London may be known for its rainy climate, but the city’s annual rainfall is actually around half that of Sydney, and less than Dallas’ or Istanbul’s yearly precipitation. Indeed, the British Environment Agency designates the capital as “seriously water-stressed” and at risk of summer water shortages.
But now Thames …
I’m not by nature an optimistic person. If there’s a dark side of the moon, or anything else, I’ll usually find it, and my glasses only come half empty. Getting excited—not something you’ll witness me doing very often. Maybe it’s growing up a Philadelphia sports fan (the Eagles alone being enough to pummel the optimism out of any …
It’s always about this time of year—when the first air-sucking, clothes-wilting, soul-smothering heat wave hits a big swath of the country—that people who rarely think about climate change start to worry. Never mind that a single sweltering summer can never be traced directly to global warming. Hot weather causes even some of the …
I’m at the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington DC, which has just broken for lunch. (What’s the diet of very smart people—and the journalists who listen to them? Roast beef sandwiches.) The first half of the conference focused first on communicating just what’s happening down in the Gulf—both from people on the ground, including …
I’m in Washington DC today to attend the TEDxOilSpill conference. As I wrote in an earlier post, TED is a California-based nonprofits that puts on conferences that connect very smart—and sometimes very wealthy—together to discuss outside the box approaches to global problems. And if there’s one problem that needs some outside the box …
I have a piece in the paper edition of TIME—the one that comes with stamps and everything—on the legacy of Thomas Edison and the crisis in American scientific innovation.
Update: So TIME has put its magazine content behind a paywall. Brave new world of journalism! Well technically not a paywall because right now there’s no way to …
Over the past week or so, as BP has blunted the Gulf spill by channeling more and more of the oil into containers on the surface, it’s been easy to think that the accident could be managed, even if sealing the well has proved impossible so far. But the challenge of working 5,000 feet beneath the surface of the ocean means that a …
Given that it’s World Cup month, even soccer-phobic Americans are getting into football of the non-padded variety. Part and parcel with the World Cup sporting experience—especially in the first round of matches—is an acceptance of ties. Ties are not something we like to do in American sports, especially in baseball, where two …
If there were ever a time and place for “so crazy it might just work” ideas, it’s the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. More than 50 days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the finest minds in the offshore oil industry are still trying to figure out a way to plug the leak for good. Even as the joint BP/government brain trust in Houston …
Lithium—it’s not just my second-favorite song in the Nirvana catalog. The soft and silvery metal is the key ingredient in making the long-lived lithium-ion batteries needed to build workable electric cars. All the big electrics—the Tesla Roadster, the Nissan Leaf, the Chevrolet (yes, not Chevy) Volt—use lithium-ion batteries, as …
