Honey bees study finds that insects have personality too

A new study in Science suggests that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates. Some honey bees, too, are more likely than others to seek adventure. The brains of these novelty-seeking bees exhibit distinct patterns of gene activity in molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans, researchers report.

The findings offer a new window on the inner life of the honey bee hive, which once was viewed as a highly regimented colony of seemingly interchangeable workers taking on a few specific roles (nurse or forager, for example) to serve their queen. Now it appears that individual honey bees actually differ in their desire or willingness to perform particular tasks, said University of Illinois entomology professor and Institute for Genomic Biology director Gene Robinson, who led the study. These differences may be due, in part, to variability in the bees' personalities, he said. The study team also included researchers from Wellesley College and Cornell University.

"In humans, differences in novelty-seeking are a component of personality," he said. "Could insects also have personalities?"

Robinson and his colleagues studied two behaviors that looked like novelty-seeking in honey bees: scouting for nest sites and scouting for food.

Read More:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-honey-bees-insects-personality.html

John Nichols - What America Lost When Dennis Kucinich Lost

Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a two-time presidential candidate who for the past decade has been the most consistent critic of war and militarism in the US House of Representatives, was defeated Tuesday in a Democratic primary that pitted him against fellow progressive Marcy Kaptur.

Kucinich was the first electoral victim of the current round of redistricting, which saw congressional districts redrawn in states across the country after the 2010 Census. A Republican governor and legislature carved up northern Ohio districts with an eye toward eliminating at least one Democratic seat, and they achieved their goal by forcing Kucinich and Kaptur into the same district.

That district favored Kaptur and, after a hard-fought race she prevailed by a fifty-six to thirty-nine margin, with the remainder going to a third candidate.

Read More:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/166641/what-america-lost-when-dennis-kucinich-lost

Bill McKibben - Women Lead Charge for Another Keystone XL Victory

Today was... quite a day. The bell that people struck last August when they sat in at the White House to block the Keystone Pipeline was still resonating. Not loudly -- the oil money in Congress muffled the sound. But loudly enough that we squeaked through by a 4-Senator margin, defeating a Republican amendment mandating the pipeline's construction.

A year ago almost no one had heard of the pipeline. Even four months ago, a poll of 300 "energy insiders" still found 97 percent predicting it would get its permit. But it didn't -- TransCanada can of course re-apply, but that will be another battle, down the road. For now, people power (the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years, 800,000 messages to the Senate in a single day, bodies encircling the White House shoulder to shoulder five deep) overturned the odds.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/08-13

Joe Quinn - The 'Kony 2012' Delusion

The people behind this campaign are MASSIVELY misguided. Or it's a CIA-sponsored psy-ops.

Take for example the fact that one of the 12 'policy makers' (US politicians) that they are targeting to help them ensure Kony is arrested is George 'Dubya' Bush. The puppet president who presided over the murder of 1.5 million Iraqi civilians. And we're all meant to believe that people like him are going to care about the plight of Ugandan children? Kony is Bush's ideological brother for god's sake.

Other than their complete ignorance of the fact that the US political elite is populated by the world's worst war criminals, the makers of this video are also massively ignorant of the truth about WHY Uganda, and many other African nations, are subjected to the brutal excesses of war lords and have been for so many decades.

Read More:

http://joequinn.net/2012/03/08/the-kony-2012-delusion/

Matt Stoller - GAO: Almost Half of Bailed Banks Repaid the Government With Money “From Other Federal Programs”

The Government Accountability Office continues its subtle war on the talking point used by Treasury that “TARP made money”. Here’s the GAO, with a report out today.

As of January 31, 2012, 341 institutions had exited CPP, almost half by repaying CPP with funds from other federal programs. Institutions continue to exit CPP, but the number of institutions missing scheduled dividend or interest payments has increased.

Much of the government-supplied TARP funding (to small banks) was replaced by the Small Business Lending Fund passed in 2010, which Republicans called “TARP 2.0″.  The larger banks, however, where much of the bank-based credit creation in the economy takes place, didn’t use this program.  Instead, they got an implicit subsidy of between $6B and $300B a year from the widespread belief that the government will not let their bondholders lose money.

