Geoffrey Forden, an MIT physicist and expert on the Chinese space program, was recently interviewed by John Johnson Jr. of the LA Times on the topic of the recent proliferation of space junk from China's missile test last year ("China Added to Space Debris" April 16, 2008). The news item caught my eye with the new-to-me and very impressive sounding word "supercriticality." Apparently that is what happens when space junk collides in a cascade of impacts. It is apparently very, very bad. Space is becoming cluttered to the extent that clutter will beget clutter, and in time it won't be...

by Antony Duc Le writing for VietWill (April 24, 2008). By all accounts, the Ho Chi Minh City leg of the Olympic Torch relay taking place on the 29th of April is expected to be relatively trouble free for the Beijing government. Most likely, we will not see protesters in support of Tibet or Darfur in the streets due to Vietnam's strict laws governing public demonstrations. However, that does not mean that the Vietnamese people are welcoming the Olympic torch with open arms. On the contrary, for the past months, there have been intense discussions on internet forums and blogs...

UC Berkeley and the surrounding National Labs are some of the premier nanotechnology research institutions in the world. In addition, Berkeley is the first government entity to have regulated nanotechnology. The scope for debate between the promotion and regulation of this exciting new scientific development is huge. The day-long event organized for this Sunday will discuss the potential of nanotechnology for solar panels and the potential toxicity of nanoparticles. It is true that large-scale nanotechnology is still a few years away- but as future policy-makers shouldn't we try to keep ahead of the trends? If not now, are we more...

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed column, Martin Feldstein – a well known economist of Reagan Administration fame – decries the Federal Reserve’s continued tax cuts as a solution to the imminent economic recession in the U.S. Feldstein argues that rate cuts will be ineffective at preventing a recession due to our fouled credit market and glut of unsold houses, while the cuts may worsen the food crisis in developing countries abroad. How could U.S. interest rates at home possibly worsen food crises in countries like Egypt, South Africa, and Haiti? According to Feldstein, the interaction of lower Federal...

Eco-friendly system will put U.S. Capitol in new light - by Christopher Lee, The Washington Post (April 4, 2008) Pelosi plans to upgrade the lighting system at the Capitol Dome. Battling global climate change, one lightbulb at a time... "Everyone supports making the Capitol more energy-efficient, but we don't have to waste taxpayer dollars to do it," said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "This is a ridiculous boondoggle."...

I chose to take last semester off from grad school because I went to Nepal for my summer internship and decided to stay and support/experience the Constitutional Assembly elections planned for November. Unfortunately, they were postponed, no one was sure if they would actually happen, and the time came for me to return home. Finally, a new date was set for April 10th, and as that date approached, it looked like the election might actually happen. I, along with the entire country and a large part of the international community held my breath that it would be a peaceful and...

Tonight the Goldman Environmental Prize winners for 2008 were announced (summaries cribbed from the Goldmanprize.org website): North America: Jesús León Santos, Mexico: In Oaxaca, where unsustainable land-use practices have made it one of the world’s most highly-eroded areas, León initiated a land renewal program that employs ancient indigenous practices to transform depleted soil into arable land. Africa: Feliciano dos Santos, Mozambique: Using traditional music, grassroots outreach and innovative technology to bring sanitation to the most remote corners of Mozambique, Santos empowered villagers to participate in sustainable development and rise up from poverty. South & Central America: Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and...

A new paper concluding that drunk driving increases after smokefree bar laws are passed was just published in the Journal of Public Economics (Adams and Cotti, J Public Econ 92:1288-1305;2008). Stan Glantz at UCSF, a pioneer in tobacco-free policy, set the record straight through his analysis of the research, disseminated through smokefree.net.. After detailing the article's questionable statistical practices and biased literature citations, Glantz concludes by emphasizing that even if we accept the authors' conclusions that a smokefree law is associated with 2.54 more accidents per year in the average county, the benefits in terms of just reduced heart attacks...

Cal law professor John Yoo is in the news again lately. Yoo is the author of an infamous August 2002 legal opinion, written while at the US Justice Department, justifying the use of torture in interrogations. Last week the Pentagon declassified another argument by Yoo on behalf of the use of torture, an 81-page memo from March 2003: eyebrows are being raised, to say the least, by the memo's content. Here are a few relevant articles worth reading: "White House asked DOJ how Bush could sidestep Fourth Amendment" - describing the circumstances of the memo, by Jason Leopold for the...

Though most people expect the Bush administration to do little to pass climate change legislation during its final year in office, there is still a tremendous amount of work being done in Congress. The Lieberman-Warner bill appears to be most likely to get 60+ support in the Senate this year according to Lieberman himself. But what would be the political impact of such a bill? Does it remove global warming legislation from the federal agenda? Or will it just create a not-as-good substitute for legislation that might pass in 2009 or 2010 with one of the current presidential candidates? If...

On Tuesday, April 1 UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria Harrison e-mailed the UC student body to explain how the University police force is dealing with the tree sitters. (Click here to read the full letter). April Fools joke? Hardly. Harrison's 1,200-word expose was unexpected. She claims that an unsolicited student e-mail inspired her to share her thoughts on University policing policies. Her reply was thorough, eloquent, savvy, and downright impressive. While I'm not wholly convinced that the University would be as responsive to a negative court order as the police chief contends, I respect her forthrightness. In a time when...