An inexpensive new malaria vaccine is reportedly 80% effective in preventing malaria.

Although it is comparatively inexpensive, 200 million doses will still cost 2 billion dollars to make and administer in Africa.

Malaria can't continue to exist in a mosquito for longer than a mosquito's short life span. If we can prevent it in humans, we can get rid of it entirely — if we can overcome vaccine denialism. There is a lot of vagueness in "80% protective," so I don't know whether this vaccine could eventually eradicate malaria over time. Perhaps in combination with modern genetic engineering that can greatly reduce the mosquito population in an area.

US citizens: call for strengthening the protection of North Atlantic right whales.

Environmentalists are suing the US Forest Service for approving a new railroad through a protected "roadless area", for the sake of opening up a new oil field. The Forest Service paid no attention to the danger of exacerbating global heating disaster.

A mother writes about swapping household roles with her three children for five days, seriously, and how her children became more mature and responsible and developed better relationships with her and each other.

Biden has proposed firmer policies for making the results of federally-funded research, and the experimental data, available to the public(PDF).

This is a good step in the right direction, but we also need to do something about the harm done by trade secrecy for science and engineering that isn't federally funded. This harms medicine and denies users' right to repair hardware and program free software to run it.

The proposal has one small problem that is potentially disastrous: the new systems of publication don't have to take effect until 2025. If a right-wing government is elected in 2014, it could cancel them before they even take effect. Yes, that election would cause bigger disasters — but why enable it to cause another one?