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But Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman says that adherence to the Constitution is both misguided and long out of date.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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IBM Predicts: Cognitive Computers That Feel And Smell, Within The Next Five Years

At the end of each year, IBM releases its “5 in 5”--five technology predictions that IBM researchers foresee coming to fruition within the coming five years. These predictions are based on everything from emerging market trends to cultural and social behaviors to actual technologies IBM has incubating in its many labs. And if this year’s predictions are to be believed, many computational systems--from your tablet and laptop to your smartphone--are about to get a lot more sensory, learning to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in their own digital ways.

Welcome to the era of cognitive systems, IBM’s researchers say. “Cognitive computing systems will help us see through complexity, keep up with the speed of information, make more informed decisions, improve our health and standard of living, enrich our lives and break down all kinds of barriers—including geographic distance, language, cost and inaccessibility,” the company says in a press release.

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Golden Spike announces plans for commercial lunar exploration

It was forty years ago this month that Apollo 17 took astronauts to the Moon for the last time. Since then, the satellite has only been visited periodically by unmanned probes, but that may change inside the next ten years. On Thursday, the day before the anniversary of Apollo 17’s launch, a new company called Golden Spike announced at the National Press Club that it would be sending commercial exploration missions to the Moon within a decade with a ticket price of US$750 million. Read More

Why Not Socialism?

President Barack Obama owes his victory to the efforts of black, Latino, trade union, feminist and LGBTQ folks, who rallied to thwart a Romney campaign that relied on voter suppression and coded appeals to white nationalism. But unfortunately, the economy is still in the dumps, and Obama will not follow his reelection with an all-or-nothing progressive push. Rather, the exit polls and ballot initiative results will be read by the president’s neoliberal advisors as a mandate for so-called “compromise” policies—i.e., further austerity, further cuts.

An ideological vacuum will be created on the Left when the president tacks back to the center and the GOP even more to the extreme Right, and democratic socialists are in a unique position to fill it.

Democratic socialism provides a counterweight to the Tea Party agenda of reaction and division. We advocate for an expanded electoral and economic democracy along with deep citizen engagement. We know that many Americans share these values. People want a voice in decisions that affect their lives, and they know that the only way to cut the deficit is to put people back to work. We also know that 49 percent of people aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, according to a Pew poll released last year, and that class consciousness is on the rise.

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The Impact of Twitter on Journalism | Off Book | PBS

Nuclear fusion – your time has come

Every year, one typical coal-fired power station devours several million tonnes of fuel and produces even more carbon dioxide. Burning stuff has the virtue that it is simple but it is very brutal. That volume of carbon dioxide is damaging the atmosphere and, in the longer term, the fuel will run out. It is clear that the world needs an alternative to generating energy by setting fire to things.

For a good few years now, nuclear fusion has looked like offering a solution to the problem. For every 100 tonnes of coal we burn, fusion has the potential to deliver the same amount of energy, without any carbon dioxide emission, using a small bath of water and the lithium contained in a single laptop battery. Moreover, it would be inherently very safe and would not produce any significant radioactive waste. Lest there be any confusion, the science behind this way of harnessing the energy locked away inside the atomic nucleus is entirely different from that used in current nuclear fission reactors. It almost seems too good to be true … but it isn't.

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One-molecule thick material promises electronics revolution

Imagine a world where rooms are lit by their walls, clothes are smartphones and windows turn into video screens. That may seem like a bit of science fiction, but not for long. Researchers at MIT are using a two-dimensional version of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) to build electrical circuits that may soon revolutionize consumer electronics.

We've heard a great deal about graphene in recent years. A two-dimensional version of graphite, graphene has proven to be something of a wonder substance. It’s tremendously hard, highly heat conductive, is possessed of unique optical qualities ... and that’s just scratching the surface as engineers discover new uses for it in everything from solar panels to space elevators.

By comparison molybdenum disulfide is a humble substance used largely for lubricant or as a catalyst in petroleum refining. That, however, is changing. Last year, Swiss scientists described a version of molybdenum disulfide that had the same 2D-style structure as graphene and now researchers at MIT are using it to build electrical circuits.

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Battle of the Next-Generation DNA Sequencers Heating Up

With the steady evolution of DNA sequencing technology, the cost of the machines as well as the cost of running them continues to drop. Due to their revolutionary technology, one of the biggest players in the field recently has been Ion Torrent (acquired by life sciences giant Life Technologies in 2010). And I don’t use the word “revolutionary” lightly here. Their technology is a game-changer and we previously described how it would lead to a democratization of genomics, making it more accessible to researchers on a small budget. But now, a company called Oxford Nanopore Technologies has barged right into their party, with its own impressive approach to DNA sequencing.

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Abundance – The Future is Better Than You Think

I’ll start with poverty, which has declined more the in the past 50 years than the previous 500. In fact, during the last 50 years, while the population on Earth has doubled, the average per capita income around th world (adjusted for inflation) has tripled.

