The historic phone call between President Obama and Iranian President Rouhani has been the biggest foreign policy story of the week, yet we have remained relatively silent on the issue. The truth is that we have been waiting for the dust to settle before taking a view, because there are a few different ways to look […]

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is looking into reports that solar energy facilities are blinding, burning, maiming, and killing birds. A number of dead birds have turned up near solar facilities this summer, and the BLM wants answers. E&E News reports: At project sites like the Ivanpah plant, which uses thousands of heliostat mirrors to reflect […]

Interesting news from Mars: it appears that the red planet’s dusty outer layer is 2 percent water by weight. The BBC talked to a scientist involved with NASA’s Discovery Rover project: “If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little bit – a few hundred degrees – […]

Over at Forbes, Hardeep Walia zeroes in on one of the key factors driving the student debt crisis: loans are often given out with little regard to students’ future earning potential. STEM students, for example, have more jobs open to them and earn far more on average than, say, philosophy students, yet both are treated as […]

Wealthy Chinese families appear to have found a way around China’s one-child policy: pay a huge pile of money to middlemen agencies that will help them find a surrogate mother to give birth to a “designer baby” in the United States. And there are other side-benefits to this arrangement: once the child reaches 21, she […]

Companies are starting to get proactive about reshaping the health care market, and the results could be revolutionary. The Times reports on new efforts GE is taking to drive down costs for its employees. Its current big push is for so-called “medical homes”: Over the last few years, G.E. has pushed for the creation of so-called medical […]

American companies are turning their attention toward MOOCs as a potential tool for finding new hires and training old ones. One of the newest programs along these lines is Udacity’s Open Education Alliance, a partnership with several major firms to create MOOCs that grant certificate in the skill-sets that are in high demand.As the WSJ notes, […]

The image above is the cover story of the latest issue of the Economist. The topic is the resurgence of al-Qaeda and the call-it-anything-but-the-Global-War-on-Terror. A key passage from the leader: How much should Western complacency be blamed for this stunning revival? Quite a bit. Mr Obama was too eager to cut and run from Iraq. He […]

Everybody is staring transfixed at the US-Iran relationship and the UN struggle over Syria, but Egypt remains the key to Middle Eastern stability. The biggest question in the region is whether the new Egyptian government will stabilize the situation beyond the short term. The economics minister has laid out a plan:1. Use money from friendly […]

When you get past the Tesla-fueled hype—the Elon Musk cheerleading, the various super- and hyper- prefixes in front of the requisite infrastructure—the renaissance of the electric car has been mostly underwhelming. Tesla’s approach has been to tout the sexy, high-end models first to help stoke demand for the product. Other carmakers like Nissan and Chevy […]