June 28 — For the first time in more than 65 years, dengue has returned the continental United States, according to an advisory the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued in late May. While a few cases were reported earlier, they were primarily in Americans who had caught the virus abroad or at the Texas-Mexico border.

The upsurge is not unexpected. Experts say more than half the world’s population will be at risk by 2085 because of greater urbanization, global travel and climate change. Over the past 30 years, a global outcry against using the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, has led to the resurgence of the mosquito, a voracious consumer of human blood and carrier of infectious disease.

Epidemics have become routine in Latin America, a continent on the verge of becoming highly endemic. Outbreaks are today raging in Brazil, Guatemala and other nations. Thailand, within a week of its annual dengue season this year, has already reported 18,000 cases and 20 deaths, according to the Ministry of Public Health.

June 14 – Billions of dollars of new business and tens of thousands of jobs will flow to four hub cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Orlando and Albany, N.Y. — where plans for major high-speed rail networks are located, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Their report, released in Oklahoma City today, [...]

I wrote about the cancer drug ipilimumab last year, which has been hailed as miraculous by some. The drug has been through Phase 3 clinical trials and results will be presented on June 6 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
Meanwhile, following announcements of the miracle cure in three men [...]

May 18 — Much of the world’s oil reserves lies in giant tar sand stretches in places like Alberta and Venezuela. While the oil industry uses an energy-intensive and fairly dirty process to make steam to cook the oil out of the tar sands, underground bacteria simply eat the crude oil and [...]

A blog based on ideas fermenting in the DC think tank/ policy sectors

The chicken farm in Food, Inc. reminded me of a poultry farm in a village in Karnataka, India. The chickens in that farm were healthy and caged in separate coops. It was a clinical operation; the neatest farm of any variety I’ve visited [...]

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton defended her budget in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She said that the United States needs to become a leader in climate change politics and economics [...]

March 31 — In Burkina Faso, a school for the future regulators of Africa’s genetically modified (GM) crops is opening up next month.
The school, called the African Biosafety Network of Expertise (ABNE), has been set up by the African Union and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The operators [...]

A warming climate could lead to a more fragrant world, but it might disturb an intricate communication system used by plants, according to a review published recently in Trends in Plant Science.
When Jarmo Holopainen grew white cabbages in a greenhouse in Finland, he found that over many years of sunlight and elevated levels of carbon [...]

ClimateWire/ New York Times, Mar ‘10– It has been a long journey for the latest shipment of seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault, built into a Norwegian mountain near the North Pole, is the final defense for agriculture in the face of growing populations, a changing climate and rising threats to food [...]

Harnessing the ocean waves for emission-free power seems like a tidy concept, but the ocean is anything but tidy. Waves crash from multiple directions on a seemingly random basis, and converting the kinetic energy into electricity is a frontier of alternative energy research that requires grappling with large unknowns.
But with several utility companies and states, [...]