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In The Future, living forever is at hand, and its first test group are characters we meet in the play: they are our generation's children, as one of them mentions going to the London Olympics when he was six years old.

The same couples gather for each scene, with the plot having progressed at an interval of four years in between scenes. It's a storytelling device that works well, especially in the second act, when the world has changed massivley because of the drug and its societal side effects have become more apparent. Now in their late twenties, the men are old high school friends and in the beginning of the play, their conversational topics are mundane: whether or not to have children, debates about love and money, old memories and past slights. The first mention of Senexate is met with disbelief. But by the next act, most of the characters are taking it.

After the first excitement over immortality has faded, the problems become apparent. Harrison's medical mind has focused on the statistical and moral realities. Population control is a pressing, global issue — and soon an authoritarian system has fallen into place that limits the birthrate. Jobs and workers become stagnant with no new vacancies, no career ladders to climb. Without children to raise and faced with the possibility of perpetual life, the old-fashioned institution of marriage starts to break down. People in developing countries do not have the same access to Senexate, and the drug company that developed it has assumed massive proportions. There is talk of blood tests, genetic ID cards, and a vaccine that will prevent the drug from working forever, if you violate the rules.

One factor is that shipping companies have begun equipping their ships with more countermeasures, namely armed guards.

For several years, commercial ships sailing in the Indian Ocean have used other countermeasures, such as fences, water cannons and adjusted tactics like disabling the ship.

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

China's leaders will likely survive this trial. But what if they don't? What if China faces a severe socio-economic crisis and attendant political one of an unforeseen magnitude? What would be the second-order geopolitical effects? If Syria explodes, it does so regionally. If China explodes, it does so globally.

Such a crisis could lead to an upsurge in nationalism, an emotion that can be easily dialed upwards by Communist party leaders as a means of clinging to power.

China's defense budget has already increased eight-fold since 2001, and might continue to do so under a more nationalist-style regime (even amid slowing growth), enabling China to further implement an anti-access area-denial strategy in the East and South China seas, emphasizing submarine, ballistic missile, and cyber warfare capabilities.

the threat of war has not dissolved. It has, however, been pushed off beyond this round of negotiations. 

There is no chance of an attack on chemical weapons stockpiles. Therefore, the attack, if any, will be on command and control and political targets

One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling.

When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.

Central Asia is linked to Afghanistan geographically; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan share borders with Afghanistan that collectively span more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,240 miles).

the topography of Afghanistan's frontiers with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is largely desert. 

The crux of his argument isn't new: Cul-de-sacs discourage mobility and increase our dependence on cars to get around. Not surprisingly, the health of Americans who have chosen to live outside of city centers is slowly eroding. These maze-like neighborhoods "engineer their travel behavior," which studies have shown can have tangible effects in several areas of their lives

Consider Atlanta. The average working adult in Atlanta's suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That's 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people's environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city. Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta's downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day. [Slate]

suburban group-think has largely deviated from the practical grid layout featured in older, bigger cities

This dynamism is not limited to China. The Scottish referendum and waves of secession movements -- from Spain's Catalonia to Turkey and Iraq's ethnic Kurds -- are working in different directions.

in China, one of the most intractable issues in the struggle for unity -- the status of Tibet -- is poised for a possible reversal, or at least a major adjustment.

More important, a settlement between Beijing and the Dalai Lama could be a major step in lessening the physical and psychological estrangement between the Chinese heartland and the Tibetan Plateau.

China's current economic model, and by extension its political and social model, is reaching its limits just as it had prior to Deng's administration.

It is worth recalling just how extraordinary Deng's 1978 meeting was. Mao Zedong had died only two years earlier, taking with him what little remained of the old pillars of Communist Party legitimacy. China was a mess, ravaged by years of economic mismanagement and uncontrolled population growth and only beginning to recover from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution.

Had the People's Republic fallen in 1978 or shortly thereafter, few would have been truly surprised. Of course, in those tense early post-Mao years hardly anyone could foresee just how rapid China's transformation would be.

