Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of "centrist" senators —senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.

But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs —and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Some background: Long-term fiscal projections for the United States paint a grim picture. Unless there are major policy changes, expenditure will consistently grow faster than revenue, eventually leading to a debt crisis.

What’s behind these projections? An aging population, which will raise the cost of Social Security, is part of the story. But the main driver of future deficits is the ever-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. If health care costs rise in the future as they have in the past, fiscal catastrophe awaits.

You might think, given this picture, that extending coverage to those who would otherwise be uninsured would exacerbate the problem. But you’d be wrong, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured in America are, on average, relatively young and healthy; covering them wouldn’t raise overall health care costs very much.

Second, the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure that health care dollars are well spent.

Are we talking about real savings, or just window dressing? Well, the health care economists I respect are seriously impressed by the cost-control measures in the Senate bill, which include efforts to improve incentives for cost-effective care, the use of medical research to guide doctors toward treatments that actually work, and more. This is "the best effort anyone has made," says Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A letter signed by 23 prominent health care experts —including Mark McClellan, who headed Medicare under the Bush administration— declares that the bill’s cost-control measures "will reduce long-term deficits."

The fact that we’re seeing the first really serious attempt to control health care costs as part of a bill that tries to cover the uninsured seems to confirm what would-be reformers have been saying for years: The path to cost control runs through universality. We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care.

Siempre han sido el patito feo de la enseñanza en Europa y Estados Unidos, pero hoy las universidades a distancia empiezan a vivir una revolución que las hará pasar al primer plano. Aparte del rejuvenecimiento del concepto (el viejo "a distancia" se sustituye por "virtual" o "no presencial"), las razones para un futuro espléndido se encuentran en la mayor demanda de educación en las empresas, que obliga a estudiar en casa o en el trabajo, y la popularización de Internet.

Hace unas semanas 84 rectores del centenar de universidades a distancia de todo el mundo se reunieron en Barcelona, para intercambiar éxitos y fracasos. La primera conclusión es aclaratoria: la universidad virtual pura no existe.

El e-learning o educación virtual pura significa que todo el curso se hace por Internet. La comunicación con los profesores es sólo por la Red. Esta modalidad es aún minoritaria en las universidades a distancia de todo el mundo, que van adaptándose a la nueva realidad tecnológica a la vez que sus alumnos. De momento, la mayoría ofrecen algunos cursos o asignaturas por Red, o bien la usan como refuerzo, pero no como medio único.

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La noción de educación continua o educación para toda la vida será esencial para sobrevivir en el mundo laboral. Esto, sumado a las ventajas que ofrecen las nuevas tecnologías para estudiar desde casa, abre un cambio revolucionario en las universidades a distancia hacia el e-learning puro o mixto.

También las universidades e institutos presenciales se apuntan al fenómeno con el uso de plataformas virtuales de educación como la libre Moodle, que sirven de complemento a sus estudios, o incluso ofreciendo algunos cursos a distancia. Y nacen por doquier institutos privados que siguen las dos claves de la educación del futuro: cursos a distancia y uso del e-learning.

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Tubella [Imma Tubella, rectora de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, UOC] no obvió uno de los puntos oscuros de este tipo de universidades: el bajo porcentaje de estudiantes que acaban graduándose, ya que la educación a distancia demanda más autodisciplina y tiene que compaginarse con el trabajo. El tiempo medio para acabar una carrera a distancia es mayor que en las presenciales normales y no baja de los seis años.

All around the world, blue whales aren’t singing like they used to, and scientists have no idea why.

The largest animals on Earth are singing in ever-deeper voices every year. Among the suggested explanations are ocean noise pollution, changing population dynamics and new mating strategies. But none of them is entirely convincing.

“We don’t have the answer. We just have a lot of recordings,” said Mark McDonald, president of Whale Acoustics, a company that specializes in the sonic monitoring of cetaceans.

McDonald and his collaborators first noticed the change eight years ago, when they kept needing to recalibrate the automated song detectors used to track blue whales off the California coast. The detectors are triggered by songs that match a particular waveform. Every year, McDonald had to set them lower.

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According to McDonald, the first explanation to come to mind involved noise pollution caused by increased shipping traffic. Ambient ocean noise has increased by more than 12 decibels since the mid-20th century. But if whales were trying to be heard above the din, they’d sing at higher rather than lower pitches, said McDonald.

It’s also possible the whales are responding to changing dynamics in how sound travels through water that’s become warmer as Earth heats up, absorbing more carbon dioxide and growing more acidic than before. “But those factors are so small, and this is such a huge shift in frequency,” said McDonald.

Another explanation involves the recovery of blue whale populations, which were nearly hunted to extinction during the first half of the last century. It’s only since hunting ceased that they’ve been recorded. Maybe songs were higher-pitched when recording started, because the whales had to sing extra-loud in order to reach their scattered brethren. Now that there are more, they can lower their voices and their pitch.

But even in populations that escaped the carnage relatively unscathed, where population densities have remained steady, songs are getting lower.