What does a dying city look like? Brains are draining. The population is shrinking or aging, or both. Vibrant, creative class cool Portland is the antithesis of dying. Yesterday, journalist Annalyn Kurtz tweets: “See! The Portland labor force lost 25,000 workers in the last year. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUMT41389006.”

What in the name of Richard Florida is going on here? The link will take you to the Bureau of Labor page with a bunch of employment data for Portland (select data recreated below). You can see the boom, the fuel for Portlandia. More recently, the labor force number plateaus. Recession. Financial crisis. You know the drill. What comes next? Will the boom pick back up?

As Kurtz notes, the year-over-year drop is dramatic. You might expect such a dive for a Rust Belt city, say Pittsburgh. But Pittsburgh’s labor force is growing, setting historical records seemingly every month. Pittsburgh is thriving. Portland is dying.

As the economy recovers, I argue that Pittsburgh is the place to be. Portland is the darling of the pre-recession economy. Talent production Pittsburgh is where we are headed.

Portland helped write the talent attraction playbook. The approach works as long as there are only a few winners, a short list of tech towns. Knowledge workers hail from somewhere, likely a Rust Belt birthplace. Why compete with Austin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles for software engineers when you can set up shop cheaply in Pittsburgh? Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) graduates are in high demand. The mountain is moving to Muhammad. Portland doesn’t have a CMU.

Last month, Judge Edward Korman ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make the emergency contraceptive, Plan B, available over the counter to people of all ages, rather than requiring prescriptions for those under 17. Last week, he stood by that decision. In his harshly worded ruling, Korman rejected the claim that easier access to Plan B would allow adolescents to make decisions that were beyond their capabilities.

The scientific evidence supports his ruling. Indeed, it shows adolescents to be more competent in thinking about their decisions than many people suspect. However, the research also shows how social and emotional pressures can lead young people to act against their own better judgment.

There is little dispute about Plan B’s effectiveness. It greatly reduces the probability of pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. Nor is there much question that easier access will help many women, especially those without regular access to physicians who can write prescriptions and those who need it over the weekend, when unprotected sexual encounters (and assaults) often occur. Serious side effects are too rare to consider.

As for older adolescents, the research shows little evidence of Plan B becoming their Plan A, used routinely so that they can have unprotected sex without getting pregnant.

In 2011, the FDA moved to make Plan B universally available. However, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius overruled that decision, citing “common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age.” She left unchallenged an earlier claim that women under 16 might exhibit “impulsive behavior, without the cognitive ability to understand the etiology of their behavior.”

Judge Korman dismissed the relevance of those “youngest girls,” arguing that “the number of 11-year-olds using these drugs is likely to be minuscule.”

As for older adolescents, the research shows little evidence of Plan B becoming their Plan A, used routinely so that they can have unprotected sex without getting pregnant. However, the research also shows how unprotected sex can happen more often than young women intend—making it all the more important that they have access to Plan B when they need it.

Cognitive research suggests that, by age 15 or 16, teens and adults have similar decision-making abilities, strong in some ways, weak in others. Like adults, teens sometimes make decisions without much thought, and sometimes work hard to get it right. Contrary to folk wisdom, teens do not have a unique sense of invulnerability. Indeed, they often feel especially vulnerable. However, teens know much less about how seemingly safe acts can make them vulnerable, as when they stumble into situations where they are coerced by sexual partners.

How well teens, or adults, use their decision-making abilities depends on how well their thoughts control their impulses. Neuroscience research shows how the structures needed for impulse control evolve in adolescents’ brains. Whether teens have as much control as they need depends on the circumstances. They may have too little control in a moment of passion, but all that they need before or after.

As a result, where teens need help is in avoiding situations where they might lose control and in coping with situations when things have not gone as planned. Parental guidance can help with the former. Easy, informed access to Plan B can help with the latter.

In a study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, we used in-depth interviews and surveys to learn how young women in Pittsburgh, aged 13-18, think about three key decisions that Plan B’s availability might affect: when to have sex, what contraceptives to use routinely, and what to do after unprotected sex.

As in other studies that let teens speak their minds, ours found them to be very thoughtful, as they navigated a complex, uncertain, sometimes unfriendly world. Although they all knew about Plan B, none described it as anything but an emergency measure. Those opposed to abortion reported having thought through what Plan B meant to them. Nothing that they said suggested that easy access would encourage them to have unprotected sex. Many underestimated its effectiveness and exaggerated its negative side effects.

Despite being unenthusiastic about Plan B, these teens wanted easier access and complained about being embarrassed to ask pharmacists about Plan B and worrying about having their privacy compromised. As a result, easier access would help young women to get the drug when they need it—and reduce the risk of unplanned pregnancy. It would leave the decisions about sex, health, and relationships to the private lives of teens and those who care about them.

Most people associate brain drain with developing nations. The idea being: a country that can’t support its most talented minds will lose them to places that can. Most don’t come back. That’s now happening in southern Europe. Two cases just this week showed how the need to save five figures in salaries now could cost cash-strapped nations nine or 10 figures in valuable research down the line.

Earlier this week we heard the ridiculous story of 30-year-old Diego Martinez Santos, a modest genius from Galicia, Spain, who has been doing research in Holland. Santos had just been voted “the most promising young experimental physicist” in Europe by the continent’s organization in that discipline, the European Physics Society. Unfortunately, according to Spain’s TheLocal.es, the very same day Santos learned his application for a research grant that would have allowed him to work in his crisis-wracked home nation had been rejected—on the grounds that he was “not good enough.” That didn’t make much sense in the scientific community. Follow the money instead—or the lack of it—said Santos’ old adviser. From the Local story:

Juan José Saborido Silvia, coordinator of the Atlas High Energies group at Santiago University, where Martínez Santos wrote his thesis, claimed that, “a person with a serious reputation in Europe is not valued in Spain.” Spain’s attitude to science came under fire recently when Finance Minister Luís de Guindos’ claim to have shielded research from cuts was met with widespread rebuttals from the scientific community.

Looked at coldly, the Santos case might not cost crisis-wracked Spain much up front. And Holland’s nice. Santos can come back for holidays, and Spain can probably lurch forward a few years more without monetizing his work on the “difference in the balance between matter and antimatter which could have led to the matter-dominated Universe that exists today.”

Three days later, however, the much less theoretical case of Nuria Marti hit the papers in Europe. Marti—”Nora Martin” if that’s more relatable—is one of the authors of research published two days ago by a team of biologists in Oregon claiming to have successfully cloned a human stem cell.

Whatever you think of the bioethics of the discovery, it’s clearly a very big deal. How did Marti get in on this career-making team, other than being very talented?

Austerity. Austerity-era budgets cuts at Valencia, Spain’s Prince Philip Research Center cost her a job, and she had an offer in the United States the next day. An absolute bloodbath, the 2011-2012 cutbacks included the cancellation of 12 out of 26 research projects at the large Spanish biotech center. Nearly half the scientists and staff—114 out of 244 before the cuts—were fired, according to local reports. So people like Marti went elsewhere and aren’t itching to return.

“It seems to me really absurd, after investing time and training in someone, not to take advantage of it,” she said, speaking from Portland to Spanish daily El Pais. Marti said she’d like to do her research in Spain, “but the way things are, no.”

It will be interesting to see the value of the resulting patent for lab-grown stem cells, especially as compared to the $30,000 a year or so people like Marti and Santos earn in downsized Spanish labs. One upside: if Europe’s austerity states can’t get their Santoses and Martis back, it might soon be possible to clone them.

