TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Can the free market save tigers from extinction? "How do we save [tigers] and other endangered species? Well, here's an idea: Let's eat them!" That was ABC reporter John Stossel on last Friday's edition of the newsmagazine 20/20. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Voyage to the Pacific Ocean's garbage patch: Eureka! Editor's Note: Scuba instructor and underwater videographer Drew Wheeler is traveling on board the Algalita Marine Research Foundation's 50-foot (15.2-meter) Ocean Research Vessel, Alguita, on a two-month voyage to sample and study portions of a 10-million-square-mile (25.9-million-square-kilometer) oval known as the North Subtropical Gyre (aka "Pacific garbage patch"). Wheeler and the rest of the Alguita crew left Long Beach, Calif., on June 10 with a plan to cross the International Date Line and investigate regions of reported high plastic concentrations, northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. This is his third blog post for ScientificAmerican.com.June 23, 2009 [More] rss.sciam.com |
High Hopes for High-Speed Rail Widespread high-speed rail service, last seen in the U.S. during the Hoover administration (when passenger trains ran faster than they do today), stands ready for its comeback. Last November California voters approved a $10-billion bond toward a rail system that will move passengers the 432 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles in just over two and a half hours. The federal stimulus package sets aside $8 billion to jump-start rail projects around the country, and the Obama administration has pledged another $1 billion a year for the next five years for high-speed rail.Infatuations with high-speed rail systems have come to the U.S. before, of course--most recently, Texas and Florida trumpeted regional plans, only to abandon them after a few years. But advocates now see a difference. "It's more than plans this time, it's money," says James RePass, chair of the National Corridors Initiative. [More] rss.sciam.com |
MIND Reviews: Neuro-Economic Boom Does sex really persuade us to buy a product? Why do economies slip into depressions? And how much do we let our emotions influence our decision making? A spate of new books tries to answer these and other questions about how we make our choices, why they are sometimes so far off the mark and what their consequences are. Animal Spirits--How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009) examines the relation between economic fluctuations and psychological forces. Economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller explore how “animal spirits”--the term coined by economist John Maynard Keynes to describe levels of consumer confidence--lie at the core of such questions as why there is unemployment and why minorities are often particularly poor. [More] rss.sciam.com |
What Is the Right Number to Combat Climate Change? This December, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen to add more hot air to efforts to combat climate change. That is so because although the impacts humanity would like to avoid--fire, flood and drought, for starters--are clear, the right numbers to halt global warming are not. Despite decades of effort, scientists do not know precisely what temperatures or greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere constitute a danger. [More] rss.sciam.com |