Read More:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/03/gao-almost-half-of-bailed-banks-repaid-the-government-with-money-from-other-federal-programs.html

Ann Jones - Tomgram: Ann Jones, Playing the Game in Afghanistan

How primitive the Afghans are!  A New York Times account of faltering negotiations over a possible “strategic partnership” agreement to leave U.S. troops on bases in that country for years to come highlights just how far the Afghans have to go to become, like their U.S. mentor, a mature democracy.  Take the dispute over prisons.  Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been insisting that the U.S. turn over its prison facility at Bagram Air Base to his government.  (The recently burned Korans came from that prison’s library.)  The Obama administration initially refused and now has suggested a six-month timetable for such a turnover, an option Karzai has, in turn, rejected.  No one, by the way, seems yet to be negotiating about a second $36-million prison at Bagram that, TomDispatch recently reported, the U.S. is now in the process of building.

The Times’ Alissa Rubin suggests, however, that a major stumbling block remains to any such turnover.  She writes: “The challenges to a transfer are enormous, presenting serious security risks both for the Afghan government and American troops. Many of the estimated 3,200 people being detained [in Bagram’s prison] cannot be tried under Afghan law because the evidence does not meet the legal standards required to be admitted in Afghan courts. Therefore, those people, including some suspected insurgents believed likely to return to the fight if released, would probably have to be released because Afghanistan has no law that allows for indefinite detention for national security reasons.”

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175513/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_playing_the_game_in_afghanistan/

Gar Smith - Flare-up: How the Sun Could Put an End to Nuclear Power

Solar energy may soon eclipse nuclear power — only not in the way we hoped. According to NASA, the planet will soon face an outbreak of powerful solar flares capable of collapsing global power grids. Were this to happen, the world's reactors could be left to run wild, overheat, melt down, and explode. As this is being written, the strongest solar storm in six years is barreling toward the Earth at 4 million miles per hour.

The sun's magnetic cycle peaks every 22 years while sunspot activity crests every 11 years. Both events are set to peak in 2013. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) trigger geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) — tides of high-energy particles that can disrupt power lines. Since the 1970s, the array of high-voltage transmission lines spanning the US has grown tenfold. NASA warns these interconnected networks can be energized by a solar flare, causing "an avalanche of blackouts carried across continents [that] … could last for weeks to months." A National Academy of Sciences report estimates a "century-class" solar storm could cause 20 times the damage as Hurricane Katrina while "full recovery could take four to ten years."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/08-7

Joseph de la Torre Dwyer - The CFPB vs. Student Loan Sharks

College students today take on more debt than ever with fewer prospects of paying that money back. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that 27 percent of education borrowers have past due balances.

This stems from a few causes. For starters, average college tuition has more than doubled since the 1980s in inflation-adjusted dollars. This means that college costs have risen significantly faster than the average family’s income. At the same time, grant-based financial aid has remained virtually flat. As a result, most students and families find no other recourse but to use loans—a financial instrument about which, all too often, they possess incomplete, confusing, or inaccurate information.

Now those students and their families have a powerful ally: The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Read More:

http://www.policyshop.net/home/2012/3/8/the-cfpb-vs-student-loan-sharks.html

Diane Ravitch - Flunking Arne Duncan

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan loves evaluation. He insists that everyone should willingly submit to public grading of the work they do. The Race to the Top program he created for the Obama Administration requires states to evaluate all teachers based in large part on the test scores of their students. When the Los Angeles Times released public rankings that the newspaper devised for thousands of teachers, Duncan applauded and asked, “What’s there to hide?” Given Duncan’s enthusiasm for grading educators, it seems high time to evaluate his own performance as Secretary of Education.

Here are his grades:

Read More:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/07/flunking-arne-duncan/

10,000 GM Customers Tell Auto Giant: Stop Funding Climate Deniers

General Motors, a company that has made strides to lower the carbon footprint of driving, is taking heat from 10,000 of its customers for a donation its charitable foundation made to an institute that casts doubt on climate science, according to a report from McClatchy.

The outrage stems from a leaked internal document from the rightwing Heartland Institute that was made public last month. A detailed strategy and funding memorandum, the document showed that GM had given the group $30,000 since 2010. 

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/08-1