Credit: thelawyermichigan.com

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an […]

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robot mosquito
Credit: www.ubergizmo.com

DAVOS – Imagine a world where mosquito-sized robots fly around stealing samples of your DNA. Or where a department store knows from your buying habits that you’re pregnant even before your family does.

That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, where the assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.

“Welcome to today. We’re already in that world,” said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.

“Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead,” she added.

Another Harvard researcher into genetics said it was “inevitable” that one’s personal genetic information would enter more and more into the public sphere.

Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead. Professor Margo Seltzer, Harvard University

Sophia Roosth said intelligence agents were already asked to collect genetic information on foreign leaders to determine […]

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Indian citizens now have the same upward mobility opportunities as American citizens.
Credit: www.udupitoday.com

Ah, America. Land of opportunity. Take a deep breath and smell the possibilities. As Obama said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, “a nation that gave someone like me a chance.” A nation that allowed a wide-eyed kid from Hawaii and member of the Choom gang to become its president. But are the chances of upward mobility in America all that great? In a new report released on Tuesday, hours before Obama’s remarks, the World Bank claimed that it is now about as easy to move out of poverty or from low-class to middle-class status in India as it is in America.

Entitled “Addressing Inequality in South Asia,” the report notes that (based on gini coefficient measures of income distribution and inequality) between 2004 and 2010, roughly 40 percent of India’s poor (or 9 percent of the total population) moved above the […]

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Credit: flickr/Mass Clean Energy Center

On January 29, the Department of Interior (DOI) will auction off the largest area of federal waters in the nation for the development of offshore wind power. More than 742,000 acres, or over 1,160 square miles, will be offered for wind development off the coast of Massachusetts. While the U.S. is yet to install its first offshore wind turbine, across the Atlantic the offshore wind industry is booming. In the first six months of 2014, Europe connected 224 offshore wind turbines in 16 wind farms to its grid. Overall, Europe has over 2,000 offshore turbines.

The opening of these waters south of Martha’s Vineyard comes at an inauspicious moment for U.S. offshore wind as the long-sought nearby Cape Wind project is all but dead, according to the Boston Globe, after suffering a decade of “controversy and mismanagement.”

What could be the final blow for Cape Wind came earlier this month as two major power companies that had agreed to purchase the bulk of […]

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A gorilla family
Credit: explore.org

While coverage of the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa remains centered on the human populations in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, wildlife experts’ concern is mounting over the virus’ favorite victims: great apes.

Guinea, where the epidemic originated, has the largest population of chimpanzees in all of West Africa. Liberia is close behind. Central Africa is home to western lowland gorillas, the largest and most widespread of all four species. Due to forest density, the number of those infected is unknown. But with hundreds of thousands of ape casualties from Ebola, it’s doubtful they’ve escaped unscathed.Animal activists are ramping up efforts to find an Ebola vaccine for great apes, but with inadequate international support for human research, their mission could be seen as competing with one to save humans. Experts from the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada insist such apprehension would be misplaced. Two streams of funding—one for humans, one for apes—can coexist […]

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