Hedge fund managers are reportedly buying airstrips and farms in remote areas because they think they need a getaway.
Credit: Ken Lambert/AP

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said.

Johnson, who heads the Institute of New Economic Thinking and was previously managing director at Soros, said societies can tolerate income inequality if the income floor is high enough. But with an existing system encouraging […]

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Design, Technology Innovation’s water pipe that that changes saltwater to pure simply by the nature of the plastic.
Credit: Design Technology Innovation

When drought grabs hold of a region—as it has in epic proportions in California—desalination seems like an obvious way to get  the freshwater we need for drinking, cooking, and irrigating crops. But the process of removing salt from saline water is pricey, typically costing twice as much as building a reservoir or recycling wastewater.

What if you could flip the process, extracting pure water vapor from saltwater?

That’s the approach U.K.-based Design Technology & Innovation took to develop a new irrigation system that pumps saltwater into underground pipes but only releases freshwater vapor into the soil—the salt remains trapped inside.

What’s the secret? A special kind of plastic dubbed Dutyion.

“We basically stumbled across a plastic with a particular ability to allow water vapor to pass through it, but virtually nothing else,” said DTI’s Mark Tonkin, […]

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This global positioning satellite receiver is part of Iceland’s network of 62 such receivers that geoscientists are using to detect movements of the Icelandic crust that are as small as one millimeter per year. Langjökull glacier can be seen in the background.
Credit: Richard A. Bennett/ University of Arizona

Earth’s crust under Iceland is rebounding as global warming melts the island’s great ice caps, a University of Arizona-led team reports in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The capability to control our bodies down to the DNA level, is incredibly nuanced, as this placebo study reports.

A new study revealed that Parkinson’s placebo drugs that were believed to be more expensive than regular drugs are much more effective that regular placebo drugs. The study was published in the American Academy of Neurology online issue of Neurology.

Dr. Alberto Espay, study author, believes this has to do with the patients’ expectations that play a major role in the effectiveness of their own treatments. Placebo drugs have achieved great results in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and this new study sheds some more light on why that is.

This is the first study in Parkinson’s disease to test the placebo effects of drug cost. Espay revealed that they wanted to see if the people’s perception of the […]

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Credit: nycprgirls.com

President Obama’s proposal for tuition-free community college education, and the broader discussion which it has inspired, confirms our belief that it is time for a comprehensive solution to a $1.3 trillion problem: student debt in the United States.

We strongly support the concept of tuition-free public higher education, and are encouraged by renewed arguments in its favor. But we must also confront what has been done to the last several generations of students. They have been forced to take on debt that is crippling to them, to our economy and our society.

A student debt “jubilee” would reflect both the values upon which this nation was founded, and the economic principles which have sustained it through its greatest periods of growth and prosperity.

It is time for a truly transformative idea:  Let’s Abolish All Student Loan Debt in America.

If you agree, click here to take action.

Jubilees Then and Now

The Liberty Bell represents our nation’s core values, combining personal freedom with community action. The words inscribed on the Bell – “Proclaim liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof” – are from the Book of […]

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