International
On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands on their signature Doomsday Clock from 90 to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest in history.
In 1947, the bulletin created this representative timepiece to draw attention to the ever-present threat of humanity destroying itself with dangerous technology.
They first set the clock at seven minutes to midnight, and it reached an all time high of 17 minutes after the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1991.
“In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster,” said the bulletin in a statement on Tuesday.
Though originally concerned with the threat of nuclear warfare between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the message of the clock has been expanded to encompass global threats of all kinds, including climate change, disease, and the spread of misinformation.
According to the bulletin, the clock is “a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.”
At a news conference on Tuesday, the former president of Columbia and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Juan Manuel Santos, provided his thoughts on the matter.
“There is still time to make the right choices to turn back the hands of the Doomsday Clock. In Colombia, we say, ‘Cada segundo cuenta.’ Every second counts. Let us use each one wisely.”
National
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University are publishing new discoveries from their experiment gluing tiny QR codes onto bees.
The team of entomologists and engineers used glue to stick AprilTags (a kind of scaled-down QR code smaller than a human fingernail) onto more than 32,000 subjects to track their comings and goings with automatic imaging technology.
Scientists previously believed a bee’s life span lasted around 28 days, but this experiment proved them wrong as Robyn Underwood, Penn State extension educator in apiculture and co-author of the paper, told CNN.
“We’re seeing bees foraging for six weeks, and they don’t start foraging until they are already about two weeks old, so they live a lot longer than we thought,” she said.
The data showed that bees typically leave the hive for anywhere between a few minutes at a time to several hours.
“This suggests that most of the foraging that the bees do occurs very close to the hive,” study co-author Margarita López-Uribe, associate professor of entomology at Penn State, told CNN.
She suggests that this may mean that when they are not foraging, they are exploring on long journeys.
López-Uribe hopes that these techniques will become more widespread for insect research in the future:
“One of the goals of developing this system open-access and with low-cost equipment was to be able to transfer this method to be replicated across dozens (or hundreds) of landscapes.”
Local
Oklahoma Representative Justin Humphrey filed House Bill 1310, proposing the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) be renamed the “Department of Corruption.”
Humphrey announced that he does not intend to pursue the bill, only to draw attention to corruption in the legal system, especially involving Director Steven Harpe of the DOC.
“All I’m doing with that bill is calling out that Steven Harpe is one of the most corrupt individuals that I believe I’ve witnessed in all of my 35 years’ experience in state government,” Humphrey told the Oklahoman.
Among the alleged crimes, Humphrey calls out a $90,000 raise that Harpe granted to himself. When he requested documentation authorizing the request for the raise, officials informed him that it did not exist.
“Based on the claim of no records, this seems like embezzlement,” he said according to an article published by the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
Humphrey also searched for documented approval of the new department headquarters that is under construction but once again came back empty handed.
“Again, I was advised that records do not exist,” Humphrey said in the same article. “I can tell you this building is not cheap.”
These are only some of the many issues that comprise what Humphrey calls “the Oklahoma swamp.”
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