Portside

But what if we’ve confused cause and effect? What if it’s not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat? Science may slowly be coming to an understanding of the complex feedback loops which control our metabolism.

The United States has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for some 50 years and is still struggling to deal with the legacy of those attempts. In addition to the billions of dollars spent, mostly fruitlessly, the government will have to spend billions more to deal with the wastes produced by those efforts. America’s energy-from-thorium quest now faces an ignominious conclusion: the Energy Department appears to have lost track of 96 kilograms of uranium 233.

In an exhaustive and devastating opinion, Judge Lynn Adleman writes that the facts don't justify restrictions that unduly burden minorities.

Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.

After receiving major bribes from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindall, Chiquita is abandoning Gulfport Miss. for New Orleans. This is another chapter in United Fruit/Chiquita's sorid anti-union history.

While the leading candidates for the Presidency of the European Commission tout the Greek bailout as a success story, the candidate of the European Left Party, Alexis Tsipras, says the imposed austerity is a tragedy for the Greek people, and it should not be repeated in any other country.

School segregation doesn’t happen by accident; it flows inexorably from housing segregation. If most black Americans live near other blacks and in a level of neighborhood poverty unseen by the vast majority of white Americans, then in the same way, their children attend schools that are poorer and more segregated than anything experienced by their white peers.

While very little in paleoanthropology is ever “settled,” a new study represents an important step forward in terms of settling that the "Hobbit" people were really a different human species, and not pathological individuals of Homo sapiens. The question that remains to be answered definitively is which species of archaic Homo is the most likely ancestor of Homo floresiensis.

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