Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?
Making progress on family planning will require not only principles and commitments, but successful implementation, which must include four crucial elements, says John May of the US-based think tank Centre for Global Development. Millions of women, particularly in developing countries, lack information on — and access to — family planning services. This not only jeopardizes…
Linton Weeks’s thought-provoking post on the right of plants to evolve reports on the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that helps communities develop laws that recognize ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. The CELDF’s work is not unprecedented; in 2008 Ecuador granted nature the constitutional right to the maintenance and regeneration of…
Two American economists won the Nobel Prize in economics for their research into how to match different actors in given markets, such as job seekers with employers and patients with donated kidneys. Alvin Roth of Harvard University and Lloyd Shapley of the University of California Los Angeles won the prize “for the theory of stable…
New research indicates that life might be able to survive on some of the odder exoplanets discovered so far – from scorching hot worlds with molten surfaces to freezing balls of ice. Habitable planets are usually defined as those where liquid water can exist. But not all exoplanets orbit, like Earth, at a fairly constant…
Swimming in schools allows fish to detect threats more easily, and new research — in which fish were placed in something of a video game — suggests schooling behavior actively deters predators.
Despite great medical advances that have lengthened human life spans, your chances of living a very long life may be lower than you’d hoped. That’s the conclusion of a study by two longevity experts who reviewed the standard models that predict mortality rates and turned up a major error. Instead of confirming that death rates…