Political advertisements (even the rare ones that actually refer to facts) are full of fallacies.  The appeal to emotion is clear.  The “good guy” is shown shaking hands with a diverse group of people.  He/she is fighting for justice, fairness, freedom, etc (all words that evoke positive emotion and passion.)  The “bad guy” in the ad is always shown in black-and-white or grainy film with ominous music playing in the background.  Fear tactics are clear as the opponent is charged with wanting to take away freedom, raise taxes, go to war, take away healthcare, destroy the economy, ruin the environment, free terrorists, etc.  If your emotions aren’t fully charged after a 30 second ad, you might want to check your pulse.

The Kremlin has already struck many deals with foreign businesses — especially U.S. and European firms — and set out the first steps to make Russia appear more attractive to investors. But the necessary deals and investments will have to be on Russia’s terms, making this modernization program very different from previous efforts in an attempt to prevent the errors of the past from being repeated.

In centralizing Russia’s economy, the Kremlin changed the laws, limiting how much a foreign business or citizen can own in Russia’s strategic sectors and nationalizing many assets owned by foreigners. This, along with shifts in Russia’s foreign policy, made Russia’s anti-Western sentiments very clear. Russia, with its oligarchs and organized crime, was already a risky market to invest in, but the legal changes made it even more difficult for foreign groups to work inside the country.

Typically, the Kremlin has thought that as long as it had energy wealth it did not need a diverse or modern economy, let alone foreign investments. But over the past two years, a series of events has made the Kremlin reassess Russia’s long-term economic capabilities.

I've had the huge pleasure of giving a talk at TED Global in Oxford, about the lessons games can teach us about engagement and about learning itself. The full video will be online in due course; until then, here's a summary of a few central points.

Even though organic methods may increase farm biodiversity, a combination of conventional farming and protected areas could sometimes be a better way to maintain food production and protect wildlife.

The study is the first to seek to establish the trade-off between the most efficient use of farmland and the most effective way to conserve wildlife in our countryside and has important implications for how agricultural land in the UK should be managed

Lead author, Dr Jenny Hodgson, of the Department of Biology at York, said: "This research raises questions about how agri-environment schemes and incentives could be improved. There could be much more scope for restoring and maintaining permanent, high-quality wildlife habitat. This might involve neighbouring farmers clubbing together to achieve a larger area of restored habitat, or setting up a partnership with a conservation organisation."

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")

Since 1989 the population of the Russian Far East declined by 14% to 6.7 million in 2002; shorn of subsidies from the center, it is now dependent on the rest of East Asia for food and consumer imports. It sits next to Chinese Manchuria (the provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin), an environmentally-strained rust belt of 108 million souls. Thus it is not surprising to see American geopolitical jockeys, Russian xenophobes and anti-Putin "liberals" alike (i.e. Radio Free Europe's Aleksandr Golts and Echo Moskvi Radio's Yulia Latynina, etc) claiming that a stealth demographic invasion of Russia is well underway which will in a few years result in a Chinese Far East.

The issue of Chinese migration to Russia and its political consequences starts with one main question - how many of them are there? All reputable estimates are in the range of 200,000 to 400,000, with 500.000 as the absolute maximum, most of them shuttle traders or seasonal laborers. The academic Gel'bras first came with these figures in 2001, based on adding up numbers from separate towns and regions.

Most migrants come from cities or small towns, and only 20% from villages - although the latter figure is higher in Moscow. Only 5% were employed in agriculture back in China. 38% were "workers" and 11% were "worker-peasants". Although only 6% admitted they had been unemployed, the real figure is much higher since 70% of workers and 68% of worker peasants said they migrated because they couldn't find a job in China.

But a new body of research has begun to show how growth and achievement emerge from relationships. The new science begins with infancy. For centuries, babies were seen as blank slates who just filled their stomachs, emptied their bowels and bladders, and cried and slept in between. As for any significant aspects of their environment, small children were seen as passive receivers. (And largely insensitive ones: For most of the 20th century, doctors routinely operated on babies without anesthesia, believing them exempt from pain.)

I think future generations might like to have most of the things we're investing in, such as infrastructure, healthcare, schools, a clean environment, energy sources, and freedom, to name just a few. No one wants to inherit a country full of sickly, uneducated hobos, on the verge of being conquered by Cuba.