Imagine generating electricity from the energy a redwood tree exerts when it sucks water up 300 ft. to its highest needles. Is there any greener juice than that? Stein Erik Skilhagen thinks about this sort of thing all the time for Norway's state-owned power company, Statkraft, where he's the head of osmotic power. Yes, osmotic power. Of course you remember studying osmosis. But just in case you've forgotten, it's the passage of a liquid from a region where it's ...

Twas election night all over again. The halls were decked, the pundits were quacking, Democrats said Florida was still too close to call. By the Sunday 5 p.m. deadline, the counting still wasn't done, but in a dramatic signing ceremony at 7:30, secretary of state Katherine Harris certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes. But even as Bush asked Dick Cheney to head a transition team and named Andrew Card his chief of staff, the Democratic faithful were ...

At 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 15, as thousands of people gathered to protest against their ruler at a busy intersection in Manama, the capital of the small island nation of Bahrain, you could just about hear over the general hubbub the anthem of the young people who have shaken regimes from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf. It wasn't a verse from the Koran. It wasn't a traditional tune from the region. It was rap. A reedy ...

Here we go again: the spike in global oil prices that preceded the Great Recession is being repeated. Just three years ago, the price of oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $100 per bbl. for the first time, bringing dire warnings about looming economic hardship. Sure enough, the world economy entered its worst downturn since the Depression just months after oil prices peaked at a record $147 per bbl. in July 2008. Now the ...

Not long ago I had an apple problem. Wavering in the produce section of a Manhattan grocery store, I was unable to decide between an organic apple and a nonorganic apple . It shouldn't have been a tough choice--who wants to eat pesticide residue?--but the organic apples had been grown in California. The conventional ones were from right here in New York State. I know I've been listening to too much npr because I started wondering: How much Middle Eastern ...

Just an hour from Johannesburg, sprawling across hundreds of square kilometers of veld, lies a UNESCO World Heritage site known as the Cradle of Humankind, where many of the world's oldest human fossils have been unearthed. But while it may be an anthropological El Dorado, the Cradle is also emerging as an unlikely nursery for arts and culture. At its heart lies the Nirox arts foundation, www.niroxarts.com, a four-year-old arts complex built on land jointly owned by ...

Of all the colonial revolts that have convulsed Asia and Africa since World War II, none have matched Kenya's Mau Mau movement for sheer grisliness. In seven years of terror beginning in the autumn of 1952, 95 Europeans, 29 Asians and 12,423 Africans were slain by methods ranging from merciful garroting to having their heads bashed in and their brains removed, dried and ritually eaten. Last week the British finally got around to releasing the first complete and authoritative account of ...

Take a look, if you can stand it, at video footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. Your eye will naturally jump to the top of the screen, where huge fountains of dark debris erupt out of the falling towers. But fight your natural instincts. Look farther down, at the stories that haven't collapsed yet. In almost every clip you'll see little puffs of dust spurting out from the sides of the towers. There are two competing explanations for these puffs ...

When a reporter from Rupert Murdoch's British Sunday paper the News of the World was jailed, along with a private detective, in 2007 for hacking into the cellphone voicemails of aides to the royal family, the paper insisted it was a one-off — a "rogue reporter" operating without the knowledge or approval of his bosses. That assertion prompted two reactions from those in the U.K. newspaper industry: snorts of disbelief — after all, the British tabloids have ...

The great transition was taking place without violence. Across the land, veterans of World War II tried to make the best of this best of all civilian worlds. In The Bronx, ex-Pfc. Peter Boucouvales, paralyzed from the waist down by the bullet which had lodged in his neck, lay between clean sheets in the Veterans Administration Hospital. The corridors were cheerless, the windows dirty. His lunch of filet of sole, peas, rice, cole slaw and lemon pie was cold by ...