Rotundus.com

Legal euthanasia has not led to more cases in the Netherlands

"While there was a slight decrease in the years after euthanasia was made legal in 2002, assisted suicide has now returned to pre-legalisation levels of around 2.8% of all deaths, the researchers from four Dutch teaching hospitals and the national statistics office CBS found. And while opponents of euthanasia had warned the legislation would lead to a sharp rise in involuntary euthanasia among terminally-ill patients, there has actually been a reduction in this sort of deaths"

Prison population not rising despite critics’ predictions on Tories’ tough-on-crime laws: Vic Toews

"The number of inmates in federal prisons as of June 30 stood at 14,965, Toews said, almost 3,000 below the level predicted for this year in 2009 by the Corrections Service of Canada and far below what the opposition in Parliament has been warning."

Fracking Did Not Sully Aquifers, Limited Study Finds

A brief excerpt of the article itself: "None of the saline water contamination correlated with the location of shale gas wells. And the results were consistent with water quality tests conducted in the 1980’s, years before hydraulic fracturing began in the area. The discovery also supports the group’s earlier findings that wells near fracking operations had elevated levels of methane but no detectable contamination from fracturing fluids or brines." The extra methane does seem like something to take note of

Woman's call to end video game misogyny sparks vicious online attacks

I somehow doubt you'll find a more realistic portrayal of men in the romance fiction genre (90% of whose readers are female and also the bestselling fiction genre) than you find of women in video games. One problem with the internet is that it's relatively anonymous, meaning that it's generally hard to filter out the crazies... even more so than the spammers. (Just pick a random article from any random newspaper that's got more than one or two comments and you're almost guaranteed to find a few crazy ones). It's not always crazy men making nasty comments about women - sometimes it's women making such comments - e.g. the president of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Unexpected sex differences in brain development

"A team of researchers from the NIH recently released some of the most comprehensive research yet on sex differences in brain development, as measured by high-resolution MRI scans. ... What's particularly interesting about this new report is that the NIH group found that sex differences diminish as a function of age, from age 9 through age 22." Perhaps the differences between men and women aren't entirely a matter of socialization...

Wind farm scrapped over fears for birds

"Docking Shoal scheme shelved and £10m wasted on the £1.5bn wind power project that could have powered 400,000 homes" - I've mentioned before that wind turbines kill birds and that wind projects are often treated different - but in this case it's a $2.4 billion wind farm getting scrapped over an estimate of 94 bird deaths per year. (That's about $25 million per estimated bird death per year). The Telegraph reports slightly lower bird death estimates - with that study reporting an estimate of about 71 with the 94 killed by the sum of the other approved projects.

Quebec forum seeks French word for 'hashtag'

"English words like "email" and "networking" pepper digital and economic parlance in the French-speaking world, to the chagrin of the attendees at the first French Language World Forum, who are struggling to find French alternatives." - wonder if they'll send the language police after people who fail to replace the words they're currently used with the new ones brought up by this forum. Also gets into the difficulties in new works migrating between Quebec, European, and African French.

Briton jailed for four years in Dubai after customs find cannabis weighing less than a grain of sugar under his shoe

The problem of zero-tolerance policies: "A search by customs officials uncovered a speck of cannabis weighing just 0.003g - so small it would be invisible to the naked eye and weighing less than a grain of sugar - on the tread of one of his shoes." Found in another article looking at new scanning technologies that might soon invade an airport near you.

White House expands Title IX support to science, tech

Will quotas restricting the number of male scientists be imposed in the US? Somehow I'm guessing that these rules will likely ignore the female-majority fields - e.g. biology. Interestingly in the US post-title-IX implementation there's actually a greater gender disparity in the number of degrees issued (previously 17% fewer degrees to women, now 25% fewer degrees to men).

That's the argument at least of a recent Nature article. For those who prefer slightly less academic English, here's a bit of a summary from the Telegraph:

Grasslands, savannahs and forests are in a constant battle. Savannah is the area which is being fought over at any one time: can the trees establish themselves in sufficient numbers to create forest or is there something holding them back from doing so? A lack of CO2 in the atmosphere, seems to be the limiting factor. If we increase the amount of CO2 then the trees do better and new forests grow.

Burning more fossil fuels therefore seems likely to grow several new Amazon style forests across Africa and Latin America.

It seems that previous research has really focused on how commercially-important crops perform under increased CO2 concentrations. BTW, here's the author's view of climate change:

I don't think the whole thing is a scam. I do think that the economy with the truth comes at this point, where we're trying to work out how large the effects are going to be. I seriously suspect that positive feedbacks are talked up while negative ones are downplayed leading to the overall effect being exaggerated.

That strikes me as a not-unreasonable view.