Imagine that you had $75 billion that could be put to work addressing the most pressing problems of the day. What problems would you attend to, and how would you allocate the money?

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» Read more of Saving the World for $75 Billion: The Copenhagen Consensus

The discovery of extinct life on Mars would furnish evidence for what some pessimistic cosmologists call the “Great Filter”–a theorized congeries of conditions obtaining throughout the universe, under which the chances of life anywhere developing civilizations capable of interstellar travel are impossibly small.

This doesn’t mean that life never arises elsewhere; it only means that the chance of it arriving at the stage at which it can voyage among the stars is effectively zero.

» Read more of Mars, the “Great Filter,” and Extraterrestrial Life

Wine has become a poster-child for the health benefits of alcoholic beverages. It has been the subject of a diverse range of scientific investigations and as a result often appears in news headlines. The news has been mostly positive, in part because wine, especially red wine, is loaded with antioxidants.

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» Read more of Rx Wine

We eat too much, and we know it. Worse, we can’t seem to stop ourselves from overeating. The obesity epidemic sweeping the United States, the United Kingdom, and other developed countries is, literally, a growing problem, waist lines included. We’ve so far been most successful not at burning off excess fat but instead at explaining away our weight problems …

» Read more of Fat, Fat, Why We’re Fat

“Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.” But it does suggest that God has not entirely confided in us. This ought not to surprise anyone – why on Earth should he, after all? – but it runs counter to the attitude of those whose single-minded focus on what is written in the terrestrial Jewish/Christian scripture leaves them no capacity for curiosity about what may not be written there.

» Read more of Aliens, Gays, and Radio Host Kevin James: More Certainty Afoot

Forests have done much work in the human imagination and in our material world as well, furnishing not only shadows and havens, but food and fuel. We may have come down from the trees, but we never stopped seeking their shade and wood; our ancestors learned to coax both game and gardens from the glades.

Deforestation, then, deals two blows …

» Read more of Our Fate in Forests

This summer eight species of butterflies found in the United Kingdom are in desperate need of good flying weather. Last year’s unusually rainy summer grounded them, leading to less breeding and feeding and resulting this spring in the lowest numbers counted for these species since butterfly record-keeping began in the United Kingdom some 25 years ago. Scientists and conservationists fear that it could take many years for these butterflies to mount a comeback, assuming they can do so at all.

» Read more of Butterfly Climate Effect?

There be four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise:
The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in summer;
The conies are but a feeble folk, yet they make their houses in the rocks;
The locusts have no king, yet they go forth all of them by bands;
The […]

» Read more of A Few Words in Favor of Tarantulas

Life is noisy, and silence is rare. So it is that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been making efforts to reduce noise in the city through an active program of incentives and disincentives. Elsewhere, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has initiated an ambitious noise-mapping project across Great Britain, while in 2003, the European Union established April 30 as International Anti-Noise Day—a commemoration that, beg pardon, would seem to be in need of a slightly noisier program of publicity.

» Read more of Notes on Noise Pollution

In what might be considered uplifting environmental news, Oxfam tells the Times of London that there is much demand for recycled brassieres in the developing world, at least in part because the things are technically difficult to make. For that and other closing remarks on Earth Week, come on in.

» Read more of Bras, Evolution, and Why We’re Living … Shorter? (Earth Week Coda)