BOSTON – Growing water scarcity in many parts of the United States is a hidden financial risk for investors who buy the water and electric utility bonds that finance much of the country’s vast water and power infrastructure, according to a first-ever report on the issue released today by Ceres and Water Asset Management.

The report, The Ripple Effect: Water Risk in the Municipal Bond Market, evaluates and ranks water scarcity risks for public water and power utilities in some of the country’s most water-stressed regions, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas and Atlanta. The report shows that some of the nation’s largest public utilities may face moderate to severe water supply shortfalls in the coming years, yet these risks are not reflected in the pricing or disclosure of bonds that public utilities rely on to finance their infrastructure projects. There are about 50,000 public water utilities in this country serving an estimated 258 million Americans. The electric power sector is enormously water-intensive – it accounts for 41 percent of the nation’s freshwater withdrawals.

‘Water scarcity is a growing risk to many public utilities across the country and investors owning utility bonds don’t even know it,’ said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, which […]

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When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor’s house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O’Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back to visit.

We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we’re usually referring to change. But change isn’t the same thing as time.

To measure anything’s position precisely is to ‘lock in’ on one static frame of its motion, as in a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe movement, you can’t isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Consider a film of a flying arrow that stops on a single frame. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy: it’s […]

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According to today’s conventional scientific wisdom, time flows strictly forward - from the past to the future through the present. We can remember the past, and we can predict the future based on the past (albeit imperfectly) - but we can’t perceive the future.

But if the recent data from the lab of Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University is correct, conventional scientific wisdom may need some corrections on this particular point.

In a research paper titled Feeling the Future, recently accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Bem presents some rather compelling empirical evidence
that in some cases - and with weak but highly statistically significant accuracy – many human beings can directly perceive the future. Not just predict it based on the past.

A pre-publication copy of Bem’s paper is available on his website, and it should appear on the
journal’s website shortly. The article is already attracting considerable attention, including a
piece in Psychology Today. Also, Bem reports that he has already received hundreds of requests
for ‘replication packages

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Men who eat a lot of fatty fish run a lower risk of prostate cancer, concludes a new research paper from Karolinska Institutet (Sweden). The effect is likely to be attributable to the abundance of omega-3 fatty acids, although there is also a hereditary factor.

In Sweden, prostate cancer is by far the most common form of cancer; in countries such as China and Japan, it is much rarer. Just why the risk of developing the disease is country-dependent is hard to know for certain, but one reason could be differences in dietary habits. Substances that have often been identified as important in this context are EPA and DHA, two omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in abundance in fatty fish such as salmon, herring and mackerel. In cell experiments, scientists have seen that omega-3 fatty acids can prevent the development of cancer, but the exact value of having an omega-3-rich diet remains an open question.

To find out whether omega-3 fatty acids in food affect the chances of developing cancer, scientists asked 1,500 Swedish men with diagnosed prostate cancer about their eating habits and then compared the answers with a healthy control group. The results strongly support the hypothesis of the […]

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In September, four soldiers at Ft. Hood — veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — took their own lives in the course of one week. More than a hundred Army troops have killed themselves this year. Host Scott Simon talks with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his wife, Deborah, about the increased efforts to curb suicides by military servicemen and women.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

In September, four soldiers at Fort Hood, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, took their own lives in a single week. More than 120 U.S. Army troops have killed themselves this year. Earlier this week, we went to the Pentagon to discuss the tragedy of the growing number of suicides in the U.S. armed forces with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and his wife Deborah.

The Mullens have struggled to find a link among these suicides.

Admiral MIKE MULLEN (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff): There’s just a lot we don’t know. And we have doubled our rate since 2004. We now exceed the rate in the population in the country. As I’ve looked into this and tried to understand it, it turns out […]

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