Solazyme is a company, started in a garage, that hopes to produce fuel oil from algae. The company is having trouble scaling up production to commercial levels, so to make ends meet, it’s producing a slightly different oil and selling it as a cosmetic product. And while skincare is all well and good, the potential […]

An important education story from earlier this week that we failed to note: a new study run by the National Council on Teacher Quality has called U.S. colleges of education an “industry of mediocrity” that churns out ill-prepared and under-qualified teachers.The Wall Street Journal reported the jaw-dropping statistics: As evidence mounts that teacher quality is one […]

The Economist‘s ‘Democracy in America’ blog has an excellent post titled “Climate Change: A Cooling Consensus” that’s well worth your time this weekend. It’s a very well-written essay encapsulating more or less what we’ve been saying all along here at Via Meadia. It also notes some important ways in which the debate has shifted. A […]

We were cautiously optimistic on the immigration bill wending its way through the Senate as of last Friday. We thought, and continue to think, that the general move is in a more positive direction—that the core political dynamic of trading better border enforcement for addressing the problems of current illegals is a sound one.But a […]

Talk about perverse incentives! It appears that Chinese coolant manufacturers have been producing an excess of a harmful greenhouse chemical in order to dispose of it responsibly under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). By using incinerators to cleanly burn off the chemical, HFC-23, these manufacturers were earning emission credits that they would in turn […]

We got trouble, right here in Gary, Indiana. Business Insider reports that the city is practically a wasteland, with 6, 500 of 7,000 public properties abandoned. And that’s not all: Things are getting so bad that Gary officials are thinking about cutting off city services to about 40 percent of the city’s land and moving […]

His sweet and innocent-looking face dominates the most recent cover of Time magazine. He calls himself the “Burmese Bin Laden.” He warns his fellow Burmese that “crude and savage” Muslims are everywhere, out to get innocent Buddhists, to rape their daughters, to slaughter them. “We are being raped in every town, being sexually harassed in every town, […]

The melting Arctic ice has been a key measure of the pace of global warming for several years now, but a smart piece in Foreign Affairs argues that the regional melt is creating an economic boom: No matter what one thinks should be done about global warming, the fact is, it’s happening. And it’s not […]

Vocal Eurosceptics have gained a new ally: the Netherlands. The country’s government just released a document outlining Dutch objections to deeper European integration and listing key policy areas that the country will not hand over to Brussels. FT: “The Netherlands is convinced that the time of an ‘ever closer union’ in every possible policy area […]

School’s out for summer—school’s out forever!?Dallas high school juniors may soon find themselves singing that tune because of a plan by district officials to develop a three-year high school diploma. State legislators recently passed a bill that would allow officials to transfer funding set aside for a student’s unused senior year to students in pre-K […]