China has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad water problem. A recent water census discovered that 28,000 rivers have disappeared over the past two decades. The country’s per capita water resources are just one quarter of the world average. Shockingly, forty percent of what little water China does have is too toxic for humans […]

According to its defenders, Accountable Care Organizations are among Obamacare’s greatest cost-saving measures. In theory, ACOs control costs by allowing providers to keep some of the savings they create when they deliver care more cheaply than other providers. But in practice, the results have been unconvincing.The WSJ has a long-form, informative piece on the successes and failures of […]

The impending Congressional showdown over Obamacare and the federal budget has set the chattering classes ablaze all week, yet as with the Iran story, we’ve chosen to remain mostly silent on the topic. To us, it seems like a lot of noise rather than signal. This battle has much more to do with the big […]

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, […]