In Black Jack, Mo., (pop. 6,792), the city council wrangled last week over precisely how to define a family. In West Virginia, religious conservatives are getting ready to do battle with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over the use of a law that aims to bolster marriage by outlawing ‘lewd and lascivious cohabitation.’ In North Carolina, a state judge in July ruled unconstitutional a law that states it’s illegal for unmarried couples to live together. Still, 1.6 million Americans in seven states are breaking their states’ laws for doing just that, according to Unmarried America, a lobbying group for singles’ rights based in California. States enforce these morality-based laws – which can include fornication and ‘criminal conversation,’ sweet-talking a married woman with a mind toward adultery – only in select cases, experts say. Yet the debate about whether the laws should continue to exist is a flash point between secularists and traditional Christians over the definition of a family. ‘These are archaic laws which are hardly ever enforced, but they are … often used as a weapon to degrade someone else,’ says Dan Pollitt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, […]
LONDON — A third of the world’s population is suffering from a shortage of water, raising the prospect of ‘water crises’ in countries such as China, India and the US. Scientists had forecast in 2000 that one in three would face water shortages by 2025, but water experts have been shocked to find that this threshold has already been crossed. Frank Rijsberman, director-general of the International Water Management Institute, said: ‘We will have to change business as usual in order to deal with the growing water scarcity crisis.’ About a quarter of the world’s population lives in areas of ‘physical water shortage’, where natural forces, over-use and poor agricultural practices have led to falling groundwater levels and rivers drying up. But a further 1bn people face ‘economic water shortages’, because lack the necessary infrastructure to take water from rivers and aquifers. The findings come from a report compiled by 700 experts over five years, the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture from the International Water Management Institute, presented on Monday at World Water Week in Stockholm, an international meeting of water experts. David Molden, co-ordinator of the report, said: ‘If we continue to manage […]
LONDON — A project to collect DNA samples from half a million Britons to unpick the genetic basis of killer diseases including cancer got the go-ahead on Tuesday, marking the start of the world’s biggest medical experiment. A team of international scientific and medical experts said the success of a local three-month pilot phase, involving 3,800 participants around Manchester, meant the UK Biobank project could now be rolled out nationwide from the end of 2006. Over the next four years, blood and urine samples will be collected from volunteers aged 40 to 69, to help scientists unravel the genetic foundations of common diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and joint problems. ‘For decades to come, the UK Biobank resource should provide researchers around the world with vital insights into some of the most distressing diseases of middle and old age,’ principal investigator Professor Rory Collins said in a statement. The mapping of the human genome in 2000 opened the door to the detailed analysis of genes but experts are still grappling to understand how they interact with lifestyle and environment to determine why some people become sick and others do not. In the long […]
Dark matter has always been a tricky thing to nail down. It was first proposed to account for the discrepancy between the measured rotational behavior of galaxies and the rotation predicted by the combination of Newtonian gravity and the visible mass. Over time, it became clear that the normal matter, which interacts readily with light, accounts for less than 10 percent of the matter in the universe. The remaining matter could be inferred based on the dynamics of galaxies and larger structures, but could not be seen directly, and so picked up the name dark matter. Some scientists, however, have not been convinced that dark matter must exist, and suggested that we might have an incomplete understanding of gravity instead. It has been difficult to resolve this conflict, as dark matter doesn’t interact with light, and its gravitational pull ensures that there’s always regular matter associated with it, confusing efforts to detect it. According to new observations, that last sentence should be rewritten to read ‘almost always.’ Using mutliple observations from a number of space-based astronomical platforms, a unique collision between two clusters of galaxies has been observed at a number of wavelengths. That collision, shown on the right, […]
Dublin-based technology risk management company, Steorn, has challenged the scientific community to prove it wrong. In an advertisement found in the most recent issue of The Economist it has challenged scientists and engineers to test the firm’s free-energy technology and publish the findings. The challenge appears real, but is the technology? Steorn states that from all the scientists who accept their challenge, twelve will be invited to take part in a rigorous testing exercise to prove (or disprove) that Steorn’s technology creates free-energy (also known as over-unity). The results will be published worldwide. According to Steorn the technology is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy. The technology can be scaled to virtually all devices requiring energy, from cellular phones to cars. Assuming their claims can be validated, Steorn intends to license its technology to organizations within the energy sector. It will allow use of its technology royalty-free for certain purposes including water and rural electrification projects in Third World countries. The Challenge Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, has said that he posted this challenge in the pages of The Economist to catch the attention […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