We’re not just richer than ever before, we’re healthier as well. During the last century, maternal mortality has decreased by 90 percent and child mortality by 99 percent, while the length of the average human lifespan has more than doubled.

As Steven Pinker has made clear, since the middle ages, violence on Earth has been in constant decline. Homicide rates are a hundred-fold less than they were when they peaked 500 years ago. So we’re not only healthier, we’re safer as well.

If your measure of prosperity is tilted towards the availability of goods and services, consider that even the poorest American’s today (those below the poverty line) have access to phones, toilets, running water, air conditioning and even a car. Go back 150 years and the wealthiest robber barons couldn’t have hoped for such wealth.

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Is 3D printing the key to utopia?

You know the problem: the dishwasher that has cleaned your dishes faithfully for 15 years suddenly stops working. You call out a repairman who identifies the problem: the filter unit has finally given up the ghost. “Ah,” you say, much relieved, “can you fit a new one?” At which point the chap shakes his head sorrowfully. No can do, he explains. The company that made the machine was taken over years ago by another outfit and they no longer supply spares for your ancient machine.

Up until now, this story would have had a predictable ending in which you sorrowfully junked your trusty dishwasher and bought a new one. But there’s an emerging technology that could change that. It’s called three-dimensional printing.

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First-Ever Private Spacecraft Docking Mission To Launch April 30

NASA seeks to make space history again, this time by overseeing the first-ever docking of a privately owned commercial spacecraft with the International Space Station (ISS).

The Dragon cargo vessel developed by private firm SpaceX has been tentatively cleared to launch from Cape Canaveral on April 30, 2012, and is set to rendezvous with the space station a few days thereafter, NASA’s associate administrator of space operations William H. Gerstenmaier said Monday.

The entire mission will take 21 days, at which point the Dragon cargo vessel will re-enter Earth and plunge into the Pacific Ocean, to be recovered and re-used again.

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List of private spaceflight companies

This page is a list of non-governmental entities that currently offer – or are planning to offer – equipment and services geared towards spaceflight, both robotic and human spaceflight.

Virgin galactic only goes into sub orbit. Without public/tax support advances will go at a snail's pace.

This week the Dutch company PAL-V announced the first flights of its prototype "flying car".

This unique vehicle is called the PAL-V One, or the 'Personal Air and Land Vehicle', and It marks the start of a new era.

On the ground the vehicle drives like a sports car. Within minutes its rotor is unfolded and its tail is extended: then it is ready to take off thanks to the advanced gyrocopter technology.

With these successful test results it is proven that it is not only possible to build a flying car but also that it can be done within existing international rules for both flying and driving.

Having passed this important milestone the company is now inviting investors to join them in creating the future.

The next step will be the design of the first commercial production model of the PAL-V, and first deliveries are expected in 2014.

For 100 years people have dreamed of a flying car, and many attempts have been made to realize this dream, but now it has truly become a reality.

www.PAL-V.com

‘The person who lives to be 1,000 years-old has already been born.’

This week, to a large and gripped audience, Professor Sarah Harper from the Oxford Institute of Ageing had just explained what societies of the future would look like. Then someone in the audience stood up and quoted gerontologist Aubrey de Grey: “The person who lives to be 1,000 has already been born.”

To think of our children living into their 100s is, it seems, at the vanilla end of the ageing debate now. Conceivably, you could retire in your sixties, become transformed by stem cell regeneration or similar, go back to work at 100, work for another 800 years, and still have a really long retirement.

Whatever, there are going to be a lot more old people around soon, and many things urgently need looking at again. If we were to design a pension system today to match Bismarck’s – in terms of the age that it starts set against median life expectancy – it would kick in at 103.

But if this strikes fear into your heart, it might be because, as the minister for care services, Paul Burstow, told me at another conference later in the week: “We equate old age and frailty as if they are automatically synonymous. We equate old age and senility as if they are automatically synonymous. This is something we’ve got to stop doing.”

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RFS 9: Kill Hollywood

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

That's one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

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Real Online TV Is Finally Here

Hulu has not one, but two original shows ready to stream over the Interwaves in the near future—one of them is even scripted. (The other is reality. Groan.) These aren't just six-packs of five minute webisodes; they're original content aiming to follow in the footsteps of HBO. Giddyup!
Hollywood is teetering on a ledge, debating whether or not it should jump into the great unknown of the internet. Hulu and Netflix are standing behind, ready to push the industry in for its own good.

The amateur, short-form online video boom of the past five years has been cool, but it isn't an endgame. Sure, it generated an audience—we'll always watch those five minute Funny or Die vids in our cubicles as we work—but it isn't enough to drive an industry. Online TV has the potential to be more than just an alternate, low-budget route for jaded producers, writers, and actors. It could do more than just serve as a glorified DVR with more restrictions than an airport security checkpoint. On-demand, broadcast-quality TV on any device is the prize. Hulu and Netflix have delivered on the infrastructure, but networks and studios are balking on content in the name of short-term profit. So in the face of hostility, the two services have decided to stop waiting for the dinosaurs to come around, and in effect, have become their own networks. Awesome.

