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“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” These are the words of Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street. The poster boy for unharnessed greed echoes the sentiment of rational free-market economists, who view greed as not only an inevitable aspect of human nature but ultimately a desirable one....

In the 1830s a German naturalist named Renous was arrested in San Fernando, Chile for heresy. His claim? He could turn caterpillars into butterflies. A few years later, Renous recounted his tale to Charles Darwin, who noted it in The Voyage of the Beagle. Imprisoning someone for asserting what today qualifies as common knowledge might seem extreme, but metamorphosis—the process through which some animals abruptly transform their bodies after birth—has long inspired misunderstanding and mysticism....

The final presidential debate focused on America’s involvement in the oil-rich Middle East and on future threats to the nation, though neither candidate discussed the related risks of climate change. The contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney capped a string of four debates in which they and their running mates failed to mention the topic of rising temperatures. It was the first time that has happened since the problem was identified in the 1980s, according to Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Climate Silence....

ARTISTIC OBJECTION “Let Your Creativity Soar,” the panel discussion led by Mariette DiChristina, was a great article, but I think the experts are a little bit off when they address society’s perception of creativity. “Artist” and “creative” are not equivalent. I do not believe Western society has a negative perception of creativity; rather there is a negative perception of financial instability and destructive behavior. It happens that artists and musicians can fall into such states....

Genome sequencing has revealed how a strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) spread through parts of New York City. Although MRSA is often associated with public spaces such as hospital and gyms, researchers say that private homes helped to fuel its travels in the New York neighborhoods of Manhattan and the Bronx. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests a framework for other investigations into how pathogens colonize and infect communities....

Although a dozen years have elapsed since any new nuclear power reactor has come online in the U.S., there are now stirrings of a nuclear renaissance. The incentives are certainly in place: the costs of natural gas and oil have skyrocketed; the public increasingly objects to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels; and the federal government has offered up to $8 billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing (with new laws to streamline the process) and $18....

Despite government pledges to rein in deforestation, Indonesia is on track to release vast amounts of greenhouse gases over the next decade as its burgeoning palm oil industry churns under carbon-rich peat and cuts down its rainforest. According to a new study by researchers at Stanford and Yale universities, emissions from the palm oil industry alone could release 558 million metric tons of carbon dioxide – more than the national emissions of Canada – by 2020....

From Nature magazine Fair-skinned, red-haired folks know — sometimes through painful experience — that they are more susceptible to the damaging effects of the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays, including sunburn, skin ageing and a higher risk of skin cancers. But a study published today in Nature suggests that in mice, the pigment responsible for this colouring has a role in the development of melanoma. “There is something about the redhead genetic background that is behaving in a carcinogenic fashion, independent of UV,” says David Fisher, a cancer biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the study....

By Reuters Staff NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. health regulators on Thursday announced strict new recommendations for preventing the transmission of antibiotic-resistant infections from reusable medical devices such as those that have spread recently at several hospitals. A key change is that when manufacturers submit instructions for disinfecting the devices between uses, the Food and Drug Administration will not take the company’s word that the instructions work, but will demand proof....

1969 Heart-Healthy Water “Several studies in the past decade have suggested that the death rate from coronary disease is inversely correlated with the hardness of the local water supply: the harder the water, the lower the coronary rate. A study recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine reports evidence that the excess coronary deaths in soft-water areas are almost entirely sudden deaths outside the hospital. Researchers at the University of Toronto School of Hygiene reviewed the death certificates of 55,000 people who died in the province of Ontario in 1967 and classified the deceased individuals according to the hardness of their local water supply....

By Jean-Francois Rosnoblet SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France, March 25 (Reuters) - French investigators on Wednesday searched for the reason why a German Airbus ploughed into an Alpine mountainside, killing all 150 on board including 16 teenagers returning from a school trip to Spain. Helicopters flew over the site where the A320 operated by Lufthansa’s Germanwings budget airline disintegrated after it went down in a remote area of ravines en route to Duesseldorf from Barcelona....