Routledge recently announced that it will publish the first international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the academic study of pornography. Making its debut in spring 2014, with editors Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith at the helm, the aptly titled Porn Studies will give critical scholarship on pornography a place at the proverbial table.

The announcement generated a great deal of media interest (“Porn studies is the new discipline for academics,” declared The Guardian), along with some palpable skepticism (“The world has officially lost its marbles,” wrote one online commenter), and a few snickers (“I want a Ph.D. in porn!”)

But for many of us working in the growing field of porn studies—myself included—we reacted to the news with a collective “Hurrah!”

THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF pornography is nothing new. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the journal’s editorial board.) Film and media scholars, sociologists, and legal experts, among others, have been writing about pornography for quite some time. The publication of Linda Williams’ book, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ in 1989, positioned hardcore heterosexual pornography as a film genre worthy of critical engagement and helped to establish greater legitimacy within the academy for serious scholarly investigations of the increasingly diverse, popular, and profitable world of pornography.

With titles like C’lick Me, Porn.Com, and Porno? Chic! academic publishing on pornography, on an international scale, is flourishing. There’s also been an uptick in academic conferences dedicated to the topic of pornography, including the recent Feminist Porn Conference at the University of Toronto, the first international conference of its kind. And depending on where you go to college, you might be able to take a class on the history of pornography as a popular film genre, such as the one taught since 1993 by Professor Constance Penley at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Thus, rather than marking the emergence of a new field of study, as some media outlets have claimed, Porn Studies is a direct outgrowth of the mounting scholarly interest in the topic of pornography as a significant, yet relatively under-examined, realm of popular culture.

“It’s really important that academics do study porn and find ways to make their work more available so that public debate and policy can become more well-informed.”

“This journal signals that the study of pornography is at a critical mass in terms of the enormous growth of scholarship in the academy,” says Mireille Miller-Young, an associate professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a member of the journal’s editorial board. “It it also signals that we are at a moment when, because of the national fascination with the porn industry and questions about sexuality in mainstream popular culture, the time is right for a journal like Porn Studies to come onto the scene.”

Clarissa Smith, one of the journal’s editors, agrees: “We felt it was time to establish a journal because so much high-quality work on pornography is being carried out. [Porn Studies] will open up a space for researchers to develop conversations in different disciplines and push the study of porn forward even further.”

One of the recurring questions raised in a number of media discussions about the journal is whether there is any inherent value to the academic study of pornography, and, if so, what is it?

“We think there’s academic value in studying all forms of culture, and porn is no different from that point of view,” Smith says. “But porn is particularly interesting and important as an area of study for all kinds of reasons.”

Smith emphasizes three reasons in particular: pleasure, censorship, and controversy. First, porn is an important part of many people’s intimate lives, including their sexual relationships and identities, as well as their desires and fantasies. Second, pornography is often the focus for thinking about issues like censorship, regulation, freedom of speech, and ethical issues around sex and the media. And thirdly, pornography continues to be a controversial topic in the media and in other public forms of commentary, but, according to Smith, the way it is discussed often fails to engage with the evidence we have about porn.

But perhaps the biggest reason why pornography warrants critical engagement by scholars is that it’s a multi-billion dollar global industry that creates products that circulate widely and are consumed by many, yet we know surprisingly little about the conditions under which pornography is made and consumed, and how it affects people’s intimate lives and sexual identities.

“A lot of misinformation and myths get circulated [about pornography],” says Smith. “It’s really important that academics do study porn and find ways to make their work more available so that public debate and policy can become more well-informed.”

The editors of Porn Studies welcome all submissions, and hope the journal becomes a space for rigorous research on, and critical debate about, pornography.

“We can’t know what kinds of research will be forthcoming,” Smith says, “and that is truly exciting. We’re hoping for contributions from around the globe from different disciplines so that we can really begin to understand pornography in multifaceted ways.”

Why smoke marijuana? Users would probably reply that numbed-out bliss is its own reward. But if smoothing out the harsh edges of reality is your goal, what bruises are you attempting to avoid?

Newly published research suggests that, at least for some, the answer is: The intense discomfort of social exclusion.

“Marijuana has been used to treat physical pain,” reports a research team led by University of Kentucky psychologist Timothy Deckman, “and the current findings suggest it may also reduce emotional pain.”

Given the drug’s long-term health effects, “This may reflect a poor way of coping,” the researchers write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, “but it may also explain some of the widespread appeal of marijuana.”

Avoiding social pain by smoking pot is not unlike taking antacids to relieve stomach pain, as opposed to addressing its root cause.

Deckman and his colleagues are building on two lines of recent research: One that shows the pain of social exclusion is more intense than we previously realized, and another revealing that physical pain and emotional pain travel similar pathways in the brain.

A 2010 paper by C. Nathan DeWall, a co-author of this new study, found the use of acetaminophen (i.e., Tylenol) reduces the pain of social rejection. A much-publicized follow-up earlier this year found that use of that same painkiller can reduce existential angst.

Since acetaminophen and marijuana work through similar brain receptors, the researchers wondered whether pot similarly softens the pain of exclusion. They describe four experiments providing evidence that indeed it does.

The first incorporated data on 5,631 Americans, who reported their level of loneliness, described their marijuana usage (if any), and assessed their mental health and feelings of self-worth. Not surprisingly, the researchers found a relationship between loneliness and feelings of self-worth, but it was significantly weaker for regular pot smokers.

“Marijuana use buffered the lonely from both negative self-worth and poor mental health,” the researchers write.

Another experiment, featuring 537 people, found those who were experiencing social pain were less likely to have suffered a major depression in the past year if they smoked pot relatively frequently.

Still another experiment, featuring 225 people, used the computer game Cyberball to create an immediate experience of social exclusion. Half the participants in the three-person game received the ball twice early on, and then never again during the course of the game. They then reacted to a series of statements designed to assess whether their need for self-esteem and belonging felt threatened—statements such as, “I had the feeling that the other players did not like me.”

The results: Those who smoked marijuana relatively frequently felt less threatened than those who smoked it less frequently, or not at all.

Together, these studies show that “marijuana use consistently buffered people from the negative consequences associated with loneliness and social exclusion,” Deckman and his colleagues conclude. But buffers are of limited usefulness.

“Humans have a fundamental need to belong,” the researchers note. “Hurt feelings motivate us to fix our relationships and re-establish social connection.”

In that sense, avoiding social pain by smoking pot is not unlike taking antacids to relieve stomach pain, as opposed to addressing its root cause (such as stress or obesity). It does work, at least for a while, but it’s also a way to avoid dealing with the underlying issue.

In the long run, weed is a poor substitute for “we.”

Is the United States safe enough? That is the fundamental question being asked by the public, policymakers, and members of the Obama Administration after the Boston bombing. What shape is al Qaeda in now and how does it affect those of us living in the United States?

While working at the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Counterterrorism Center as an analyst and targeting officer I focused on a loose network in Iraq that eventually grew into the al Qaeda we recognize. From my perspective, we are almost witnessing—today—the reverse engineering of al Qaeda back into its initial state in the 1990s, when U.S. officials observed the organization as a collection of independent groups with a central financier, Osama bin Laden. The current-day exception: al Qaeda has spread a central message through propaganda and a few high-profile attacks that are inspiring regional affiliates, lone-wolf individuals, and small groups that don’t necessarily wage jihad for the same reasons that bin Laden did.

The question we keep hearing and asking over and over again: Is al Qaeda finished or is this the beginning of al Qaeda 2.0?

