California's boldness stemmed in part from the attitude of its governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has been outspoken in his determination to combat global warming. " There are some issues in the world that are simply so compelling, whether in the United States or in the United Kingdom, that demand us to put aside our partisan differences and attack them head on, " Schwarzenegger ...

A new technique for sorting male and female mosquito larvae may lead to the use of sterile males in tackling malaria. Nigel Williams reports. the testicles of the male mosquitoes fluorescent, allowing the scientists to distinguish and easily separate them from females. The plan is to breed, sterilize and release millions of these male insects so they mate with females but produce no offspring. ...

The push to develop commercially viable cloned animals as a source of organs for human transplants ratcheted up another success last month, but veteran Dolly, the cloned sheep has raised some doubts about the wider issues of cloning. Two teams produced piglets cloned from adult cells in which a copy of a gene controlling production of a particular cellsurface sugar had been knocked out. Shortly...

those of Brazil and Congo, and their biological diversity is unique. But logging is putting the forest ecosystems under unprecedented pressure — between 1990 and 2005, Indonesia lost 28 million hectares of forest, most of it virgin forest. The government has banned the export of unprocessed logs from the country but timber is regularly smuggled out via Malaysia and Singapore for processing in o...

The British government is using its role as current chair of the G8 group of wealthy nations and its presidency of the European Union from now until the end of the year to push for major revamping of aid and debt relief to Africa’s poorest countries. But a new report by a cross-party group of members of parliament warns that such efforts will have little impact unless a massive new attack on ma...

the world's smallest. The giant rat is about the size of a cat and has been classified as belonging to the Mallomys genus of rodents. The region has the largest area of tropical forest without roads or trails. Its isolation is helped by its steep mountain slopes and difficult terrain. The Foja mountains rise to 2,200 metres and, although humans live at the base of the mountains, abundant game a...

We study preferences for which choosing high expectations about the future make us happy now but make us unhappy later if they are not realized. These preferences generalize the recursive utility of Kreps-Porteus and Epstein-Zin. Like recursive utility agents, our agents care about the time resolution of uncertainty, but our agents are not purely forward-looking. For example, two agents with th...

Convinced of hope's therapeutic benefits, physicians routinely support patients' false hopes, often with family collusion and vague, euphemistic diagnoses and prognoses, if not overt lies. Bioethicists charge them with paternalistic violations of Patient Autonomy. There are, I think, too many morally significant exceptions to accept the physician's rationales, or the bioethicist's criticisms, s...