Wednesday, 23 May, 2012

By marketing to billions of lower-income people, business can do well by doing good: Affordable green goods for “the base of the pyramid” could improve lives and cut environmental damage. Could this work?

Wildfires are a tragedy, but are human actions making them worse? What is the role of global warming and zoning? Can we build safer houses in safer locations?

Most adhesives can’t be reused. But a radical new design, based on the foot of frogs, lizards and insects, shows how engineers can learn from nature to make smarter materials.

Using a chemical reaction that changes color when specific chemicals are present, a new “dipstick” may detect spoilage better than the human nose.

Could carbon storage help control warming? The oil industry already injects CO2 into deep rocks. Is it possible to capture CO2 from coal plants, and pump it deep underground?

What did the losing World Trade designs look like? What is the significance of a city skyline?

How to restore the Dead Sea Scrolls? What if your treasure was a bunch of fading, brittle scrolls, written in three ancient languages, and that now exist on 100,000 fragments of dead-animal skin and papyrus? What if those scrolls contained the earliest written versions of the Old Testament?