alan wells

If you don’t know who E.O. Wilson is, you probably should, especially if you study anything involving life sciences. He’s a biologist and a long time advocate for the natural world. He received a TED Prize last year, and his TED wish was to create The Encyclopedia of Life. Here’s what its gonna look like. Anyone who’s ever struggled with phylogeny or taxonomy in a bio class has got to love the visualizations they’re showing, and I love the idea of citizen biologist being able to help compile this, where ever they are.

Including the $124.2 billion bill, the total cost of the Iraq war may reach $456 billion in September, according to the National Priorities Project, an organization that tracks public spending.

According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.

Boston.com has comparisons for 9 other ways that money could have been spent.