Long Game

Imagine a Web-based bank that lets you deposit checks by simply photographing them with its mobile app. It lets you make cash withdrawals from ATMs all over the country at no cost, sometimes even reimbursing you for fees you get charged by other companies.

BankSimple says it will be "an easy, intuitive, and social bank for people who appreciate simple online services." The company emphasizes its lack of fees, saying that other banks grew greedy when they moved beyond making money from interest on deposits.

There will always be physical schools - students need to go somewhere during the day to enable the engine of modern economic progress: two parents working. But these schools will evolve into things that look more like civic centers - hubs for community involvement and rich relationship-building

Disintermediation is a process in which a middle player poised between service or product providers and their consumers is weakened or removed from the value chain.

An example of what disintermediation looks like is what happened to travel agencies.

Disintermediation of travel agencies occurred in two distinct phases: an initial phase in which technology enabled travel agents to do their job better and a “terminal” phase in which these same agencies were disintermediated.

Finance is a fund management science.

Economics is a social science.

Since Russia and Turkey are both resurgent powers in the region, the energy issue can turn quite thorny at times, particularly as the West is leaning on Turkey to keep its distance from Moscow. But Russia and Turkey are not looking for an energy brawl at the moment. Tensions exist between these historic rivals, but the current geopolitical environment is pushing the two sides to work with — instead of against — each other.

a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion (about $7.5 billion) could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity [The Times].

Armand Neukermanns, who is leading the research, said that whitening clouds was “the most benign form of engineering” because, while it might alter rainfall, the effects would cease soon after the machines were switched off [The Times]

Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.

Shortly after the cold war ended, the U.S. started buying warheads from Russia and converting the weapons-grade uranium into fuel suitable for commercial reactors.

spent fuel rods from a typical plant cannot easily be converted into weapons-grade explosives.

Terrorists cannot easily blow up nuclear plants to create dirty bombs.

One researcher put the basic biological assumption of a single common ancestor to the test--and found that advanced genetic analysis and sophisticated statistics back up Darwin's age-old proposition

A new statistical analysis takes this assumption to the bench and finds that it not only holds water but indeed is overwhelmingly sound.

If there is another war in the Middle East, will it remain limited like previous ones, or will it draw in other participants who feel they can no longer stand aside? Will governments be able to restrain the emotions of people who feel they will be dishonored if they don't support their brethren?

Unless you're making an argument about a group of great powers locked in an unstable system of bipolar military alliances with contradictory and ill-defined security commitments to one another, then you're probably doing violence to a decent analysis of whatever the current situation is.

The European financial crisis is moving to a new level. The Germans have finally consented to lead a bailout effort for Greece. The effort has angered the German public, which has acceded with sullen reluctance. It does not accept the idea that it is Germans’ responsibility to save Greeks from their own actions. The Greeks are enraged at the reluctance, having understood that membership in the European Union meant that Greece’s problems were Europe’s.

Europe feared nationalism out of a very nationalist impulse.