Category Archives: Commentable

Selected reader’s comments

Off to Mars. Yes and no.

It hasn’t escaped notice that the Russians (with a Chinese probe) tried sending a mission to Mars, Fobos-Grunt-Yinghuo, which spluttered into low Earth orbit and presumably will fall back to Earth. Meanwhile, NASA the U.S. space agency lofted another Mars mission, MSL Curiosity, that is happily on its way to the Red Planet. If this [...]
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Stem Cells: An excellent coverage of the medical reality

I’ve posted before about the most unusually frank, thorough and intelligent postings on current health issues by the British National Health Service (NHS) called NHS choices, [SciTechStory: Behind the headlines, a systematic source of science candor]. This time I’m drawing attention to a longer piece made available through the site, called Hope and hype: stem [...]
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Mars 500: The simulation ends

The Mars 500 facility, in a parking lot….Credit: ESA, Wikimedia Commons It was, as so many jokingly put it, a real down-to-earth mission to Mars. As in, the mission never left Earth. Beginning June 3, 2010 and ending November 4, 2011, the Mars 500 mission took place in a facility at the Russian Academy of [...]
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One voice: Paul Krugman, fracking and solar energy

At best, when an individual such as Paul Krugman (International Trade Economist, Nobel Prize winner in economics and columnist for the New York Times) opine in a public forum, it’s an insightful piece of analysis, a useful expression of sentiment, or an effective way of providing sorely needed background on important issues. Occasionally, however, important [...]
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The seven billionth baby

At a relatively arbitrary date, October 31, 2011 at a relatively arbitrary time of 11:58 PM in Manila in the Phillipines (near the International Dateline), a relatively arbitrary baby (Danica May Camacho) was born – the seven billionth person alive on Earth. That is according to the United Nations Population Fund. The U.S. Census Bureau [...]
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Dennis Ritchie 1941-2011

Not many people outside of the computer industry know of Dennis Ritchie. Most programmers know who he was because whatever their programming language of choice, they know about the continuing influence of the “C” programming language and the Unix operating system. Dennis Ritchie was the primary developer of both. Together “C” and Unix underlie much [...]
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Steve Jobs, entrepreneur, artist

Forest Gump, the paragon of grace under incomprehension, remarked about making a great deal of money “from a fruit company.” He had no idea, but the audience did. Everyone saw the image of the colorfully striped apple and knew what it meant. Steve Jobs and his company, Apple Computer, touched almost everybody. Jobs and company [...]
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The Nobel Show

There is nothing else like it in science, the annual awarding of the Nobel Prizes for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. I wish the awards were as eagerly anticipated by the world’s populations as say the Super Bowl or the World Cup; but this is the biggest show in science. I also wish [...]
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The Prestige: China orbits practice unit

The Heavenly Palace is in orbit, or at least the first practice piece – Tiangong 1 – is in orbit. CNSA, the Chinese National Space Agency reports that the 10.5 meter cylinder is designed to practice docking and other aspects of orbital navigation over the next 3-5 years, with the ultimate goal being a functioning [...]
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Kindle Fire ices the future of pads

Many moons ago Apple brought forth the iPad and it was well received. This was a minor miracle as all the pad or tablet computers that had gone before it were great disappointments, each failing to bring excitement or even utility to the tablet format. The iPad, as usual the slightly eccentric somewhat overpriced Apple [...]
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