Word: costs
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...blossoming around the world. To stop bad guys at the border, for instance, the U.S. is embarking on a program called U.S.-VISIT, for U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology, which was mandated by Congress in 2002. Biometric technologies are the linchpins of the new system, expected to cost $10 billion over the next decade. The technology is not just to keep track of foreign visitors either. If you're leaving the country, get ready to be face printed. The U.S. State Department is retooling its passport production process and by the end of next year will issue...
...tire gauge is really a symbol of a very serious piece of good news: we can use significantly less energy without significantly changing our lifestyle. The energy guru Amory Lovins has shown that investment in "nega-watts" - reduced electricity use through efficiency improvements - is much more cost-effective than investment in new megawatts, and the same is clearly true of nega-barrels. It might not fit the worldviews of right-wingers who deny the existence of global warming and insist that reducing emissions would destroy our economy, or of left-wing Earth-firsters who insist that maintaining our creature comforts...
...public transportation, more carpooling, more telecommuting, more recycling, less exurban sprawl, fewer unnecessary car trips, buying less stuff and eating less meat - that would require at least some lifestyle changes. But things like tire gauges can reduce gas bills and carbon emissions now, with little pain and at little cost and without the ecological problems and oil-addiction problems associated with offshore drilling. These are the proverbial win-win-win solutions, reducing the pain of $100 trips to the gas station by reducing trips to the gas station. And Americans are already starting to adopt them, ditching SUVs, buying hybrids...
...there's still no birth control for men. What happened? In a word: money. With the cost of new-drug development hovering in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the pharmaceutical industry decided there wasn't enough of a market to make male hormonal contraceptives worthwhile. The German drug giant Schering halted its development program in 2006 (after its high-profile acquisition by Bayer), and other drug companies quickly followed suit, abandoning several projects that were - at least by the researchers' accounts - on the verge of success...
...much wine, it is known, can cause violent behavior. But few have gone as far as the grape growers of France's Languedoc-Roussillon region, the world's biggest wine-growing area by volume. Hurting from overproduction and cheap imports and punished lately by the rising cost of gas, a small group of local winegrowers has resorted to "wine terrorism" in a violent attempt to shock the French government into helping them...