How much is 13 billion dollars worth? It’s enough to put you in the top 100 richest people in the world, or out rank 70 country’s GDPs. It’s also the annual revenue pharmaceutical companies generate on ADHD medication in the United States.

ADHD diagnosis have been on the rise in the last decade, putting it second only to asthma as the most common childhood diagnosis. For many of the 11 percent of kids in America with an ADHD diagnosis, the answer has been to throw pills at the problem.

But is it effective? One study that followed students for more than 3 years didn’t find any increase in performance or improved grades.

The amphetamine Adderall is chemically similar to methamphetamine and causes a similar reaction in the brain. Both increase synaptic levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.

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According to the Alliance of World Scientists, a group comprised of over 15,000 scientists from over 184 countries, humans need to change their individual consumption and behavior… soon.

Among encouraging people to lower their use of fossil fuels and reduce their reproduction rates — because, [according to them], the Earth can’t sustain all of us — they urged folks to, essentially, go vegan.

They (eerily) issued a similar warning 25 years ago, talking about how rapid consumption and reproduction, as individual behaviors, could lead to ocean dead zones, ozone depletion, forest cover loss, decline in marine life, and loss of biodiversity.

While the warnings are the same, the warning this time around is a bit more severe, as the environmental impacts have gotten significantly worse. The group’s statement is clear.

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For at least three decades scientists and environmental activists have been warning that the world is on the verge of a global warming “apocalypse” that will flood coastal cities, tear up roads and bridges with mega-storms and bring widespread famine and misery to much of the world.

The only solution, they say, is to rid the world of fossil fuels — coal, natural gas and oil — that serve as the pillars of modern society.

Only quick, decisive global action can avert the worst effects of manmade climate change, warn international bodies like the United Nations, who say we only have decades left — or even less!

Of course, human civilization has not collapsed, despite decades of predictions that we only have years left to avert disaster. Ten years ago, the U.N. predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.”

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Notorious New York City businessman, and World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein, scored another post 9/11 windfall this week, after Silverstein properties reached a $95 million dollar settlement in a civil litigation suit against American Airlines and United Continental Holdings.

The settlement, filed Tuesday with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, comes after 13 years of ‘hard fought’ litigation. In an email to Reuters, Silverstein properties’ spokesman Bud Perrone said,

“We are pleased to have finally reached a resolution to this piece of post-9/11 litigation.”

Silverstein, who signed a 99 year lease on the World Trade Center just 2 months prior to the attack, has received Over 4.5 Billion dollars stemming from post 9/11 lawsuits. In May of 2007, CBS Moneywatch reported:

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