How the big picture changes from tiny beginnings: It pays to think small when forecasting environmental change. That’s “small” as in bacteria, atmospheric molecules, or beetles. Individual activity on this small scale can add up to major environmental effects that computer-based forecast modeling doesn’t adequately cover. [CSM]

How humans are putting the planet in peril: Man-made global warming is producing significant change on Earth, according to a study that has put together decades of data to reveal changes that range from the loss of ice sheets to the collapse of wildlife populations. [Telegraph]

Malibu to ban plastic bags: Supermarkets and other large retailers will have about six months to comply, smaller vendors up to a year. The action follows a number of other efforts in California to ban plastic bags. [LA Times]

May 15th, 2008 at 10:34 am

This article is filed under Blog, Environment.

Remember ‘go outside and play?’: Overbearing parents have taken the fun out of childhood and turned it into a grind. [LA Times]

Kidneys for Sale: “What can Iran teach us about good governance?” is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need. [Reason]

Republic of Montana: Several dozen Montana politicians, including Secretary of State Brad Johnson, have adopted an unconventional take on the Second Amendment case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court: They’ve threatened secession. [Reason]

Bridging a cultural Gulf promises a new media era in Middle East: The past two years have seen the beginnings of a transformation in media in the Gulf, helped by rulers willing to risk a hands-off approach towards English-language television and, now, from newspapers. Media freedom is far from complete, but early signs are encouraging in a region where there is a limited tradition of free media. [Times]

The very sexist guide to being the perfect wife (but it was the 1930s): Is your wife “slow to get into bed”? Does she flirt with other men at parties? Or is she “a good hostess – even with unexpected guests”, ever ready to “react with pleasure and delight to marital congress”? If so, fill in below and give her a score. Psychologists in America have discovered a “Marital Ratings Scale” from the 1930s that allowed husbands to assess their wives. [Independent]

May 15th, 2008 at 10:31 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.

Wind Energy Use to Jump, Then Soar: Two decades from now Americans could get as much electricity from windmills as from nuclear power plants, according to a government report that lays out a possible plan for wind energy growth. [Discovery]

China’s Silver Lining: Why smoggy skies over Beijing represent the world’s greatest environmental opportunity. [The Atlantic]

Floor plans: The first deep-sea mining machines - for extracting gold, silver and copper deposited near volcanic fissures on the ocean floor - are being built by a British engineering company. The pioneering designs, which will resemble giant, abrasive vacuum cleaners, are at the forefront of an emerging underwater mineral extraction industry that is sounding alarm bells among marine biologists and environmental scientists. [Guardian]

May 14th, 2008 at 10:56 am

This article is filed under Blog, Environment.

Memories of Rauschenberg: ‘A giant among artists’: Artist Robert Rauschenberg used to say he intended for his work to fill the gap between art and life — and the morning after his death, friends and colleagues were left struggling for words to describe the gap he left in their lives and in the art world. [LA Times]

A Baghdad Rescue Operation: These painters were so poor, and art supplies were so expensive in Baghdad, that their canvases often contained only the thinnest veneer of color. Indeed, on one of the few occasions that Brownfield encountered Iraqi painters in the shop, they told him that Vincent van Gogh, great as he was, used too much good paint. [NY Mag]

Architect Rem Koolhaas saw what Vegas didn’t have, not what it needed: Like a lot of Las Vegas marriages, the one between the Venetian Hotel and the Guggenheim Museum was born of some seriously misplaced optimism. Presided over by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, with St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum standing by as a comically out-of-place bridesmaid, the union was planned in the late 1990s, when the Guggenheim brand and the transformative power of high-design architecture both seemed unassailable. [LA Times]

Museum showcases female punk scene: ‘Vexing: Female Voices From East L.A. Punk’ traces the history and the legacy of a key era. [LA Times]

May 14th, 2008 at 10:53 am

This article is filed under Art, Blog.

Students Fail — and Professor Loses Job: Who is to blame when students fail? If many students fail — a majority even — does that demonstrate faculty incompetence, or could it point to a problem with standards? These are the questions at the center of a dispute that cost Steven D. Aird his job teaching biology at Norfolk State University. [Inside Higher Ed]

Virtual schools see strong growth, calls for more oversight: Rather than send her kids off on the yellow bus, Briana LeClaire has school come to her home. Her kids attend a virtual public school, connecting online to teachers and coursework. Everything from books to microscopes to radish seeds arrives via brown trucks. [CSM]

The Bachelor’s Degree Is Obsolete?: Why don’t we declare the bachelor’s degree obsolete? No, not education, not colleges and universities, not professors or libraries or students, just the four-year bachelor’s degree. [Inside Higher Ed]

For working moms, a way to connect with college: About 40 mothers are receiving scholarships from Project Working Mom to earn degrees online. [CSM]

May 14th, 2008 at 10:51 am

This article is filed under Blog, Education.

