the line: Spectacular photographs show abandoned railway stations left to crumble and decay

Maps: The Secrets Drillers Can Hide About the Fracking in Your Backyard

By Tim McDonnell

| Wed Aug. 1, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

 

A new analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council shows that most states where fracking occurs have no disclosure laws at all, and that those that do are woefully behind when it comes to revealing behind-the-scenes details of their operations. While the Obama administration has put some new rules in place, many decisions about what drillers are allowed to hide are left to the states;

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar complained to Reuters that state-level regulation is "not good enough for me, because states are at very different levels, some have zero, some have decent rules."

That's a problem, study author Amy Mall said, because unlike coal plants and other large-scale energy operations, fracked natural gas wells are often in close proximity to houses, schools, or other high-traffic areas.

At stake is a trove of information: exact ingredients of the chemical cocktail used to frack a particular site, when and where drillers plan to frack, how toxic wastewater is to be dealt with, and many more basic details, all of which could be useful to local politicians and residents concerned about health impacts, groundwater and air pollution, and seismic activity associated with fracking.

"The state laws on the books aren't anywhere near where they need to be for the public to have information to protect their communities," Mall said.

The maps below highlight just a few areas covered by the report. Click on states for info on their laws, and for more detail check out the full version here. 
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Harvard Scientists to Build Iron Man-like Suit for Military

Harvard University scientists are working on an Iron Man-like smart suit that could improve soldiers' endurance in war zones.

By Sharon Gaudin
Thu, July 19, 2012

 

Computerworld   — Harvard University scientists are working on an Iron Man-like smart suit that could improve soldiers' endurance in war zones.

 The university received a $2.6 million research grant for the project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense.

The suit, which is expected to include sensors and its own energy source, will be designed to delay the onset of fatigue, enabling soldiers to travel further in the field, while also supporting the body and protecting it from injuries when the soldier is carrying heavy loads.

A team of bioengineers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard will work on the project.

The suit is designed to be lightweight, efficient and nonrestrictive, according to Harvard. It will be made from soft, wearable devices that will be connected to stretchable sensors for monitoring the body's biomechanics.

Another technology that is expected to be part of the suit will produce low-level vibrations that should increase the body's sensory functions and should give the wearer a better sense of balance.
This isn't the first effort to build a wearable mechanism that can bolster the human body.
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Shocking satellite images of how drought is impacting U.S. crops

These maps just released from the Ecology and Agriculture Spatial Analysis Laboratory at Kansas State University and Farm Futures show the impact of this summer's severe heat wave and drought on U.S. crops. They're based on satellite data taken over a two-week period.
Here's a comparison of this year's vegetation to the 23-year average for this period (brown indicates 'decreased biomass' and green indicates 'increased biomass):

 And here's a comparison to last year alone:

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Step away from the soda, says biologist: Fizzy drinks can cause permanent weight gain

Good news for the Bloomberg campaign against big sugary drinks. New study says frequent consumption could lead to lasting metabolic damage.

 By Meena Hart Duerson / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 7:24 PM

 A British biologist has a message for soda lovers: step away from the fizz!

Dr. Hans-Peter Kubis, the director of the Health Exercise and Rehabilitation group at Bangor University in England, has found that regularly drinking soda can not only cause weight gain but can actually change the metabolism in the human body, potentially triggering a whole host of other medical problems.

“If you’re thirsty and think of reaching for a sugary soft drink - don’t - it can compromise your long-term health,” the University warned in a statement publicizing Kubis’s findings.

His study, published in the European Journal of Nutrition in June, looked at the effects of increased soda intake on a group of 11 men and women described as “lightly active, healthy, lean subjects with sporadic soft drink consumption.”

This group was given sugar-sweetened beverages over a course of four weeks while researchers kept track of their vitals.

The study found that even in that short time, the extra soda led their bodies to process calories differently, switching to “an inefficient metabolism.”

“Regularly drinking soft drinks changes the way our muscles use food as fuel, making them prefer to burn sugars over fats,” researchers found, noting the research indicated “these changes are lasting.
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Mitt Romney Olympic Archive Still Off-Limits

Mitt Romney at a news conference
about the 2002 Winter Olympics

July 23, 2012, ABC News

More than a decade has passed since Mitt Romney presided over the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, but the archival records from those games that were donated to the University of Utah to provide an unprecedented level of transparency about the historic event, remain off limits to the public. And some of the documents that may have shed the most light on Romney's stewardship of the Games were likely destroyed by Salt Lake Olympic officials. 

The archivists involved in preparing the documents for public review told ABC News that financial documents, contracts, appointment calendars, emails and correspondence are likely not included in the 1,100 boxes of Olympic records, and will not be part of the collection that will ultimately be made public. 

The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics represent a crucial chapter in the Romney biography -- his selection to oversee the Games came in the wake of a bribery scandal.  

Romney ... frequently cites the experience as part of what qualifies him to assume the presidency. But the absence of publicly available records that detail the decisions he made while running the games has increasingly become an uneasy subject for the library, which has for months been receiving inquiries from journalists and other researchers trying to subject Romney's version of the events to an analysis based on documents from the events. 

Romney [has] already faced criticism for his decisions to keep secret some of his past tax records and some details about his investment holdings.

Note: For lots more from reliable major media sources on institutional secrecy, click here.

Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals

Exploiting gaps in global tax rules.

July 21, 2012, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)

The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy. James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

"This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and – most importantly – to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries," Henry says. John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network [commented]

"Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people. This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich."

In total, 10 million individuals around the world hold assets offshore, according to Henry's analysis; but almost half of the minimum estimate of $21tn – $9.8tn – is owned by just 92,000 people. Note: Henry's report, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited, is available here.

For more on this, click here.