Новости за 07.06.2017

Nitrate film burns. It is chemically the sister of guncotton, the old-fashioned explosive. Nitrate film has been known to spontaneously combust, and it continues to burn even if you submerge it in water. From its invention in 1889 until Kodak’s conversion to acetate base in the early 1950s, nitrate film was also the standard stock for movie prints. So, when a nitrate film print burns, a story burns with it: The reel is devoured from beginning to end, until the whole narrative has been swallowed up and each character eaten by flame. Читать дальше...

In 2009, Republican Congressman Bob Inglis went snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef and returned home a changed man. He saw the massive bleaching of the once-colorful Australian corals, and realized that climate change was real. U.S. lawmakers, he concluded, needed to take conservative, market-based action—like eliminating fuel subsidies and implementing a revenue-neutral carbon tax—to fight the problem. But Inglis didn’t get much time to push those policies, because the following year South Carolina voters kicked him out of office. Читать дальше...

Chinese President Xi Jinping met this week with a powerful American leader who believes climate change is real and wants to open the economic floodgates for U.S.-China cooperation on green tech.

When the Republicans’ legislative agenda started drifting sideways early in Donald Trump’s presidency, it became easy to see how their dysfunction could precipitate a massive economic crisis. Just a few months later, we are nearing the brink of such a crisis.