One of my favorite websites, hands down, is Stuff Dutch People Like (#22: Hairgel! #27: Picking Their Noses!). Yeah, check it out. Posts usually come complete with video and/or photographic evidence. Now I get to add one to the list: phenology [...]
Kamal Sharaf is an artist and satirist in Yemen who has dared to question the status quo. Through his cartoons he challenged former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and suffered for it. He was forcibly taken from his home in 2010 and spent a month in prison. These days Kamal Sharaf continues to take comparatively progressive stands on issues like women’s rights and is not afraid to question the direction of the new Yemeni president.
The shifting of the seasons as the world warms up is putting a new focus on the field of phenology. It is the study of the timing of seasonal events like the emergence of a particular plant or insect. As The World’s Clark Boyd reports from The Netherlands, scientists are trying to track winners, losers and ecological relationships that are getting out of whack.
An American chemist says he’s found a substance – several, in fact – that can repel some of the most fearsome predators in the ocean, and he wants to use his discovery to protect them. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro of our partner program NOVA has the story.
The world’s oceans are full of salt and also contain ingredients vital to marine life and the Earth’s climate. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro of our partner program NOVA met up with a French scientist who’s studying the chemistry of seawater for clues to our planet’s future.
A day after elections in Myanmar (also known as Burma), there are calls for the lifting of international sanctions against the government. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Priscilla Clapp, about the best way forward. Clapp was chief of the US mission in Burma from 1999 to 2002.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is not listening … to his opponents, to his international critics, or even to Koffi Annan, the UN/Arab League envoy who is talking, persuading — even pleading with Assad to play ball with Annan’s six-point peace plan. Pope Benedict visits drug trade-addled Mexico, and meet some non-human drug addicts: the food on your plate.
In the history of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, there’s long been a divide between public health advocates and churches. Religious leaders often promote ideas about HIV and the use of condoms that run counter to public health campaigns. But in Swaziland, the two sides are starting to work together. The World’s Alex Gallafent has the story.
Marco Werman talks with Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, about the forces that drive oil prices up and down.
As the US Supreme Court hears arguments on the massive health care overhaul, across the Atlantic Europeans are puzzled. Germans, for one, seem to agree that government-mandated health care is the way to go.
Genetic tests allow doctors to diagnose disease, but the knowledge of what’s in your DNA doesn’t always help in the way one might hope. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro of our partner program NOVA talks about one man and his unusual gene.
Anchor Marco Werman speaks with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson about the latest news from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.
In some parts of Mexico, Catholics are losing parishioners to evangelical churches. It’s a spiritual flip moving throughout the country, and there’s no better place to see the religious context then Zongozotla. Reporter Monica Campbell visits the town where evangelicals are gaining ground.
One year after the Fukushima disaster nearly all of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants are out of service and the country is facing a major power crunch. The government has promised a major shift toward cleaner renewable energy to help fill the gap. But as Sam Eaton reports, the country’s clean energy revolution has yet to get much traction.
Associated Press reporters Jack Gillum and Seth Borenstein analyzed 36 years of monthly data on gasoline prices and US domestic oil production and found no statistical correlation between them [...]