But where does that leave the American public in terms of risk of terrorist activity? The large al Qaeda franchises are bound by geographic constraints and interests and are less likely to pull off a high-profile attack similar to 9/11 than they were a decade ago. And the lone-wolf adherents of al Qaeda’s ideology are unlikely to have the training, financing, and capability to execute anything on a large scale. But is their inability to do significant damage enough to make us feel secure here at home? We have to ask what it is we are trying to protect ourselves from. Is it the dissemination of an ideology to lone-wolf actors who are not part of al Qaeda? Is it the terrorist acts themselves, acts that can be carried out by anyone of any affiliation? Is it both?

The question we keep hearing and asking over and over again: Is al Qaeda finished or is this the beginning of al Qaeda 2.0? I would argue it’s neither. Al Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated, but that doesn’t mean the dogma they used for recruitment efforts died with them. Using the term al Qaeda 2.0 insinuates an evolution of the pre-9/11 al Qaeda that just isn’t there. Instead, it’s two-fold. First, there are affiliates overseas with possible aspirations of transnational attacks working to adopt al Qaeda’s ideology to fit their current circumstances. And second, there are small groups and lone-wolf individuals who are inspired by and adopting al Qaeda’s message to justify their own violent actions. We understood al Qaeda core’s ideology, but the group’s current network is using the ends to justify their means, which makes those ends harder to detect and predict.

The offshoot in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, is the perfect example of an ideological separation from al Qaeda’s dogma. They are settling disputes and providing food, services, and security where needed—similar to Hizballah. Citing their doctrine of “defensive jihad,” al Qaeda historically rejected becoming part of a political process that would help build an infrastructure. The lone-wolf ideologues, like the Tsarnaev brothers or other small groups, just adopt al Qaeda’s message. The common denominator for all followers of al Qaeda is a never-ending list of reasons why their version of jihad justifies violence against the U.S.

Where does that leave the United States in combating what we used to know as al Qaeda but is now more of an ideological network? After 9/11, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was passed by Congress to give the President of the United States the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those who committed the attacks on the World Trade Center. The AUMF created a traditional militarized response against a defined actor, similar to a state, expecting a definitive end after collapse. It was a useful tactical tool that was employed to great effect. But the imminent threat al Qaeda once posed has diminished, and the U.S. needs to develop a more encompassing strategic response.

The ideology al Qaeda espouses is not confined to one named group or organization. Today, whether or not someone is a part of al Qaeda is almost irrelevant. You can’t kill an ideology with a drone. A war on an ideology doesn’t result in a definitive end by fighting it through traditional militarized means.

The threat of terrorism will not go away; societies have been grappling with violence since the beginning of time. But our efforts against al Qaeda’s dogma have been restricted and the CIA is bound by policy and legal findings to conduct counterterrorism options—the responsibility is on the intelligence community to use the tools provided. Congress and the current administration need to ensure funding and prioritize the development of new tools, like counter-radicalization strategies with host countries and strategies to identify and prevent self-radicalization in the United States, and work to better integrate the strategies used to combat illicit networks and communicate the risk versus cost of security to the American public.

It’s time to re-evaluate the United States’ definition of victory against the War on Terror. Is defeating al Qaeda’s central leadership considered a victory when the ideology fosters a following of lone individuals and loose networks? Given my experience following Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s network and evolution as the lead Targeting Officer on the CIA’s Zarqawi Operations team, it’s my opinion that we need to step back from the reality we came to terms with right after 9/11 and evolve with the extremism we hope to combat.

Some places are less connected across space than others. North Korea is an extreme example. Robert Guest, author of Borderless Economics, explains:

Because North Korea shuts out people, it shuts out ideas. That’s one big reason why it is a starving backwater. Its more open cousin, South Korea, which welcomes foreigners and sends hordes of students and businesspeople abroad each year, is 17 times richer.

People connect places. Migration is how ideas move. Another cost of isolation:

Two recent papers by Filipe Campante of Harvard’s Kennedy School and Quoc-Anh Do of the Singapore Management University argue that geographically isolated capital cities are more prone to corruption.  (This certainly fits with the anecdotal evidence of countries like Myanmar, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria, that have moved their capitals to more isolated locations.)

I theorize that the lack of churn (migration in and out of the community) allows social capital to accumulate. Ironically, the problem isn’t a paucity of trust. The circle of power is too small to facilitate knowledge exchange with the rest of the world. You will deal only with people whom you have known for decades. Autarky is institutional poverty, the hoarding of a shrinking pie.

Time to put the above lens to work in order to solve a social science mystery. Big trouble in Little Portugal:

From the very beginning, and with unusual persistence, the Portuguese community in downtown Toronto set about recreating its motherland on Canadian soil. “They never really left home,” proclaimed the headline of a 1973 Weekend magazine article. Although many Portuguese have since spread throughout the Greater Toronto Area, Little Portugal remains the community’s spiritual center, and a strikingly realistic miniature of its namesake: squat, modestly sized houses, often with glazed tiles of the Virgin Mary beside the doors; little paved-over front yards; the alternately sweet and sea-salty smells of bakeries and fish markets; fado, the plaintive Portuguese folk music, booming out of storefront stereos and filling the streets.

But Toronto’s Portuguese brought something else with them: miserable academic performance. Although the high dropout rate among black students has grabbed headlines in recent years, prompting the creation of two Africentric schools in Toronto, it’s Portuguese who, according to a 2006 Toronto District School Board report, have the highest rate in the city: 42.5 percent. (Another report puts the number at 34 percent, but these estimates vary wildly over time, and the historical mean is closer to 40 percent.) That’s nearly 20 percent higher than the municipal average, and almost four times the rate for Chinese students. The Toronto Catholic District School Board doesn’t keep track of dropout rates by language group, but, according to a source in the TCDSB, their Portuguese students have the same problem.

While that 42.5 percent figure includes some Portuguese speakers from Brazil and Angola, the current generation of dropouts is, by and large, second- or third-generation Portuguese. According to the TDSB, just 17 percent of the children of Portuguese immigrants have a BA or higher level of education—the lowest number among second-generation Torontonians. In an Ontario-wide math test, 14 percent fewer Portuguese-language students reached the expected level of proficiency than the average Toronto student. Other studies indicate that only about one in 20 Portuguese Torontonians has a university degree, compared to the city average of one in four. Just six percent of Portuguese work in the professions, compared to 18 percent of all Toronto residents. And, defying the timeworn stereotype of upward mobility, the children of Portuguese immigrants do not make significantly more money than their parents.

Experts are perplexed. What explains the remarkable dropout rate? I think the answer is in the first paragraph of the quoted passage. Little Portugal is exceptionally parochial. The neighborhood is isolated, suffering from too much social capital. The situation is akin to the immigrants stuck in the Parisian suburbs. Higher education isn’t worth much if you can’t leave.

Hallstatt, Austria, is in China. So is the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, Christ the Redeemer, and a soon-to-be-completed Manhattan. There are others, too, and it’s all part of this weird (at least to us Westerners, or this one Westerner who is writing this) proliferation of what are being called “copy towns.” They’re villages and buildings and cities in China that are being constructed as replicas of non-Chinese places from around the world—and people are living in them. Hallstatt, China, has an artificial lake, and they imported doves to make it more Hallstatt-like.

Much of the awareness of this comes from artists Sebastian Acker and Phil Thompson, who traveled to China and pretty thoroughly documented the “copy towns.” Now they’re hoping to travel to all of the areas that have been copied in hopes of doing some parallel research to give themselves—and all of us—a better idea of what the heck is going on here. They’re holding an Indiegogo campaign to help fund the trip and their research. I spoke to Thompson yesterday via email to try to get a sense of what these replica-cities are all about.

