It is America's worst kept secret - the government has top secret military installations.But the hype around Area 51 rapidly grew to be about aliens and UFOs. Instead, it was a more typical Cold War tale. President Eisenhower had signed off on a secret reconnaissance plane and the military wanted it flown from a secret location.The plane became the well-known U-2 and a CIA official, an Air...
read moreSome people are worried that unthinking, uncaring robots will be part of our future. They are concerned about a Cylon uprising or maybe a Terminator, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon; there hasn't been a true advancement in artificial intelligence since the early 1990s, all we know is that the brain is a lot more complicated than making faster CPUs, regardless of what Ray...
read moreA saying in the Old West was that God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.Well, not completely equal, but his invention of the revolver certainly made life better for flintlock pistol owners. Speed and accuracy were still a subjective issue.Now, maybe even accuracy is going to be egalitarian.When I was a young man at Duquesne, we had a rifle team. In the NCAA then, if you were going to...
read moreEveryone says they care about science. And everyone says they care about developing nations.Chocolate may be instrumental in deliciously helping people care about both. Ivory Coast, the world’s top cocoa producer, has a problem; young people are turning to other crops or giving up on small farms because they can't improve yields enough to make their cocoa holdings worthwhile. The choice is lose...
read moreInstagram, a popular photo-sharing application, is used by millions of people to show photos of their wedding cakes and pictures of themselves they took in the mirror with their cell phones. Or maybe it has a much deeper level, if you look hard enough. And want to take advantage of its popularity and need to talk about something at a conference. read...
read moreIf you're not a researcher, you probably don't use Mendeley a lot, I don't have an account there even though I have written lots of pieces about their stuff. But it's popular among researchers and in the early days of Science 2.0, when I had the Science 2.0 name itself reserved for a collaboration tool, I always assumed we would buy something like Mendeley or something like Mendeley would...
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