Limited access to clean sources of energy, known as energy poverty, makes nearly half the world’s population reliant on burning wood, animal waste, coal or charcoal to cook. This leads to severe respiratory diseases that kill roughly two million people worldwide each year. It is often women and children who suffer the most from indoor…
As virtuous as you might feel when you choose organic foods sweetened with brown rice syrup instead of high-fructose corn syrup, you might actually be making a potentially toxic decision. Infant formulas, cereal bars and other foods made with organic brown rice syrup are loaded with arsenic, found a new study. And while an occasional…
The tidy Swiss want to clean up space. Swiss scientists plan to launch a “janitor satellite” — a 10-million-franc ($11-million) satellite called CleanSpace One — specially designed to get rid of space junk, the orbiting debris that can do serious and costly damage to valuable satellites or even manned space ships. Its launch would come…
Internal documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago nonprofit think tank, showing its funding of leading skeptics of global warming and a plan to teach climate change skepticism in schools. An anonymous person leaked the documents to several publications and activists supporting the science of climate change. “The heart of the climate…
Half a billion children could grow up physically and mentally stunted over the next 15 years because they do not have enough to eat, according to a new report from the charity Save the Children. The survey covered families in India, Bangladesh, Peru, Pakistan and Nigeria where, the agency says, half the world’s malnourished children…
In an unlikely marriage of quantum physics and neuroscience, tiny particles called quantum dots have been used to control brain cells for the first time. Having such control over the brain could one day provide a non-invasive treatment for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression and epilepsy. In the nearer term, quantum dots could be…
It turns out that the use of electric vehicles may not be that clean after all, particularly in the world’s most populated country, China. In a recent study, Christopher Cherry, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of Tennessee, and his colleagues found that in terms of air pollution, electric vehicles were…
Jeff is ready to get married. As an Orthodox Jew, Jeff* is not leaving anything to chance: He prays every morning that he will find a wife, attends big religious singles events and maintains active profiles on three different Jewish dating sites. For people like Jeff who are seeking romance and marriage on the web,…
The president’s 2013 budget asks for modest increases for some federal science agencies but trims funding to NASA. The request takes a deep bite out of Mars and outer-planet science exploration in particular. NASA’s funding would fall to the lowest level in four years, with a total budget of $17.71 billion. The president’s request projects…
Over the years of writing and teaching, I have tried to free myself of constraints I felt, limits to the range of exploration I could make, to the kind of intuition I could credit. I realized gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt these constraints, which amount to a…