Leid Stories—Heed This Warning! FREE YOUR MIND!—08.25.17

Another week in Bizarro Land. Another week of peddling fast but going nowhere. We’re still looking for answers in all the wrong places and from all the wrong people. It’s “Free Your Mind Friday,” our weekly open forum, on Leid Stories. Let your light dispel the darkness that surrounds us. Call 888-874-4888. Download this episode (right click and save)

Children get more satisfaction from relationships with their pets than with siblings

Children get more satisfaction from relationships with their pets than with their brothers or sisters, according to new research from the University of Cambridge. Children also appear to get on even better with their animal companions than with siblings. The research adds to increasing evidence that household pets may have a major influence on child development, and could have a …

Salvaged Trees Become Living-Roof Garden Arbor

Jeremy Harper is used to making something out of nothing. For 20 years he has worked as an arborist and site clearer which has taken him across the United Kingdom, often repurposing would-be waste materials and giving them a new lease of life. But he admits that he has surprised himself with a personal project to build a living arbor …

Todd C. Frankel – Africa’s Cobalt Pipeline: Where Your Mobile Phone Starts

he sun was rising over one of the richest mineral deposits on Earth, in one of the poorest countries, as Sidiki Mayamba got ready for work. Mayamba is a cobalt miner. And the red-dirt savanna stretching outside his door contains such an astonishing wealth of cobalt and other minerals that a geologist once described it as a “scandale geologique.” This …

Could bread mold build a better rechargeable battery?

You probably don’t think much of fungi, and especially those that turn bread moldy, but researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 17, 2016 have evidence that might just change your mind. Their findings suggest that a red bread mold could be the key to producing more sustainable electrochemical materials for use in rechargeable batteries. The researchers show …

Carbon dioxide captured from air converted directly to methanol fuel for the first time

They’re making fuel from thin air at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. For the first time, researchers there have directly converted carbon dioxide from the air into methanol at relatively low temperatures. The work, led by G.K. Surya Prakash and George Olah of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is part of a broader effort to …

Resistance Radio – Doug Zachary – 12.20.15

Doug Zachary. He is 65 years old was born to Okie migrant farm laborers in California in 1949. From age 4-13 he lived in an ultra-nationalist orphanage near Dallas, Texas whose politics and pedagogy was informed by the John Birch Society. Like all his fellow male “inmates”, Doug wound up in the Marine Corps where he was awakened to a lifetime of radical curiosity, resistance and struggle.