TWiGL

Meanwhile, in Haiti…

The cholera epidemic affecting Haiti looks set to be far worse than officials had thought, experts fear…

Rather than affecting the predicted 400,000, it could be twice that…

“We really need to reconstruct water and sanitation systems for the cholera epidemic to go away completely.”

(Source: BBC)

Kuwait is fatter than the US?

Not the most glorious achievement, but a little surprising.  Granted, I don’t know any Kuwaitis, so what do I know?  This is just sad all over though, with economic and technological advancement comes obesity?  We can do better than that - designers, engineers, thinkers…  

via GOOD.  and of course the paper they’re referencing has pretty data visualizations you can link to.

Global Challenges

Taken from The Guardian’s writeup of The Royal Society’s 10 Questions that science must answer.

How do we ensure humanity survives and flourishes?

This is the context in which all the exciting discoveries and explorations are going to happen. We certainly can survive but we can only do it by thinking in a rather larger and more collective way than we’re accustomed to at the moment. The natural sciences will need to work in conjunction with the social sciences and governance if we are to ensure we will address challenges in an effective way. The challenges lie not so much in the natural sciences but in the social sciences and governance.

Why might we not survive? We are hitting a number of very obvious resource limitations in terms of consumption and emissions. Some prefer to deny the importance or existence of anthropogenic climate change but I think there’s no doubt at all. It’s very clear that the framework is solid; we are heading for a warmer Earth and it is going to have a lot of consequences, among which will be increasing conflict and dangers of us not collectively surviving in the end. We need to head off the thing happening at all, if we can, and we need to head off the consequences in terms of conflict and ultimate conflagration.

Underlying all our problems is that we are over-running the Earth. That’s not to say that we should panic about it, but it is something we should discuss openly and manage. This is a challenge we can meet if we think more collectively. We’re not good at doing that, especially in our current ethos. In the last 50 years, we have moved away from collective thinking: people are set up and educated more and more in the western style to compete. This is not a good way of solving these problems. On the small scale, and on a level playing field, the free-market structures are great; they’re exactly what we need to flourish. But they don’t work at all on the global scale, and it is there where we have to address the best way of going about it.

We need a democracy that recognises that these large things matter. That’s the conundrum, really, to see how we can use the security and individual freedom that comes out of the ballot box with sensible collective behaviour. That’s something that is not been solved and it is a problem for social science and natural science working together.

John Sulston is chairing the Royal Society’s study on people and the planet.