David Brin has his defense of the Transparent Society up at Wired. This was in response to a critque by Bruce Schneier that centered around unequal power. My tiny involvement was emailing David Brin to make him aware of the Schneier article. A common problem with attacks on the 1997 book “The Transparent Society” is …
In a major step forward for computational protein design, University of Washington scientists have built from scratch a handful of enzymes that successfully catalyze a specific chemical reaction. These proteins have no naturally occurring counterparts, and the reaction–which breaks down a man-made chemical–has no natural catalyst. David Baker and his colleagues at the University of …
(Hat tip Bad Astronomy), About 1% of the stars in the Milky Way could have earth like planets (smaller rock like planets) Another study shows the Milky Way is twice as big as previously thought. So instead 100 billion stars there could be 200 billion and of those 1% or two billion could have earth …
There is an article and report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) where there are projections of a deficit in US military spending as China’s economy grow. The assumptions in this report and the time frame is nuts. They are talking about a big deficit in 2050-2080 assuming higher than US per …