TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Beyond Fossil Fuels: David Ratcliffe on Nuclear Power Editor's note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies.What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of nuclear fission? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Rain Is Good (for Flowers, Puddles and Mud) As the official start of summer beckons on Sunday, the stretch of Seattle-like weather has been a dampening experience for people who live in New York. nytimes.com |
In Riverside Park, Relaxation on the Shore, Thrills on the Water Summer weekends bring a beach vibe to a stretch of Riverside Park, where there’s sunbathing, picnicking and even free water scooter rides on the Hudson. nytimes.com |
Why People Believe in Conspiracies After a public lecture in 2005, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. “Who is they ?” I queried. “The government,” he whispered, as if “they” might be listening at that very moment. “But didn’t Osama and some members of al Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was?” [More] rss.sciam.com |
Growing Skyscrapers: The Rise of Vertical Farms Together the world’s 6.8 billion people use land equal in size to South America to grow food and raise livestock--an astounding agricultural footprint. And demographers predict the planet will host 9.5 billion people by 2050. Because each of us requires a minimum of 1,500 calories a day, civilization will have to cultivate another Brazil’s worth of land--2.1 billion acres--if farming continues to be practiced as it is today. That much new, arable earth simply does not exist. To quote the great American humorist Mark Twain: “Buy land. They’re not making it any more.”Agriculture also uses 70 percent of the world’s available freshwater for irrigation, rendering it unusable for drinking as a result of contamination with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and silt. If current trends continue, safe drinking water will be impossible to come by in certain densely populated regions. Farming involves huge quantities of fossil fuels, too--20 percent of all the gasoline and diesel fuel consumed in the U.S. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are of course a major concern, but so is the price of food as it becomes linked to the price of fuel, a mechanism that roughly doubled the cost of eating in most places worldwide between 2005 and 2008. [More] rss.sciam.com |