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At the grand old age of 241, the Royal Academy is letting its hair down. After allowing itself to be spattered with red wax by Anish Kapoor, it now welcomes a gaggle of artists with a green tinge. For the second GSK Contemporary show, “Earth: Art of a changing world”, Burlington House will have a giant molecular structure growing out of its venerable facade. The RA's new exhibitions director, Kathleen Soriano, gave us a sneak preview of the show, and as she flipped through her laminated folder, the images that lingered longest were the photographs by Antti Laitinen (pictured, "It's My Island I") .

At first glance they are just gorgeous shots of the sea. On closer inspection there is an island, the kind you see in cartoons. Laitinen, who is Finnish, made the island himself, lugging sandbags out into the Baltic in a rowing boat for six weeks solid: a Sisyphus on sea. “Yes, it was like that,” Laitinen says. “I think life is quite a Sisyphean struggle in general, but I don’t consider it a bad thing at all.”  read more »

The US Department of Energy (DoE) recently concluded its fourth “Solar Decathlon” in Washington, DC. The ten-event competition is a two-week contest between 20 of the world’s most energy-efficient houses. For the two brief weekends when the houses were open for viewing, the rows of futuristic abodes transformed the usually humdrum National Mall into the busiest and most high tech block in America. On the soggy final day of the contest, throngs of umbrella wielding architects and environmentalists replaced the standard assortment of tourists, protestors and ultimate Frisbee players on the nation’s quad.

Like the last decathlon in 2007, this year’s gold medal went to Darmstadt University of Technology in Hesse, Germany. Their solar-panel-covered “Cube House” (pictured below) won by fewer than 11 points out of a possible thousand, yet it aced the critical net metering category, by which the competition's judges measured the energy a house produces or consumes over the course of the competition. (If only America had a robust smart grid capable of absorbing excess power, such  dwellings could actually generate extra juice to go around.) Germany's engineers and scientists have benefited from government incentives to make solar energy competitive with coal.  read more »

Our friends at The Economist's Democracy in America blog make a convincing case for the Senate to pass cap-and-trade legislation:

How warm were the oceans this summer? The warmest they've ever been since measurements started in 1880.

How's that typhoon season coming along? In August, Typhoon Etsau killed 13 people in Japan. Later that week, Typhoon Morakot, Taiwan's worst in 50 years, killed 367 people. Last weekend, Typhoon Ketsana brought the heaviest rain in 40 years to the Philippines, where it killed over 300 people. In Vietnam, Ketsana dumped 3 feet of rain on one province and killed over 100 people. In a day or two, Typhoon Parma will hit the Philippines, and most likely Taiwan shortly thereafter. It is currently clocking winds of 120 knots, faster than Ketsana.

Meanwhile, in Australia, where February's "Black Saturday" wildfires killed 181 people, the sky turned black last week, as a multi-year drought generated the largest dust storms in 70 years.

Himalayan glaciers? Catch them while they last. Arctic sea ice? Third-lowest ever.  read more »

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This is fascinating, and a touch sad:

There are a lot of clichés thrown around about the elderly, but one that seems to be true—or at least is backed up by research—is the belief they tend to be more prejudiced than younger people. This phenomenon—noted in The New York Times as early as 1941—is widely assumed to be the result of socialization. After all, today's senior citizens grew up in an era when racism was widespread and gays stayed in the closet. Of course they aren't as open-minded as their children and grandchildren.

A decade ago, a research team led by William von Hippel of the University of Queensland challenged that assumption. The psychologists proposed that older people may exhibit greater prejudice because they have difficulty inhibiting the stereotypes that regularly get activated in all of our brains. They suggested an aging brain is not as effective in suppressing unwanted information—including stereotypes.

Bible Belters and their red state ilk don’t often infiltrate America’s cosmopolitan coast (the occasional befuddling health care reform protests aside). The righteous and religious have Branson and Dollywood; Hollywood and New York remain the destinations of the decadent and the depraved. The denizens of these opposing poles have little to do with each other, except for within the disappointing realm of politics.

That’s what makes the dispute surrounding “Creation”, a film about the life of Charles Darwin (in British cinemas on September 25th), so surprising. The biopic, which stars Paul Bettany as Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife Emma, has yet to find an American distributor. This may have something to do with the fact that only 14% of Americans polled by Gallup in 2008 agreed that “man evolved over millions of years” (up from 9% in 1982, at least). The BBC film has unleashed a torrent of criticism from some American Christian websites, which evidently wield some power. According to a story in the Telegraph:  read more »

In December 2008, as General Motors was busy begging the outgoing Bush administration for money to delay its inevitable bankruptcy, Salon took the opportunity to recount “the short and disgusting life of the Hummer”. These massive gas-guzzling SUVs were bought by GM in 1999 and rapidly became a money-minting, market-beating, road-hogging phenomenon. But with last year’s rising gas prices and a recessionary economy, the Hummer just as quickly became a monstrous cash-guzzling, bottom-line-battering burden to the embattled car company.

As Salon gleefully noted, “the mighty Hummer has been celebrated and reviled as a metaphor for American bravado—and wretched American excess. But this hip-hop icon, this military-porn embodiment of America's post-911 belligerence, may now be a victim of the market”. Although the Hummer’s future is still far from certain, it now appears that the company will soldier on—in China.  read more »

A new bit of bad news about carbon emissions, reported in The Economist:

According to a report published by the Climate Group, a think-tank based in London, computers, printers, mobile phones and the widgets that accompany them account for the emission of 830m tonnes of carbon dioxide around the world in 2007. That is about 2% of the estimated total of emissions from human activity. And that is the same as the aviation industry’s contribution. According to the report, about a quarter of the emissions in question are generated by the manufacture of computers and so forth. The rest come from their use.

So much for the magic bullet of telecommuting. On the upside, this awkwardly curbs lingering feelings of guilt for all those long-haul flights ...

As Theodor Herzl once said: "If you will it, it is no dream."

In his "Critique of Practical Reason", Kant named the two things that filled him with wonder and awe: the "starry heaven" above and the "moral law within". A similar dedication would go on to define the Romantic poets--Keats, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge incorporated both science and the internal life into their poetry. Somehow, the second half of the relationship--the influence of the poets on the scientists--has not been expertly explored until now, with the publication of Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder".

"Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity," Holmes writes. "But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so.”

The Economist called the book a "long-awaited fermentation of the author's knowledge of the Romantic poets and his lifelong fascination with science." A biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, Holmes's particular genius is to parse the similar philosophical concerns of both science and poetry, showing us how the scientists of the era defined the textbook Romantic temperament as much as the poets did.  read more »

The story of humanity is written in our genes, and thanks to modern science and technology, we are finally able to read it, writes J.M. Ledgard in our latest cover story. Geoffrey Carr, science editor of The Economist, explains how this works:  read more »