A lot of Chinese people look up to the West as an ideal, so the construction of these towns could be seen as a way of accelerating their progress; a quick way of achieving through emulation.

Where did you first come across the Chinese copy towns?
We first came across the towns in an article on Spiegel Online. It was about the replica of Hallstatt being built in the Guangdong Province. We had both been doing individual research into contemporary reproductions in design and art and so we both found the article fascinating. Once we did a bit more research we discovered that there were lots of these types of towns all over China, covering architectural styles from all over the world.

So, I don’t understand these things. Everything is more connected today, and everything we do is copying something else in some way, but these towns and buildings are so weird! Are they just a straight money grab? Or is there some deeper, I don’t know, more cultural desire at play?
It’s true that most things are a copy in one way or another. But these towns are unique, not only in their scale, but by the fact that they are residential. America has Disney World and Las Vegas, but in these places the illusion is only a temporary one. The residents of the copy towns live out their lives in these illusions.

There are many different reasons as to why these towns exist. No one reason seems to be fully responsible, rather it is culmination of many different circumstances. One of the main reasons is China’s developing middle and upper classes; a significant portion of people have become very wealthy, very quickly, and these people want a way to showcase their wealth. They are allowed to do so in modern China, but under the Mao regime public shows of wealth would not have been possible. However, given China’s recent history, it does not have a societal model for prosperity. Under Mao, class divisions were squashed and declarations of wealth were not usually allowed, and so they have turned to the West for ways in which to display their new-found fortunes. This adoption of Western styles may be an attempt to pick up an already established ready-made social attitude.

Another reason for the towns could be the huge building bubble that is taking place in China. Vast numbers of new buildings are being built, many of which have never been filled. In order to attract residents to their developments, the construction companies may be creating copy towns so that they stand out amongst the myriad buildings opening every day. Ironically, it is their copied nature that makes them unique in the market.

But generally China has a long history of copying, especially within architecture and the arts. For centuries the emperors would replicate lands that they had conquered within their own palace gardens. These constructs would often include fauna and plants from the conquered regions. This ability to replicate and maintain the distant land demonstrated the emperor’s control over the original region.

Then there is also China’s desire to replicate the West and become a first-world country. A lot of Chinese people look up to the West as an ideal, so the construction of these towns could be seen as a way of accelerating their progress; a quick way of achieving through emulation.

What are the implications of this, then? They’re basically erasing something Chinese—and replacing it with something that’s not. Can that be a positive thing?
The dichotomy between being Chinese or not Chinese doesn’t really work here; these towns are a product of Chinese culture and history. They may be copies, but the fact that China is comfortable to create these places says a lot about their philosophical differences to the West.

As to whether they are a positive thing or not—it is hard to say. Most of the towns we visited were half empty. It will be interesting to see if the trend lasts for much longer.

What about the towns being recreated? No one owns a copyright or a design of a town, right, since they’re these ever-growing organic things? But are there intellectual property rights at play here? It sort of seems like the architects are stealing.
That’s a hotly debated topic. All the towns we visited are replicas of buildings that are far too old to still be protected under Western intellectual property law. There are some features that they cannot copy though, such as the lighting system on the Eiffel Tower—that is still protected under IP. Although in China there are currently no specific provisions on IP rights related to architecture, meaning that each case is treated very differently. The Wangjing SOHO building designed by Zaha Hadid is currently being copied whilst the original is under construction. Depending on how the case develops, it could set a precedent for future copies.

You guys went to Ai Weiwei’s house. What were his thoughts on all of this?
We asked him about his feelings toward the architecture near his home, which consists of many architectural pastiches of his own style. He stated that at first he was flattered that somebody would choose to copy one of his buildings, but that it always ended in anger because they never copied the building correctly. They would just copy the style of the facade and not the feeling or concept of the building. He said that quite often the insides of the buildings were completely different and didn’t make sense with the exterior (windows and doors being in odd positions), this, he said, was due to the fact that people who make the copies had never experienced the interior and so had to create that independently. This recent trend of copied architecture, in his opinion, was due to the increased use of computer design in the architectural process. He stated that now architects speak the language of computers and “use three buttons—copy, paste, and delete.”

OK, so, a final, impossible-to-answer question: Is this a bad thing, good thing, or are you still trying to figure all that out?
There are so many contributing factors that it is impossible to really answer that question. Plus, as we are both from Europe we obviously come to these towns with our own taught views on reproductions. We have to try and think outside of what we culturally view as right/wrong, good/bad. In many ways the problems that Westerners have with these towns is just as strange as the towns themselves. Especially given Western architectural histories; copying is hardly something new to the field. When we visit the original towns we want to engage with the residents to understand what it is that really makes people feel so strongly about the copies.

I have an addiction. It’s not to drugs or alcohol, jumping out of airplanes, or even sex. My addiction is to a grid of 36 dots—and to making them disappear as quickly as possible.

If you own an iPhone or have a friend who does, you’ve probably heard some version of this admission before. The grid is Dots, a super-addictive iOS game released by New York tech incubator Betaworks just over two weeks ago. Dots was downloaded one million times in the first few days after its release, becoming the top app in eight different countries; users completed 25 million rounds in the first week. After just two weeks, users had racked up more than 100 million rounds. That adds up to 190 years of gameplay.

Part of Dots’ addictiveness is its simplicity. You start with a six-by-six grid of multi-colored dots on a flat white background. Players connect dots of like color to remove them from the board and score points, which can be cashed in for various perks. Connecting a square for four or more dots will eliminate every dot of that color from the board. At Quartz, Zach Seward’s handy guide boils the game’s winning strategy down to one simple mantra: “Make squares. Just make them. There is no other Dots strategy.”

Playing video games for an hour each day can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes.

The addictiveness of Dots is troubling. The desire to play yields perhaps one too many breaks from work (this article took twice as long to write as it should have because I kept stopping to play rounds “for research”). Those 190 years of gameplay, if done during work hours, shake out to a little more than $12 million in lost wages—and that’s just if you’re working off the $7.25 minimum wage the U.S. government set in July 2009. Staring at a screen all day can cause vision problems, so much so that the Vision Council recommends “eye-gonomics” for office workers to avoid “digital eye strain.”

The good news is that my Dots addiction may come with some added cognitive perks. Casual games like Dots—video games that are quick to access, easy to learn, and require no special game skills (a category that includes many other smartphone games, like Bejeweled and Peggle)—were subject to a study on gaming and cognitive ability conducted by East Carolina University’s (ECU) Psychophysiology Lab in 2010. The study, conducted with dozens of U.S. consumers, was designed to explore the effects of casual games on subjects’ short-term cognitive acuity, including cognitive response time (how quickly a subject completes a task) and executive function (how often a subject completes a task correctly). Subjects who played Bejeweled and similar games for 30-minute periods showed an 87 percent improvement in cognitive response time and a 215 percent increase in executive functioning when compared to a control group.

These cognitive gains should not be interpreted as making gamers “smarter,” per se. Shortly after ECU published their study, the BBC and Nature found that brain training software like Nintendo’s Brain Age doesn’t really improve your reasoning, memory, or problem solving in the long run, and any gains wrought from incessant gameplay are confined to the specific types of tasks required by a game. The six-week online study, which involved 11,430 participants trained several times each week on cognitive tasks designed to improve reasoning, memory, planning, and attention, found that whatever skills players picked up were not immediately transferable to unfamiliar tasks.

