Should the Constitution Be Scrapped?

When James Madison and his fellow statesmen drafted the Constitution, they created our system of government, with its checks, balances and sometimes awkward compromises. The laws of the United States are based on this document, along with the Bill of Rights, and for more than 200 years, Americans have held it sacred.

But Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman says that adherence to the Constitution is both misguided and long out of date. In his incendiary new book, On Constitutional Disobedience, the scholar who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argues that giving up on the Constitution would improve American political discourse and government, freeing us from what he describes as an “intergenerational power grab” by the Founding Fathers.

Why would we stop obeying the Constitution?

This is about taking the country back for ourselves. There’s no reason to let folks who have been dead for 200 years tell us what kind of country we should have. The United States that the Founding Fathers knew was a very small country huddled along the Eastern seaboard. It was largely rural; large parts of it were dependent on slave labor, and there was nothing like modern manufacturing or communication. Many of the most important drafters of the Constitution, including Madison, owned other human beings. Virtually all of them thought that women should have no role in public affairs. I don’t mean to say that they were not farsighted for their time, but their time is not our time.

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Obama seeking to boost study of human brain

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics, The New York Times reports.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations, and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses.

Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.

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This Is What the First Lunar Base Could Really Look Like

We have seen many concepts, but this is the most realistic plan yet for humanity's first Moon Base. It will be more efficient and cheaper to build than any other alternative, as it uses 3D printing to quickly transform raw lunar soil into habitable domes.

Also? It looks awesome.

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NASA: Jupiter’s moon Europa ‘most promising’ place to sustain life

US astronomers looking for life in the solar system believe that Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has an ocean, is much more promising than desert-covered Mars, which is currently the focus of the US government’s attention.

“Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to possess …. life,” said Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

“And it is the place we should be exploring now that we have a concept mission we think is the right one to get there for an affordable cost,” he continued.

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