News

Ghost of Milton Friedman Materializes in Chicago, Endorses a Price on Carbon

October 29, 2014

[The Huffington Post ]...Steve Cicala, who is an assistant professor at the U of C's Harris School of Public Policy, then brings us into the logic of Friedman's conclusion with a hypothetical. Let's pretend, he says, that he owns a steel mill that sells its product for $100 a ton. And let's further pretend that co-panelist Michael Greenstone, who is the U of C's Milton Friedman Professor of Economics, lives downwind from his mill....

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Status shift for whale pelvic bones

Status shift for whale pelvic bones

October 28, 2014

For decades, scientists assumed that the relatively small pelvic bones found in whales were simple remnants of their land-dwelling past, “useless vestiges” that served no real purpose, akin to the human appendix or tailbone.

A new study, co-authored by Erik Otárola-Castillo, a fellow in David Pilbeam’s paleoanthropology lab in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, suggests that the bones, in fact, have a very specific purpose — particularly when it comes to making baby whales and baby dolphins. The research is described in a recent...

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Preoccupied with life

Preoccupied with life

October 27, 2014

A side effect of the dramatic increase in lifespan over the last century has been the retreat of death from our daily lives. For many of us, that’s meant the luxury not to think about mortality until we have little choice.

One common result is an end dominated by costly, pull-out-the-stops medical interventions, and months or even years spent not doing the things we love with the people we love, but instead cut off from the world in an institution that even, as it provides care, represents exactly what we dreaded when imagining our final days.

It doesn’t have to be...

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