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Space powers propose roadmap for flight to Mars

Despite various economic issues undermining efforts by the world’s leading space powers to forge a program for future manned flights to the Red Planet, an international working group has come up with a universal space exploration roadmap.

­The effort by the partner nations in the International Space Station project, namely Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency, was also supported by China, India, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other countries.

"This is not merely an ISS club, but a broader project," the chief of human spaceflights programs of Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos, Aleksey Krasnov, added.

The proposed roadmap may be based on three alternative routes: preparation of a manned expedition to Mars from scratch, the testing of technologies on the Moon prior to a flight to Mars, or a flight to an asteroid followed by a journey to Mars.

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Space idea factory & brainstorming school

•Make nuclear fuel in space: Nuclear power may be the best viable solution for long-distance space travel. But where should the nuclear fuel be produced? Grad student Jake Dodd proposes a system to create it in space. This would avoid risks posed by creating it on Earth and use rockets to launch radioactive fuel through the atmosphere. Dodd named his idea SNAP: Space-based Nuclear Activision Plant. From a constant position in space, SNAP would “ingest fertile materials shipped from Earth, transmute them into useable nuclear fuels, and aid in the manufacture and distribution of space based nuclear fuel,” Dodd said. He suggests that SNAP might use nuclear power technologies such as molten salt reactors or nuclear-pumped lasers.

•Build an industrial research park on the moon: The U.S. – especially the private sector – could provide communications, navigation and lunar ground infrastructure for China, India and other nations to send their own vehicles to the moon and back.

•Use the space station to build space ships: Use the International Space Station as a scaffold to build the next-generation lunar orbiting station. Use the lunar station to develop and build a manned spacecraft called the Cosmic Mariner, which would journey to targets like Mars, the asteroid belt and the outer planets.

•Build orbiting “filling stations” for rockets: Rockets could fill up at these floating “gas stations” so they could use their powerful engines to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere instead of the traditional method of “falling” through the atmosphere at high speeds.

•Commercial astronauts build energy satellites: The private sector and NASA should develop a commercial astronaut corps program to start training crew who can go out on weekly missions to build, among other projects, satellites that would create microwave energy from the continually available sunlight and beam it to Earth. Such projects would create high-paying jobs and help bolster the sagging world economy

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Stratolaunch Systems, A Paul G. Allen Project

Stratolaunch Systems is pioneering innovative solutions to revolutionize space transportation. Watch the video or visit http://www.stratolaunch.com to learn more.

Has The 'God Particle' Been Found?

Science gossip!

Rumors are flying, ABC News reports, that scientists who operate the Large Hadron Collider will meet next week to discuss an "update" on the search for the Higgs boson, a particle that is part of the same field that gives mass matter. Even the attribution of the rumors (they aren't the first that the Higgs boson has been discovered) is deliciously nerdy.

According to PhysicsWorld.com, CERN's Scientific Policy Committee will be meeting on Tuesday (Dec. 13) to discuss, amongst other things, an update on the search for the Higgs boson. Teams from the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments will be in attendance.

Interestingly, as noted by the Guardian.co.uk's science correspondent Ian Sample, the head scientists of the two groups will be there to give the Higgs update. "That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle," Sample pointed out in his Dec. 6 article.

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Earth-like planet found in distant sun's habitable zone

For the first time, astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope have confirmed a roughly Earth-size planet orbiting a sun-like star in the so-called "Goldilocks" zone where water can exist in liquid form on the surface and conditions may be favorable for life as it is known on Earth.

Along with the confirmed extra-solar planet, one of 28 discovered so far by Kepler, researchers today also announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, pushing the spacecraft's total so far to 2,326, including 10 candidate Earth-size worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.

Additional observations are required to tell if a candidate is, in fact, an actual world. But astronomers say a planet known as Kepler-22b, orbiting a star some 600 light years from Earth, is the real thing.

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Plan to establish first lunar base and gas stations in space

Imagine if every time you went for on a trip, you had to carry all the fuel required to get you to your destination and back - even if that trip was to a place far, far away, like say Mars. In space there are no refueling options available (yet), and given that propellant makes up over 90 percent of the weight of a spacecraft, this issue is fundamental to saving costs and driving future space exploration. Now the Shackleton Energy Company (SEC) is looking to establish the first operational base to mine ice on the Moon that will be used to produce liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants for distribution to spacecraft via the first gas stations in space ... and the plan is to be open for business by 2020.

According to SEC founder Bill Stone, such orbital gas stations are (along with economical Earth-to-orbit transport like that being pursued by Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, and places to stay in orbit) one of the three things essential for humans to expand further into space. It is this need that SEC aims to meet while becoming the "world's foremost space-based energy company providing rocket propellants, life support, consumables, and services in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and on the Moon to all spacefarers."

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