More recent research confirms that cognitive perks picked up from gaming are skill-specific and not general gains in intelligence. According to research published in open access journal PLOS ONE by Adam Chie-Ming Oei and Michael Patterson of Nanyang Technological University-Singapore, playing video games for an hour each day can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes to those required in a specific game.

The researchers had non-gamer participants play five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day, five days of the week, for one month. Each participant was assigned one game with different styles of gameplay, from the typical action games to pattern-recognition challenges like Bejeweled, a popular Android smartphone game which has similar rules and objectives to Dots. After one month, researchers found that participants showed significant improvement in the type of cognitive skills required for their specific game: players who were assigned the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while spatial memory and pattern-recognition game players improved their performance on visual search tasks.

Playing casual games like Dots and Bejeweled are the cognitive equivalent of working out a single muscle: you strengthen a very specific skill without necessarily improving your overall mental dexterity. But if you’re like me and concerned about your addiction, this news may still come as some comfort: you may be giving up hours of your life, but at least you’re getting very good at making a bunch of colored dots disappear.

The proliferation of projection technology and electrical gadgets in the 1920s allowed people to conjure spirits. Well, spirits of a mechanical variety anyway. These ghoulish Jazz Age illusions entertained audiences and fooled ardent believers. But some thought that maybe this wave of high-tech ghosts could be put to use beyond the parlor tricks of supposed mystics.

The November 1924 issue of Science and Invention magazine proposed using a slide projector and a little smoke to coax a confession out of alleged murderers—a “novel third degree method,” as they put it.

From the magazine:

While the prisoner is asleep, or partly asleep, a picture of the deceased (if the prisoner is a murderer), is thrown on to the wall of a cell. A suitable voice is made to ask some question, such as, “Why did you do it?” A dictaphone is concealed in the wall of the cell, which carefully records any sound that the prisoner may make, while detectives watch his actions.

New recording technology also got in on the act, as a microphone disguised to look like a rock was placed in the prisoner’s cell. Once the alleged murderer confessed to the projected ghostly image, it would all be recorded by detectives in the next room. There’s no evidence that police departments ever actually tried such a scheme. But, given how far we’ve come from the projectors of the 1920s, it’s not too difficult to imagine some high-tech 21st-century version of this being tried out somewhere in the world with a superstitious inmate.

At first, it might sound gross or a little bit scary. Ridiculous, even. You wonder if it’s going to hurt. Will it be meaningless? Messy? What if you don’t know what to do—or if it happens too fast or too slow?

Relax, man. It’s totally natural. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.

Funny how rarely this seems to come up. Imminent death is the only thing you have in common with every single person you meet. And unlike, say, weddings and weather, the subject of mortality is always interesting. Trying to make small talk about death, though? Well, bring it up at your next business lunch and see how that goes.

The truth is most of us go to great lengths to avoid having to talk—or even think—about death. Nearly half of people over the age of 65 haven’t yet brought themselves to face end-of-life planning. In a culture saturated with violence, we’re not sure how to talk to our kids about what happened at Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon. And most people prefer to suffer in silence when they deal with common challenges like eldercare and miscarriages.

Are fear and denial really the best ways to approach something that’s unavoidable?

Death has always been inevitable, of course, and so has grief, but there was a time in the not-so-distant past when the attitudes and practices surrounding it were more open and practical.

In part, this comfort level was out of sheer necessity. In the 19th century, before doctors learned to wash their hands, germs killed a lot of people. Since funeral homes (and indeed, the funeral industry) didn’t exist, most people died in their beds, and corpses remained at home for up to three days while the family prepared for the funeral—which was also at home. Death was very much a part of daily life.

That changed for a variety of reasons, but the most important shift occurred during the Civil War. Suddenly, embalming—a preservation technique that had been reserved for medical cadavers—was practiced widely on Union dead so the remains would survive the journey home to their families. For those who could afford it, embalming became the preferred way to preserve a corpse—better even than packing soldiers into kegs of whiskey, another technique used to ship bodies north during high summer.

According to Gary Laderman, a prominent historian of death, the American psyche was undergoing a brutal transformation even as the professional funeral industry coalesced. The devastation wrought by the war required a certain disengagement with death, something akin to the mindset of traumatized survivors in books and movies about the zombie apocalypse. A long estrangement with death ensued, where it was increasingly pushed away from the home—out of sight and out of mind.

Dwelling in darkness for almost 150 years now, death in America has turned into something unspeakable.

The Order of the Good Death wants you to turn on the light.

Caitlin Doughty.

FOUNDED BY CAITLIN DOUGHTY, a thoughtful young mortician in Los Angeles, the Order of the Good Death is a collective of death professionals, artists, and academics who promote real talk about death and dying. While its name has an occult quality, the Order’s mission is actually quite public: to encourage people to be “death positive,” or open to exploring their thoughts, feelings, and fears about mortality.

While it started in 2011 as a network of around 10 friends and like-minded colleagues, the Order quickly expanded as it resonated with other writers, scholars, and designers. The growing group has worked hard to make death a part of the cultural conversation. They approach this task through a wide variety of projects aimed at different audiences—some within the funeral industry, and many others further afield.

Some of the Order’s most prominent movers and shakers are young women, which is remarkable, given that as recently as 1971, 95 percent of the students enrolling in mortuary schools were men. To name three, there’s Doughty herself, who remains the head and heart of the Order; Sarah Wambold, a mortician who’s reinventing the American funeral home; and Megan Rosenbloom, a medical librarian who’s launching an innovative conference called Death Salon this fall. Dissatisfied with the trappings of the traditional funeral industry and the cultural atmosphere surrounding death, these women want to help repressed Americans become more intimate with their most morbid thoughts and feelings.

THE SELF-APPOINTED NATIONAL spokeswoman for death, Caitlin Doughty is the reaper’s most dedicated PR person.

Doughty is best known for her winsome Web series, “Ask A Mortician,” a lighthearted and informative exploration of viewers’ questions about death. Featured on Jezebel and bolstered by an aggressive social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter, the videos help direct traffic to the Order of the Good Death’s website, a sort of central repository where Doughty curates essays, artistic videos, and other media. She also writes a blog that she occasionally lends to other Order members who want a platform for their own thoughts and projects.

The mortician first heard the call to public service five years ago, around the time she began working at a crematory in Los Angeles. It was her first real job in the industry. The work was more challenging than she expected, and she was surprised by many of the processes and practices. A lifelong fascination with death had not prepared her for the harsh physical realities of fire, ash, and bone. Surprised to realize there are still some things you just can’t Google, Doughty recognized the world sorely needed someone who was willing to share basic facts about the death industry. She decided then and there that her life’s work would be in public education.

Her first stop after the crematory was mortuary school. On the other side of the mirror, Doughty learned that the funeral industry itself was estranged from death in its own way. To a fault, the focus was on technical skills and body work. Having devoted serious thought to death during her undergraduate career at University of Chicago, where she studied medieval history, Doughty was scandalized by what she saw as a lack of emotional and intellectual rigor in the curriculum.

“A lot of funeral directors don’t really reflect very deeply on their place in the industry and their relationship with death,” she said. “They think if they do that, it will open Pandora’s box to all sorts of negative emotions that are very hard to handle.”

But Doughty doesn’t think that funeral homes are doing society any favors by placing people who have “passed on” in their “slumber rooms.” And she has a general distaste for expensive products like “protective” caskets that make the natural process of decay sound like a grisly nightmare. At the top of her long list of gripes: the practice of embalming, which she sees as unnecessary and bad for the environment. Doughty wants to educate people about their options and to promote greener choices like natural burial (sans casket) and cremation.