Dear EarthTalk: So many chemicals in everyday products are harmful to our health and the environment. Why aren’t we developing safer alternatives?–Donna Langston, Asheville, N.C. Researchers today are beginning to question the safety of many chemicals used in consumer products. Studies have linked bisphenol A (BPA), flame retardants, phthalates and many other chemicals found in everyday products to a wide range of health problems, including cancer, learning and behavioral problems and reproductive illnesses....

Key concepts Vision Perception Measurement Introduction It’s probably difficult to imagine a time with no television, no movies and no cartoons. But believe it or not, those times weren’t so long ago! What did those kids do when they couldn’t watch movies? One of the most popular toys during that time was a great-grandfather of the modern cartoon. This toy was called a “thaumatrope,” and in this activity you’re going to make (and test) your own thaumatrope to learn about how vision works!...

Yingwei Fei and his colleagues had spent a month carefully crafting the three slivers of dense silicate—shiny and round, each sample was less than a millimetre thick. But in early November, it was time to say goodbye. Fei carefully packed the samples, plus a few back-ups, in foam and shipped them from Washington DC to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, the Z Pulsed Power Facility at Sandia National Laboratories will soon send 26 million amps surging towards the slivers, zapping them, one by one, into dust....

By Reuters Staff LONDON (Reuters) - The World Health Organization has added new curative treatments for hepatitis C to its essential medicines list, but the U.N. agency said prices needed to fall to make them accessible to patients in poorer countries. The treatment of hepatitis C, which affects about 150 million people globally and kills around half a million each year, has been transformed by the arrival of new drugs, such as Gilead’s Sovaldi (sofosbuvir)....

STATEMENT TO THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Richard A. Muller Professor of Physics University of California, Berkeley Chair, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project 31 March 2011 Executive Summary The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was created to make the best possible estimate of global temperature change using as complete a record of measurements as possible and by applying novel methods for the estimation and elimination of systematic biases....

The periodic table may look like it has plenty of elements, but chemists and materials scientists would like more, thank you. That is because in the quest to design synthetic materials with unusually useful properties—say, a siliconlike superconductor with the biodegradability of wood—nature’s cookbook has its limits. “Oftentimes you’ll want an atom that actually doesn’t exist,” says Colin Nuckolls, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University. Molecules built out of so-called superatoms—clusters of atoms that behave like single elemental units—could fill this need....

On December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin went on board HMS Beagle in Devonport (Plymouth). For five years, the naturalist traveled around the world in the 90-foot- (27.4 meter-) long and 24-foot- (7.4-meter-) wide three-mast ship. On October 2, 1836, the ship reached English shores again. Originally, the Beagle had served the Royal Navy as a survey ship. However, it became famous through the expedition with Charles Darwin. The exotic animal world of Australia fascinated Charles Darwin and baffled him: “Anyone who has faith in his own reasoning is sure to cry out: ‘Surely there have been two creators at work here—one for Australia and one for the rest of the world....

PARIS – Six years is not a long time in science. Data may be collected, a paper or two published or a PhD earned. But in the six years since the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Charge (IPCC) report was released, the science and certainty of global warming has grown markedly. “In the first IPCC report in 1990 there were no real observations demonstrating that climate had changed, only a prognosis that it would change,” says Herve Le Treut, atmospheric physicist at CNRS (France’s National Center for Scientific Research) and a lead author of part of the fourth IPCC report set to be released on Friday....

HONG KONG — While residents in Vanuatu are still battling flash floods caused by a devastating tropical cyclone last week, a study says coastal population growth may make storm threats from the sea a global crisis within a few decades. In a paper published recently in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of researchers from several Western institutes estimated the number of people living in low-elevation coastal zones, as well as the scale of the population at risk from one-in-100-year storm surge events, by using scenario-based projections....