Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens…
This spring the World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated the early completion the 2015 development goal of bringing improved drinking water to an additional two billion people since 1990. The feat was a landmark in securing what the U.N. General Assembly declared in 2010 was a universal human right: “access to safe and clean water.” In…
Combine the tree-ring growth record with historical information, climate records, and computer-model projections of future climate trends, and you get a grim picture for the future of trees in the southwestern United States. That’s the word from a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Arizona, and…
NASA’s Curiosity rover is getting ready to take its first scoop of Martian soil. The analysis of the soil sample will be one of the rover’s most crucial tasks, helping establish whether Gale Crater ever offered favorable conditions for life. First, Curiosity started to prepare by using one of its wheels to scuff the soil…
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark…
A U.S. federal court of appeals upheld the right of environmental regulators to curb harmful carbon emissions via clean car standards and limit industrial pollution from new power plants. The court rejected a series of lawsuits that had been filed against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, which included coal,…