She’s also an advocate of home corpse care. “The thing that most people don’t know is that death doesn’t really require a professional at all,” she said. “There’s no reason that you can’t do most everything surrounding the death process yourself. I consider my role as a mortician really as a kind of facilitator and hand-holder to get people to do most of the work.”

While she’d like to see American traditions circle back to resemble what they were before the Civil War, she realizes that DIY corpse care is probably too ambitious for most people. After she finishes her memoir (which will be published in 2014 by Norton, the highest bidder in an eight-publisher auction), Doughty will open an alternative funeral home in Los Angeles, guiding people through the emotional, logistical, and bureaucratic challenges they face when someone dies.

Sarah Wambold.

MEANWHILE, SARAH WAMBOLD IS preparing to open her own alternative funeral home, Continuum, later this year. Where Doughty has worked on the national level to rehabilitate death’s public image, Wambold has focused more on serving locals in her community of Austin, Texas.

“The general idea is to reimagine the funeral home as a dual space for the living and the dead,” said Wambold, who wants her facility to function as a performance space and an art gallery. Put off by the gimmicky customization options like the golf-themed funerals offered by the traditional funeral industry, she wants to offer services that celebrate individuality. “We want to have a conversation with people about what death means to them,” she said. “Most funeral homes really don’t do that. They just don’t fill that need.

“I was inspired by Austin,” she said. “It’s a different sort of city than I had ever lived in. The people here seem to support local businesses, and it seemed like they were underserved in the funeral service area. I felt like they needed a funeral home that was more community-oriented and creative.” Unable to find a job at the sort of funeral home she had in mind, Wambold came to the reluctant conclusion that she’d have to build one herself.

A big part of her vision is simply in rejecting the stuffy parlor aesthetic favored by traditional funeral homes. “The worst thing about being a funeral director was having to walk into the funeral home,” she said, recalling a job she left in 2009. “I just hated the overstuffed chairs, the heavy drapery, the generic paintings—all of that.”

Wambold has been documenting the process of opening Continuum (“a nightmare”) on Doughty’s blog since 2012. There have been many challenges and discouraging developments along the way. In addition to the usual kinds of problems that small start-ups face, such as finding funding and an affordable workspace, Wambold is dealing with obscure levels of bureaucracy and inscrutable state laws. Most recently, she’s been trying to puzzle out why the state of Texas demands that she own embalming supplies if she’s not required to practice embalming. After serious study, the answer remains unclear.

Once she finally opens her doors for business, Wambold will face another difficult hurdle: marketing. While she said that people seem receptive to the concept of Continuum, the ideas behind it generally require some degree of elaboration. The 30-second elevator pitch of a funeral home cum performance space can sound sort of flip, particularly to someone who isn’t even aware there’s such a thing as an alternative funeral industry. As professionals like Wambold start their own businesses, the Order of the Good Death will transition from a philosophical movement to an organization of flesh-and-blood members with loans and light bills. Their bottom lines add a new sense of urgency to the organization’s mission.

Megan Rosenbloom.

TO HELP EASE THOSE growing pains, the Order will host its first formal conference, Death Salon, from October 18 to 20 in Los Angeles.

Death Salon is the brainchild of Order member Megan Rosenbloom, a medical librarian at the University of Southern California. A rare books nerd, Rosenbloom has been organizing talks and events that promote her library’s special collections since 2009. While program development and community outreach is unusual for someone in her role, her favorite part of the job is developing exhibits, leading tours, and hosting speakers. This year’s big guest will be Mary Roach.

While many are quick to write off old medical texts as curiosities, Rosenbloom sees them as essential to the curriculum at the medical school. “I have these books from around the time when this country was founded where they show what a baby looked like in utero,” she said, by way of example. “Their understanding, the way they believed things were situated, is just comical.” She uses materials like these, which were at one time state-of-the-art, to teach medical school students about humility—a useful mindset in today’s technology-obsessed milieu. “I don’t think you have to be hyper-serious about interacting with the material, but it grounds you in the perspective that we don’t know everything,” she said. “They have to understand they might be wrong.”

Similarly, she feels that historical perspective adds an important dimension to contemporary conversations surrounding death. The precise point at which a person dies, for instance, has never been well understood; to prevent people from being buried alive, some caskets used to come equipped with a primitive alarm system—a string attached to a bell situated on top of the grave. “Our understanding of death is still a little nebulous,” Rosenbloom said, drawing a parallel between those bells and the controversy that now surrounds abortion, vegetative state, and assisted suicide. “I think the history of medicine can really give people perspective on the ways that other people have interacted with these issues in the past.”

The idea for Death Salon came about earlier this year, when Rosenbloom and other Order inductees were talking about how much they’d enjoy the chance to formally meet. With her experience at the library and the organizational feat of planning her own wedding last year, Rosenbloom figured she had the logistical know-how to plan the event.

Death Salon will incorporate Rosenbloom’s love of medical history with the varied perspectives of Order members from different disciplines. The goal is to offer something for everyone, so the weekend will be a mix of private Order business and high-profile events. Friday’s daytime programming, which will be curated by Doughty, will be closed to the public, but she is also curating a special public show on Friday night. That event, Death Cabaret, will combine elements of a party with flash talks, short films, and a performance by Adam Arcuragi, the founder of the “death gospel” genre.

Saturday will feature symposium-style programming curated by Joanna Ebenstein, whose Morbid Anatomy project’s recent Kickstarter was like the Veronica Mars of the weird book world. Sunday will involve a field trip organized by Atlas Obscura, a travel website dedicated to unusual destinations. Throughout the weekend, Death Salon will host pop-up shops by L.A. businesses and offer beers crafted by local breweries.

“As I’ve been putting it together, I’ve been astounded at the level of interest,” said Rosenbloom, who reports that there has already been talk of franchising Death Salon. “People from across the country are contacting me because they want to volunteer. I was so surprised and flattered that we’re doing something that people are really responding to.

“I’m not going to pretend that I’m the most death-positive person, or that I’m completely comfortable with the idea that I could drop dead at any moment,” she said. “But I think it’s really worthwhile for people to engage with that. I feel the zeitgeist is changing. People are rejecting the idea that the denial of death is a good thing.”

Doughty, too, senses something in the air that extends beyond her own efforts to agitate for change. “I know there’s a real cultural shift coming,” she said. “There’s a ton of new people doing this work.”

The death-positive movement has been built on a staggering statistic: our 100 percent mortality rate. In a little over a century, the seven billion people that currently populate this planet will all be dead. You and me and everyone we know. Not a damn thing we can do about it.

What happens after that—well, that’s up to you.

It’s clear that religious faith confers a variety of benefits. Being part of a community of fellow believers has been shown to boost both mental and physical health.

But at what cost? New research suggests one disturbing answer: Thoughts of faith and God apparently spur people to view the world in black-or-white terms.

A just-published study finds exposure to Christian concepts or imagery increases one’s intolerance for ambiguity. This dynamic was demonstrated in a variety of experiments conducted in three different countries: Germany, Austria, and the United States.

Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologists Christina Sagioglou of the University of Innsbruck and Matthias Forstmann of the University of Cologne note that “one prototypical characteristic of Christian morality seems to be the two-tier distinction between ‘virtuous’ and ‘sinful’ behaviors.”

A new study finds exposure to Christian concepts or imagery increases one’s intolerance for ambiguity. This dynamic was demonstrated in a variety of experiments in three different countries.

