Budget crunch hits Keeling’s curves

Facing budget crunch, BC restructures health system.

Black Crunch

We study the growth of fluctuations in collapsing cosmologies, extending old work of Lifschitz and Khalatnikov. As examples of systems where the fluctuations have a different composition than the background we study scalar fields with general improvement terms. Fluctuations always grow, and often dominate the homogeneous background. We argue that even for very dilute fluctuations, scattering pr...

Biodiversity crunch

One of the major efforts of researchers in recent years has been to determine the economic value of natural resources in an effort to persuade policymakers that these resources are important in decisions about development. But many species in particular environments are being lost so quickly that their value may be undervalued, according to a new report. And Clive Hambler and colleagues at the ...

Crunch time

of the famous one-child policy, which Deng introduced in 1979, may be beginning to backfire. Economic analysts now fear that, if the officially reported fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman is correct, the side-effects of a greying society will kick in earlier than anticipated. Reports suggest that the dependency rate, i.e. the number of children and pensioners per 100 workforce, may reach ...

Carbon crunch

Last month's UN framework climate change conference in Poznan, Poland, was planned to create the groundwork for a new agreement on curbing carbon dioxide emissions to replace the Kyoto treaty which expires in 202. It was part of the UN 'roadmap' to new emission controls. The Kyoto treaty was seen as crucially flawed in the eyes of many opponents of emission curbs and even supporters acknowledge...