This sounds like pretty big news: “NASA scientists have discovered enormous underground reservoirs of frozen water on Mars, away from its polar caps, in the latest sign that life might be sustainable on the Red planet.”

“The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; [...]

Sonny points out that I was unclear in my earlier post: I’m talking about the WTC bombing of February 1993, hence the reference to attacking Afghanistan in 2000 or 2001. A good part of why we ended up where we got is that President Clinton failed to make good on his promise to bring [...]

Continuing yesterday’s post on the candidates’ science policies, let’s look at how they measure up on climate change and energy policy. Although the format divided these questions into two, I’m going to address them as the combined issue they really deserve to be.

Science Debate 2008 has posed 14 questions about science policy to the Obama and McCain’s campaigns. Over the next few days I’ll be attempting to parse the boilerplate in their responses and see how the candidates line up.
The first question is about promoting scientific innovation:
Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth [...]

Sunspots Are Fewest Since 1954, but Significance Is Unclear.

Big robots and big rockets: Some talking points on space exploration for the next administration.
Better get on these points, as well as more forward-looking projects like the space elevator. If we don’t, the Japanese will get the jump on us. (Although I sincerely doubt the cost figure of five billion British pounds quoted in the [...]

No matter if you’re on the side of the climate change consensus or one of the skeptics, it makes sense not to restrict our options to emission-reducing cap-and-trade schemes alone. We should simultaneously study every possible weapon in the arsenal to deal with warming, including geo-engineering schemes like this one:
It should be possible to counteract [...]

As we prepare to flip the switch on our own doomsday machine, a.k.a. the Large Hadron Collider, isn’t it wonderful to know that the man behind it all had a penchant for “blowing things up as a child“?
But on a more serious note, the scientific press would do well to remember that experiments like these [...]

Fear not the Large Hadron Collider. Megan McArdle reports:
the production of a large number of Higgs particles in the future could have a backwards-in-time causal effect on the machine that produced them, stopping the machine from ever running. As possible “evidence” for such a backwards-in-time effect, the authors cite the now-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)–a [...]

Much fun at Alternet. Bruce Levine:
My recent articles have been about the corrupt partnership between Big Pharma and psychiatry — resulting in nonsense, lies and exaggerations about mental illness diagnoses, chemical imbalances and psychiatric drugs — and thus, lately, I have neglected discussing the particular bullshit of my fellow psychologists, some of which is seriously [...]

In re: Stephanie’s piece on the main site, what if unlocking wealths of knowledge means unleashing apocalyptic forces beyond our control? The presumption behind a lot of what we late moderns are up to is that catalyzing vast new heaps of information generates a large set of commodities and capabilities along with a small set [...]

So I’ve just returned from Providence, RI, where an IHS conference on social change was held at Brown University. Stars of the show included the ever-lucid Will Wilkinson (recently in the news himself) and Claremont Professor Paul Zak, who received during the conference a Drudge Report link heralding a “childbirth wonder drug that can ‘cure’ [...]

Sorry, George Will. Nudging irritates me. When I think of nudging, I do not think of unobtrusively maximizing aggregate efficiency in a way consonant with free public choice. I think of this:

I think, I’m a man, not a number data point clustered within a statistically significant group! Nudging is only possible when you look at [...]

What happens to us when we can outsource and archive our memories? What’s the difference between technological recall and human remembrance? What do Jorge Luis Borges and Maude Flanders have in common? My attempt to answer all these questions and more is up now at The New Atlantis. Teaser quote:
Through technology, the alienation and systematization [...]

Ross, talking about those crazy Singularitarians, channels a little Tocqueville:
the mere fact that the Singularity is inherently “escapist,” and bears a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Christianity, isn’t a problem with the concept. It’s the whole point.
As John Gray has also pointed out, we seem always innately to grope toward the concept of God. But that concept [...]

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration [...]

Mixed news for fans of radical life extension: Charles Lindbergh is sort of your posterboy.
Forget aviation hero. On the side, Lindbergh was a Dr Frankenstein figure, who used his mechanical genius to explore the possibility of conquering death - but only for the select few who were considered “worthy” of living forever.
“Beating death was [...]

Star intellectual Steven Pinker, who should be careful whom he calls stupid, has penned (for The New Republic) an attack on the President’s Council on Bioethics that makes my ridicule of Martha Nussbaum sound like a call-in to Delilah. It is so easy to think up a list of insults for this piece that I [...]

Michael Brendan Dougherty makes an enjoyable @TAC upon the metric system, Hegelianism, and their latest champion, Fareed Zakaria.
The enthusiasts for the metric system (which is based on incorrect calculations anyway) remind me of the enthusiasts for Esperanto. George Soros speaks Esperanto.
But Zakaria’s conclusion is even worse:
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they [...]