Globalization

Cities: A Walled Green Utopia Rises in the Middle East

In Sunday’s New York Times—which I consumed along with a bagel on my iPhone—architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff has a report from Masdar, the zero-carbon, ultra-sustainable city growing up in the deserts outside of Abu Dhabi. The Masdar project is the result of a government initiative by the sultans who control Abu Dhabi, the …

Health: Did Cities Help HIV Take Off?

In this week’s Science, researchers led by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona and Preston Marx of the Tulane National Primate Research Center looked at the history of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)—the primate precursor to HIV—and found that the disease may be thousands of years older than scientists originally …