A new study looking at changes in wages and salaries, capital income, and in taxes found that capital gains and dividends made the largest contribution to income inequality. As the study states:

By far, the largest contributor to this increase (in income inequality) was changes in income from capital gains and dividends. Changes in wages had an equalizing effect over this period as did changes in taxes. Most of the equalizing effect of taxes took place after the 1993 tax hike; most of the equalizing effect, however, was reversed after the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts.

Capital gains were already the largest contributor to income inequality in 1991. But by 2006, the contribution of capital gains to income inequality almost doubled. Capital gains contributes so much to income inequality because of the large increase in their share of after-tax income. Continuously cutting the tax rate meant that more after-tax income came from capital gains and dividends.

The rise in income inequality is due more to changes at the top of the income distribution than at the bottom. While income for all Americans grew 25 percent from 1996 to 2006, it grew 74 percent for the top […]

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The story that has really captured the imagination of our readers this year has been on the Bloomberg New Energy Finance analysis that demonstrated that wind energy was already cheaper than new coal and gas plants in Australia, and solar PV was not all that behind.

Because of that interest, we’ve decided that today’s Graph of the Day should be another set from the BNEF report, because they demonstrate so vividly how the technology costs of wind, solar PV, solar thermal, biomass and even geothermal fall below rising coal and gas plant costs over the coming decades.

Remember when looking at this graph of the day that Australia needs no new baseload power plants for another 10 years – that’s according to the Australian Energy Market Operator and the utilities themselves. So this shows that the new plants we are getting built now – wind farms, thanks to the renewable energy target – are the cheapest option.

By the time 2020 comes around, solar PV will have well and truly joined wind on the southern side of the cost curve (and will no doubt be competing for space in the RET), and solar thermal – with its ability for storage and dispatchable energy, […]

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Controversial nerve-agent pesticides widely linked to decline in bees around the world should be banned, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) says today.

Neonicotinoids should no longer be used on crops which attract bees and other pollinating insects, the RSPB says, in a call for the Government to support a proposed EU ban on the three most common neonicotinoid substances.

The intervention of the million-member society comes after a mounting tide of evidence indicating linkages between the use of the chemicals, made by the agribusiness giants Bayer and Syngenta, and collapses in colonies of honey bees and bumblebees.

More than 30 separate scientific studies in the last three years have shown adverse effects on insects from neonicotinoids, which are ‘systemic’ insecticides, meaning they enter every part of the target plants – including the pollen and nectar which bees harvest. In January, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published a scientific opinion recommending that the three main substances – imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam – should not be used on crops attractive to bees. RSPB agricultural policy officer Ellie Crane said yesterday: ‘We’ve been reviewing the science for a long time, and scientists are telling us that neonicotinoids might be killing bees.

‘Everyone […]

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NASA engineers are building the largest rocket ever constructed - one that will eventually take us beyond the moon - using 3D-printed materials.

Creating this rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), is a top priority at the agency because it has a big date: Obama wants to get humans to an asteroid and then on to Mars by the mid 2030s. To speed up the construction process, NASA is relying on a form of 3D printing to fabricate some of its engine parts virtually out of thin air.

The machine, called selective laser melting, uses a laser to build a component. Unlike traditional rocket building, which relies on welding together disparate parts, 3D printing starts with an empty table. That space fills up with a completed component, built one layer at a time, out of NASA’s 3D-printing material of choice. In this case, plastic.

What used to take weeks to build now only takes hours.

‘We were looking at a way to save costs, be more efficient and reduce weight. That’s how we got here,’ says NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr.

‘The big thing about 3D printing is that there are no welds with seams, no places for stuff to leak in a […]

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Just as gun control has made a comeback among politicians after a spate of deadly mass shootings, the rapid advances in 3-D printed guns have threatened to undermine those controls before they even get started. According to a leading 3-D printing researcher, the only way to prevent printed guns from shooting a new loophole in the law may be to control the gunpowder you need to fire them.

‘Perhaps the only way forward, if we choose to try and control this, is to control the gunpowder - the explosives - and not the actual device,

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