Japan Space Elevator, Nobel Prize 50 Years Later & Urban Takeover
On September 11, a team from Shizuoka University’s Faculty of Engineering will be launching a scale model of a space elevator into Earth orbit.
She made the discovery, but a man got the Nobel. A half-century later, she’s won a $3 million prize
Like the stars of “Hidden Figures” and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, Bell Burnell’s personal story embodies the challenges faced by women in scientific fields. Bell Burnell, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1943, had to fight to take science classes after age 12.
Who owns our cities – and why this urban takeover should concern us all
The huge post-credit crunch buying up of urban buildings by corporations has significant implications for equity, democracy and rights
Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but profoundly changed Earth’s climate
A study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides new evidence that ancient farming practices led to a rise in the atmospheric emission of the heat-trapping gases carbon dioxide and methane—a rise that has continued since, unlike the trend at any other time in Earth’s geologic history.
John Law: the Scottish gambler who rescued France from bankruptcy
He created and presided over one of the earliest and greatest of all stock market boom-and-busts, that of the ‘Mississippi Company’, and inspired another, the South Sea Bubble. And he pioneered ideas about banking, monetary policy and financial markets that were revolutionary in his own time, and retain their importance three centuries later.