Weekly round up of facts from near and far

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Going green won’t cost the earth

We at LSS strongly support UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson‘s initiative on renewable infrastructure. Of course sensible people will ask how it might be paid for. Jim Armitage of the London Evening Standard suggests the answer lies in the enormous pension pots held in the City. We’ll let Jim speak for himself, but he concludes there is a potential sum of £100 billion waiting to completely transform the economy:

Here’s a simple way Boris Johnson could get the City to put billions into his green revolution | Evening Standard

_{We thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for the lead to this story}

Let’s see all the bones

Fans of human evolution will recall the exciting 2002 find called Toumei. It was over six million years old and if it walked erect, as its discovers claimed, it was a major candidate for the original human ancestor. Problem is, according to Dan Avery of the Mail, they paid too much attention to the skull, and not enough to the post cranial material- things like leg bones etc. In a box alongside Toumai’s head was a femur which may or may not have belonged to the creature-and which told a different story. Then suddenly it seemed to vanish after some other researchers had studied it. All very mysterious, and all centred on the University of Poitiers in France. Read on!

Humanoid that lived 6 million years ago walked on all fours and may be closer to chimps than humans | Daily Mail Online

Education for girls will help us all

Nothing so holds back humanity as the systematic oppression and blind prejudice which denies education to girls in third world countries. We’ve linked to a charity called Care who have made it their business to tackle this societal atrocity head on. Here’s just one little cherrypick from their site:

Nearly two-thirds of the 77 million children not attending school worldwide are girls.

Need we say more?

Educating girls | CARE (careinternational.org.uk)

Fake News, Hoaxes and the clash of belief and reason

Earlier this week, we moaned that one of the curses of our age is ability of people to dump fake news into the internet in sufficient quantities to change people’s beliefs about what is “real”. According to The Conversation, hoaxes have been round for a very long time. Here’s a well-written piece by Keith Williams about the Great Moon Hoax of the nineteenth century, and how it depended on what people wanted to be true. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

Batmen and unicorns: inside the original moon hoax (theconversation.com)

That’s enough reading for this week for us all-enjoy your Saturday night,and we hope that your team was one of the successful ones.

#greatmoonhoax #Care #fakenews #womensrights #sahelanthropus #greeneconomy #borisjohnson #pensionfunds #paleontology