With that in mind, the researchers reasoned that exposing people to Christian content would “shift a person’s cognitive style” so that he or she thinks in more dualistic terms, and is less comfortable with ambiguity. They present evidence supporting their theory in the form of five experiments.

The first featured 65 participants recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “Ostensibly to assess word comprehension,” they began by unscrambling 10 sets of words to form simple sentences. For half of the participants, five of the sets contained religion-related words such as faith, church, heaven, prayer, and divine.

Afterwards, they completed a 20-item survey designed to measure tolerance for ambiguity. Participants were asked their level of agreement with such statements as “There is a right way and a wrong way to do almost everything” and “It bothers me when I am unable to follow another person’s train of thought.” Finally, they answered five questions measuring their underlying level of religiosity.

Those who had worked with the religion-related words reported greater discomfort with ambiguity. They also generally perceived less ambiguity, in that they were more likely to agree with statements such as “practically every solution has a problem.”

Among those who did not unscramble sentences containing religious words, higher levels of religiousness “significantly correlated with ambiguity intolerance,” the researchers add. This suggests a black-or-white attitude is intrinsic to the mindset of the very religious, while for others, it can be triggered by exposure to religious concepts.

A second experiment, featuring 49 participants, found this dynamic also held true for visual stimuli. After they unscrambled either religion-related or neutral sentences, as above, participants were shown “two black-and-white pencil drawings of female faces: one ambiguous, the other non-ambiguous.” They then rated how much they liked each, on a one-to-seven scale.

The straightforward drawing featured the face of a young woman, seen clearly from the front. The ambiguous drawing can be interpreted in one of two ways: as a depiction of a young woman, as seen from behind and slightly to one side, or an image of an older woman seen in profile. Neither drawing contained any references to religion.

Those with religious concepts on their mind “liked the ambiguous drawing significantly less,” the researchers report. “Participants primed with religion clearly preferred the non-ambiguous drawing to the ambiguous one.”

Perhaps the most striking experiment featured 81 people who were approached at one of two central locations in Innsbruck, Austria: the cathedral square, or a square surrounded by civic buildings. They filled out a questionnaire measuring their tolerance for ambiguity, and their underlying religiosity.

The results: While there was no difference in religiosity between the two groups, “participants approached at the cathedral indeed reported significantly more ambiguity intolerance than did participants approached at the civic square,” the researchers report.

This echoes earlier research that Americans whose polling place is a church are more likely to support candidates and causes supported by the religious right. The looming presence of religious iconography is apparently enough to influence at least some people’s feelings and perceptions.

One obvious question raised by this study is whether this effect is specific to Christianity. Sagioglou and Forstmann doubt it, noting that a 1981 study found a correlation between ambiguity intolerance and religiosity among Indian Muslims and Hindus. If their thesis is right, any faith that divides people or actions into “good” and “bad” will presumably have the same effect.

It’s worth noting that some experts on Christian ethics, such as Harvey Cox in his sophisticated analysis of Jesus’ parables, find a great deal of nuance. But this research suggests that, in most people’s minds, religion is linked with moral rigidity.

As the researchers write, this attitude no doubt gives people structure in their lives and contributes to their well-being. But it’s also a plausible route to prejudice and general close-mindedness.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the television drama that best dramatizes ethical gray areas, The Good Wife, is also one of the very few in which the lead character is an atheist.

Without immigration, Silicon Valley is dying. Without immigration, a lot of cities are dying, including New York. Mesofacts aside, migration is ephemeral, particularly international migration. Here today, gone tomorrow. Entire regional economies depend on the influx of talent. There are exceptions to this rule. Case study Montreal:

If Montreal’s tech industries aren’t getting their workers from neighboring regions, that leaves one option: education. It seems clear that Montreal’s higher education system is doing a good job of meeting this area of market demand by training workers for in-demand occupations. With a large number of universities, colleges, and other institutions in the Montreal area, it’s not surprising that Montreal’s tech industries are well-supplied with workers. Other cities looking to boost their economies should take note.

Legacy assets such as universities are money in today’s world. Your city doesn’t have to be cool or put a bird on economic development. Talent attraction is a zero-sum game.

Silicon Valley is the talent magnet of all talent magnets. When it puts a bird on something, you call it Twitter. Hijinks in Egypt ensue. But the same laws of migration apply. Other places can attract talent, too.

More and more cities, and towns, and even rural counties are competing for talent in an age of demographic decline. If your farm needs bodies, good luck finding willing employees. Workers are the world’s dearest commodity.

Silicon Valley can’t just flip a switch and do a Montreal. Few communities can. Get used to it. The Innovation Economy is dying. The Talent Economy is ascendant. Marx is turning over in his London grave.

An article of faith in the climate warming community is that a “scientific consensus” exists on humanity’s role in raising the planet’s temperature. An equal and opposite article of faith among global warming skeptics (to check their temperature scroll down the comments section on any mainstream media article about climate change), or at least skeptics of anthropogenic climate change, is that this consensus is at best less than sweeping and at worst illusory.

A new study published online today in the journal Environmental Research Letters puts a figure on how real this (genuine) scientific consensus is. The takeaway figure? Ninety-seven percent of scientific papers that take a position on anthropogenic climate change say it exists, and of authors of those papers, 97 percent endorse the idea of human-caused warming. That suggests both a consensus, and an overwhelming one. (Yes, that’s right in line with smaller past surveys, but no, still not universal.)

I see value in continuing to hammer home that the scientific establishment has reached a consensus that people are warming the planet (and perhaps that people can cool it down).

As the paper’s nine authors, headed by University of Queensland physicist John Cook, conclude: “A systematic, comprehensive review of the literature provides quantitative evidence countering this assertion [that a consensus is collapsing]. The number of papers rejecting [anthropogenic global warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time.”

While the researchers used crowd-sourcing to help analyze the nearly 12,000 papers reviewed, the crowd itself is in no way so unified. As the paper notes, there is a “consensus gap” between science and the man on the street; a Pew poll from March reported that while 69 percent of Americans believe there is “solid evidence” the Earth is warming, only 42 percent accept this is mostly due to human activity. (Those are actually the highest figures in five years; as recently as 2006 the relevant numbers were 77 and 47 percent respectively.)

As Cook was quoted in a press release accompanying the paper: “There is a gaping chasm between the actual scientific consensus and the public perception. Making the results of our paper more widely-known is an important step toward closing the consensus gap and increasing public support for meaningful climate action.” The business world at any rate, from insurers to oil executives, is starting to cotton to the reality.

While the solid numbers observed in the Cook paper should erase any lingering argument that the consensus is either bogus or fragile, there are enough caveats that this is unlikely to be the last word.

The biggest in my mind is that Cook is the founder of SkepticalScience.com (“Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism”), and the 24 volunteers who rated the scientific papers were recruited from that website. I happen to like SkepticalScience, and think it does valuable work in counteracting the charlatans and doubt makers out there. Still, it’s obvious that its advocacy will color perception of the results. There are caveats to my caveats; the Cook paper was peer reviewed and the scientists whose stances were rated were contacted and the responses of those who replied agreed with the evaluators’ assessments.

