Green chemistry: designing chemical processing to avoid making hazardous wastes, even from the product itself.

There is no known way to dispose of the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, so the plan is to cover it with a metal dome that is expected to last 100 years. Engineers hope that, within that time, we will find some permanent solution.

That approach may work assuming technology continues to advance. But what if technological advance ceases because global heating is too much of a drain on society? Then the reactor will degrade, and leak more. In centuries, or millennia, that fallout will pollute a much bigger area.

The FBI is building a data base of nearly all Americans' faces, and can search it for any reason.

Since it is made from the data bases of photo IDs, that Americans need to have to drive, to ride in a plane, to open a bank account, to buy certain prescription medicines, and in some states even to vote, it amounts to something very close to a national ID card.

When combined with the cameras on the street that recognize faces, they add up to a system of total tracking of everyone's movements.

Of course, this sort of total control over the population makes the work of the police easy. It makes the legitimate activities easy, and the illegitimate ones easy too. It can be used to find rapists, or find heroic whistleblowers.

However, while finding the occasional rapist in hiding is positive, the good it does is puny compared with the harm of intimidating potential heroic whistleblowers. The effect is repressive control that we must overthrow.

Americans, have you the courage to resist the state's seductive offer to "protect" us from various smaller dangers, at the cost of total monitoring?

Systematic special surveillance of poor people in the US feeds algorithms that tend to exclude them from ordinary opportunities, thus trapping them in poverty.

The 1st quarter of 2016 is the third warmest year on record in the US.