A technology that is speeding up the developing world’s internet connections.

Internet connections in the developing world are getting a boost thanks to a technology conceived to improve corporate IT. In Africa’s colleges, for example, internet connections are split between so many users that speeds would remind Americans of surfing on Prodigy. HashCache, a computing method developed by a team at Princeton University to store internet data in a more efficient way, could jolt those connections and…

Read & Discuss

An ingenious scheme to encourage people to take their TB meds.

Tuberculosis treatment is a drag. Patients require a six-month course of antibiotics to clear the lung infection, which plagues a third of the world’s population and kills 2 million each year. Sure, after roughly two to three months, symptoms such as a lingering cough and fever will subside. But halting the regimen then allows the bacteria to acquire antibiotic resistance, creating TB strains that are…

Read & Discuss

Will recycling urine into drinking water solve the problem of water scarcity?

On May 20, three astronauts held up silver pouches to toast a new beverage available onboard the International Space Station. The containers looked like Capri Sun, but they weren’t filled with juice drink. It was water recycled from their urine.

The new $154-million water recycling system—which creates a day’s worth of water from urine, sweat, and exhaled air—will reduce the $12 million per year NASA hemorrhages…

Read & Discuss

Today was very nearly disastrous–for me, at least. I’d come down to D.C. to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, to spend it with my fellow Americans, and to see if I could find the patriotic bone in my skinny, brown body.

At 11:14 am, 16 minutes before “change” was about to take place, I, along with five friends, was stuck in a stairwell in the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art. We were packed tightly. We…

Read & Discuss

Last one: the frenzy has subsided and hunger has set in. The contents of the mall are now in the city’s restaurants. Obama’s presidency is only two hours old. But the economic stimulus is already underway.

12:36 Poet and benediction play to massive exodus for bathroom etc.

12:26 Crowd dispersing. No respect for poets!

12:25 This guy can really work an audience. This is an amazing substantive speech given the occasion. Hope abounds.

12:19 Hindus get shout out! People’s heads…

Read & Discuss

Restaurants are packed. Streets are closed. Visitors abound. Washington is under siege by sufferers of Obama fever. Estimates peg the number of out-of-towners in the District at upwards of two million. As a result, locals are making changes to their normal routines to accommodate (or avoid) the swarms... Read & Discuss

Barack Obama has a big-time Abraham Lincoln obsession. The President-elect’s inaugural festivities are stunning proof of that: He’ll take his oath tomorrow on the same Bible that Honest Abe used during his first swearing-in ceremony in 1861; he, along with Joe Biden, arrived in D.C. Saturday via train, recreating a trip Lincoln took; he’ll even eat a lunch like Lincoln did.

Though he is constantly making parallels between himself and the 16th president, Obama’s rise often intersects…

Read & Discuss

The atmosphere at Sunday afternoon’s We Are One concert and around the mall was hopeful and enthusiastic, save for a five-person group of anti-gay rights activists, espousing the power of Jesus over that of Obama from a small fenced-in pen between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials. Estimates on the crowd range from 750,000 to more than a million. Mostly from jumbotrons far away from the stage, the throngs watched performances by Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, Usher, Sheryl…

Read & Discuss

In Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo, there lies a striking paradox of personal space: The park’s three Asian elephants occupy a relatively small space, while the zoo’s prized giant pandas have a sprawling enclosure full of trees and shrubbery they can hide behind when they’re feeling shy.

Today, the normally uncluttered District of Columbia probably felt to its locals like it had shrunk from the size of the pandas’ environment to that of the elephants’. After all, people from…

Read & Discuss

Three long-term science projects that could change everything we know about science. Albert Einstein called scientific discovery “a continual flight from wonder.” Today, the path from wonder has an expensive toll. We’ve solved the basics—gravity, relativity, DNA—but our new queries require greater collaboration,.. Read & Discuss

A technology that is speeding up the developing world’s internet connections.

Internet connections in the developing world are getting a boost thanks to a technology conceived to improve corporate IT. In Africa’s colleges, for example, internet connections are split between so many users that speeds would remind Americans of surfing on Prodigy. HashCache, a computing method developed by a team at Princeton University to store internet data in a more efficient way, could jolt those connections and…

Read & Discuss

An ingenious scheme to encourage people to take their TB meds.

Tuberculosis treatment is a drag. Patients require a six-month course of antibiotics to clear the lung infection, which plagues a third of the world’s population and kills 2 million each year. Sure, after roughly two to three months, symptoms such as a lingering cough and fever will subside. But halting the regimen then allows the bacteria to acquire antibiotic resistance, creating TB strains that are…

Read & Discuss

Will recycling urine into drinking water solve the problem of water scarcity?

On May 20, three astronauts held up silver pouches to toast a new beverage available onboard the International Space Station. The containers looked like Capri Sun, but they weren’t filled with juice drink. It was water recycled from their urine.

The new $154-million water recycling system—which creates a day’s worth of water from urine, sweat, and exhaled air—will reduce the $12 million per year NASA hemorrhages…

Read & Discuss

Today was very nearly disastrous–for me, at least. I’d come down to D.C. to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, to spend it with my fellow Americans, and to see if I could find the patriotic bone in my skinny, brown body.

At 11:14 am, 16 minutes before “change” was about to take place, I, along with five friends, was stuck in a stairwell in the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art. We were packed tightly. We…

Read & Discuss

Last one: the frenzy has subsided and hunger has set in. The contents of the mall are now in the city’s restaurants. Obama’s presidency is only two hours old. But the economic stimulus is already underway.

12:36 Poet and benediction play to massive exodus for bathroom etc.

12:26 Crowd dispersing. No respect for poets!

12:25 This guy can really work an audience. This is an amazing substantive speech given the occasion. Hope abounds.

12:19 Hindus get shout out! People’s heads…

Read & Discuss

Restaurants are packed. Streets are closed. Visitors abound. Washington is under siege by sufferers of Obama fever. Estimates peg the number of out-of-towners in the District at upwards of two million. As a result, locals are making changes to their normal routines to accommodate (or avoid) the swarms... Read & Discuss

Barack Obama has a big-time Abraham Lincoln obsession. The President-elect’s inaugural festivities are stunning proof of that: He’ll take his oath tomorrow on the same Bible that Honest Abe used during his first swearing-in ceremony in 1861; he, along with Joe Biden, arrived in D.C. Saturday via train, recreating a trip Lincoln took; he’ll even eat a lunch like Lincoln did.

Though he is constantly making parallels between himself and the 16th president, Obama’s rise often intersects…

Read & Discuss

The atmosphere at Sunday afternoon’s We Are One concert and around the mall was hopeful and enthusiastic, save for a five-person group of anti-gay rights activists, espousing the power of Jesus over that of Obama from a small fenced-in pen between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials. Estimates on the crowd range from 750,000 to more than a million. Mostly from jumbotrons far away from the stage, the throngs watched performances by Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, Usher, Sheryl…

Read & Discuss

In Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo, there lies a striking paradox of personal space: The park’s three Asian elephants occupy a relatively small space, while the zoo’s prized giant pandas have a sprawling enclosure full of trees and shrubbery they can hide behind when they’re feeling shy.

Today, the normally uncluttered District of Columbia probably felt to its locals like it had shrunk from the size of the pandas’ environment to that of the elephants’. After all, people from…

Read & Discuss

Three long-term science projects that could change everything we know about science. Albert Einstein called scientific discovery “a continual flight from wonder.” Today, the path from wonder has an expensive toll. We’ve solved the basics—gravity, relativity, DNA—but our new queries require greater collaboration,.. Read & Discuss