But not everyone contacted agreed with the researchers’ categories for rating attitudes. Before he shuttered his website on climate science, meteorologist Roger Pielke Sr. wrote about being contacted by the Cook team, and he suggested some refinements that might better catalog his own nuanced views. (I want to be careful in categorizing Pielke père. He’s not a denier but he is skeptical about the consensus view, especially about the role of carbon, even as he acknowledges that human activity does affect the climate.) Finding the survey “much too limited,” he argued, “It appears they are writing their questions to reinforce a preconceived perspective, rather than complete an actual survey of the diversity of viewpoints in climate system science and the role of humans in its alteration.” Since charting diversity wasn’t the authors’ goal, I doubt they lost much sleep over that shortcoming, but it does seem they were focused on a rather narrow outcome—and achieved it.

Nonetheless, I see value in continuing to hammer home that the scientific establishment has reached a consensus that people are warming the planet (and perhaps that people can cool it down).

INTO THE WEEDS ON THE PAPER’S METHODOLOGY
Cook and Co. looked at 11,944 abstracts—the little summaries at the front of scientific papers—from peer-reviewed articles published in the two decades from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming.” These papers represented the work of 29,083 authors and 1,980 journals, but were still only about a quarter of the papers mentioning “climate change” in the same period that a search on the Web of Science database turned up. Of those almost 12,000 papers examined, a third stated a position on human-caused climate change—and that’s where the 97 percent figure comes from. The study’s authors note that many of the remaining papers, while they didn’t give an opinion on the role of human activity, took anthropogenic climate change as a given (i.e. those that discussed mitigation strategies).

It’s worth noting that 97 percent of scientists contacted did not feel they had taken a position endorsing the primacy of anthropogenic climate change in their respective papers. That figure is drawn from those who stated a position in their journal paper and then responded to the Cook questionnaire. About 63 percent of respondents felt their paper or papers explicitly endorsed anthropogenic climate change, but only two percent felt their work explicitly rejected it. Still smells like consensus to me.

After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own DNA had been removed. The result is a harvest of human embryonic stem cells, the seemingly magic cells capable of morphing into any of the 200-plus kinds that make up a person.

The feat, reported on Wednesday in the journal Cell, could re-ignite the field of stem-cell medicine, which has been hobbled by technical challenges as well as ethical issues.

Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The technique announced on Wednesday, by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, uses unfertilized human eggs.

Eliminating the need for human embryos could boost attempts to use stem cells and their progeny to replace cells damaged or destroyed in heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries, and other devastating conditions. But the achievement could also revive fears of reproductive cloning, or producing genetic copies of living (or dead) individuals.

Even before the study was published, a British watchdog group called Human Genetics Alert protested the research. “Scientists have finally delivered the baby that would-be human cloners have been waiting for: a method for reliably creating cloned human embryos,” said Dr. David King, the group’s director. “This makes it imperative that we create an international legal ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this research.”

Among scientists, however, the accomplishment is being hailed as “a tour de force,” as stem cell biologist George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute put it. “This represents an unparalleled achievement. They succeeded where many other groups failed, including mine.”

The highest-profile failure was that of biologist Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University in South Korea. In 2005 he and his team made headlines across the globe when they claimed, in the journal Science, that they had created human embryonic stem cells via nuclear transfer, the same technique the Oregon scientists used. Hwang’s claim turned out to be a lie, making it one of the most infamous cases of scientific fraud in the last decade.

Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The new technique uses unfertilized human eggs.

DOLLY THE SHEEP
If the Oregon achievement holds up and can be replicated by scientists in other labs, it would offer a third, and potentially superior, way of producing embryonic stem cells.

The field of stem cells took off in 1998, when scientists led by Jamie Thomson at the University of Wisconsin announced that they had harvested the cells from days-old human embryos, called blastocysts, obtained from fertility clinics.

The fact that the blastocysts are destroyed when their stem cells are removed ignited a furor from groups that believe life begins at conception. In 2001, President George W. Bush banned federal funding for research that would create more blastocysts, but stem cells already produced from them were fair game.

Those cell lines turned out to be fewer and of poorer quality than scientists had hoped. The next breakthrough came in 2007, when Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University produced human embryonic stem cells in a way that did not require eggs or embryos. He added four genes to adult cells, and the result was like turning back the calendar: The adult cells, which he called induced pluripotent (iPS) cells, showed all the properties of embryonic stem cells, an achievement for which Yamanaka shared last year’s Nobel prize in medicine.

“The whole scientific community jumped on the iPS bandwagon,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology.

That turned attention away from a third technique for producing embryonic stem cells: the method that created Dolly the sheep in 1996. Scientists in Scotland had started with a sheep oocyte (egg), removed its DNA and replaced it with DNA from a sheep mammary gland cell. They zapped the egg with electricity to make it grow and divide like a fertilized embryo. No sperm were necessary.

This technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). If the embryo is implanted inside a surrogate mother, as the Dolly team did, the result is reproductive cloning, which has also been done for mice, cows, and other animals. But if embryonic development is halted after five days or so, the result is stem cells genetically identical to the donor’s—and thus custom-made for therapies to treat degenerative diseases without fear of rejection by the patient’s immune system.

The Oregon scientists, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, used a variation of the Dolly technique. They carefully inserted an adult skin cell into a donated human egg whose DNA had been removed. The unfertilized eggs, stimulated by electric pulses to start dividing, developed to about the 150-cell stage.

The cells were all true embryonic stem cells; they have the “ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells, and heart cells,” said Mitalipov. “While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine.”

ODD EGGS
In succeeding with humans, the Oregon team toppled the dogma that there is something odd about human eggs or embryos, said stem cell expert Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Published data said there was a difference in principle between humans and the mice and other animals that had been cloned, a difference that presented an insurmountable barrier to human cloning” for either reproduction or stem cells.

The Oregon team figured out how to get the egg to act as if it had been fertilized. The secret was to keep the eggs in the phase of their growth cycle called “metaphase,” which is when DNA aligns in the middle of the cell before the cell divides. The scientists got the best results when they grew the eggs in a little of a substance that tends to be abundant in labs: caffeine.

When conducting the same experiment with monkeys, the Oregon scientists stopped at the production of stem cells and never implanted the ball of cells into a surrogate mother. Mitalipov said reproductive cloning is “not our focus, nor do we believe our findings might be used by others” to do it with humans.

“Reproductive cloning hasn’t been advanced by this new paper,” agreed MIT’s Jaenisch. “If you implanted these embryos, which would be illegal, I think you would get the same results as in mice: Most of them die at birth, and the others encounter big troubles as they age.”

STEM CELL FACE-OFF
Now the question is whether embryonic stem cells produced with the Dolly method would be superior to those created with the turn-back-the-calendar iPS method. Scientists have already found that iPS cells tend to age prematurely and die. They are also created with cancer-causing genes, which could make them dangerous to use therapeutically.

Another possible advantage of the embryonic stem cells produced by the Dolly method: It takes just days, compared with weeks for iPS cells. “If you have a patient who needs, that can be an important difference,” said Natalie DeWitt of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

On the other hand, the human eggs needed for the Dolly technique are in short supply and hard to obtain, notes MIT’s Jaenisch. (The Oregon team paid the women who donated eggs for their time and “discomfort.”) Although the Oregon team coaxed stem cells out of every egg they collected from one of the women, other labs might not be so efficient.

If the Dolly technique becomes a reliable source of embryonic stem cells, it might accelerate clinical trials of the cells, which have been slow to get going and disappointing. In 2011, for instance, biotechnology firm Geron halted a clinical trial that used embryonic stem cells to repair spinal cord injuries and said it was leaving the field.

The most promising human study is ACT’s. It is two years into clinical trials using stem cells derived from human embryos to treat two forms of blindness, including macular degeneration, with encouraging results. One patient’s vision went from 20/400 to 20/40, said Lanza.