This week how we understand the evolution of religion.

It might not just be a coincidence that big societies have these big omniscient, omnipresent

gods.

And could investors who do nothing about climate change end up in court?

The risk from future climate damage is big enough to be taken into account by investors who have an obligation to manage risk for their clients.

Plus, the law that governs the computer chip industry may be faltering.

So what next?

This is the Nature podcast for February the 11th, 2016.

I'm Kerry Smith.

And I'm Adam Levy.

About a year ago, I replaced my smartphone with a newer version.

Despite being slimmer and lighter, it had more storage, more RAM, and the camera was better.

And as a consumer,

I confess, I just kind of expected that. Dan Reed knows this feeling better than most. He's at the University of Iowa now, but he used to be corporate vice president at Microsoft.

Consumers have been conditioned to believe that every couple of years, their devices will be more powerful, they'll be cheaper.

And that may not always be the case.

The whole economic engine based on that growth model that says every new generation of devices,

smaller, faster, and one sells more of them, that's getting harder and harder to deliver on.

This principle of smaller, faster, more sales is a target the computer chip industry set

itself decades ago. It's based on something you might have heard of, Moore's law.

Back in the 1960s, Gordon Moore, who was one of the founders of Intel, observed that the number of transistors one could place on a chip was doubling every 18 to 24 months.

And the semiconductor industry has worked to make that true for most of the last 50 years.

...