Are the Quakers Going Pagan?: The liberal end of the Society of Friends has long had members who denied God’s existence or Jesus’ divinity. Now hundreds of pagans call Quakerism home. [Christianity Today]

The Neural Buddhists: Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real. [NY Times]

Churchgoing on its knees as Christianity falls out of favour: Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests. The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. [Times]

Priests-in-training are getting older: The Catholic Church priesthood shortage is being alleviated by men embarking on second careers, who bring special wisdom — and challenges. [LA Times]

May 13th, 2008 at 10:24 am

This article is filed under Blog, Religion.

World carbon dioxide levels highest for 650,000 years, says US report: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures, renewing fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control. [Guardian]

Peregrine falcons in California’s urban areas are contaminated with toxic chemicals: The birds were endangered by DDT in the ’70s. Now, scientists have found that falcons in cities including Los Angeles contain record-high levels of flame retardant. [LA Times]

Environmental Amnesia: In need of positive messages and deliverable results, they focus on individual solutions. Don’t microwave in plastic. Buy organic. There is no place in that discussion for the barrels of waste buried atop the aquifer. The very mention of them fills a room with paralyzing despair. [Orion]

May 13th, 2008 at 10:21 am

This article is filed under Blog, Environment.

Post-Katrina housing fits designers’ agendas. But can the city live with it?: The style wars between the modernists, the traditionalists, and the free-thinking blobists were the farthest thing from Vernessa Rogers’ mind when she was asked to choose from a group of sleek house designs commissioned by actor/architecture buff Brad Pitt. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

No Gothic style for this library: Helmut Jahn is either daring or he’s crazy. We’ll know better when the ellipse-shaped glass dome of his planned, mostly underground library takes its place amid the Collegiate Gothic buildings of the University of Chicago in fall 2010. [Chicago Tribune]

Award for world’s best building – and it could be a bus garage: Unsung local architects are to be pitted against the globetrotting mega-stars of the profession in an attempt to seek out the best new building in the world. Zoos, police stations and dentists’ surgeries will have as much chance of winning the inaugural World Architecture Festival (WAF) Awards as cutting-edge football stadiums and airports, the organisers promised yesterday. [Times]

Modern American architectural gems set for auction: Both the Esherick and Kaufmann are beneficiaries of the fashion for the new trophy homes, the modern architectural masterpieces that now command million-dollar premiums but were sold - or often failed to sell - as tear-downs less than two decades ago. [IHT]

May 13th, 2008 at 10:19 am

This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.

The Pregnant Male: The seahorse is a strange fish. Many of the traits it possesses have evolved in a direction unlike any other family of animals underwater—its bent S-shape; its head at a 90-degree angle to its body; its prehensile tail; and, most curiously, the male’s brood pouch. A lab at Texas A&M University led by Adam Jones is currently studying these structures in the hope of understanding how it was that male pregnancy evolved in seahorses and how it affects the traditional sex roles in the fish. [Popsci]

Whales Evolved Separate Ways to Avoid the Bends: One of the largest studies ever of modern and fossil whales has determined that virtually all modern whales appear to have evolved safeguards against the bends, a sometimes fatal condition in which nitrogen bubbles form in blood and tissues after too rapid decompression. [Discovery]

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better: Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health. [NYT]

May 13th, 2008 at 10:17 am

This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.

Mr. Sammler’s City: Hip young residents of the revived Lower East Side or Williamsburg need to know that it’s possible to kill a city, that the streets they walk daily were once no-go zones, that within living memory residents and companies were fleeing Gotham, that newsweeklies heralded the rotting of the Big Apple and movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy plausibly depicted New York as a nightmare peopled by freaks. That’s why it’s worth looking back at Mr. Sammler to understand why that decline occurred: we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. [City Journal]

Who needs credit?: Surprisingly, perhaps the fleetest country of all has been Argentina. Since it emerged from the financial crisis of 2001-02, it has been one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. It is expected to expand faster than most of its neighbours again this year. How has such a perennial economic miscreant proven so resilient to the credit crunch? Quite simply, it barely has any credit. [Economist]

We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppresed People: Tracing these stolen goods back to where the thefts occur lands us in some of the most wretched places on earth. What these countries have in common is an abundance of natural resources and plentiful political violence and corruption. All suffer from what Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs call “the resource curse.” Here dictators and insurgents sell off the country’s resources to foreigners, terrifying the people into submission while keeping the wealth for themselves. [Cato]

Paris has the Louvre of pawnshops: Even Rodin went to Credit Municipal of Paris, also known as ‘auntie,’ when he was down on his luck. And as times get tougher, the institution has begun accepting wine. [LA Times]

Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex: How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think. [Wired]

May 13th, 2008 at 10:15 am

This article is filed under Blog, Society.