Every year the Journal of Environmental Microbiology publishes the choicest of the comments by its peer reviewers. The article itself is only available by subscription, but a Boing Boing commenter gave last year's list here: [www.boingboing.net]

What, nothing by John M. Ford? He won the World Fantasy Award in 1989 for "Winter Solstice: Camelot Station" ([listserv.heanet.ie] which is about the best Arthurian overview ever. Also look for his brilliant version of the Illiad done in every known Hollywood genre: "Troy: the Movie" ([www.strangehorizons.com] ). …

SETI has always been one of those low-probability high-payoff research fields, but after 50 years of searching the odds are getting pretty long. We can already exclude civilizations that are within a few light years of us and broadcasting at our power levels. The longer we look, the bigger the empty sphere around…

Dunno what the clock and the bells are trying to prove scientifically, but they're cool. Some of the other experiments mentioned at Atlas Obscura are obviously valuable, like the Evolution Experiment and the Harvard Grant Study, but the purpose of the dripping pitch is ... obscure.

Add to this list cyborg-ized moths: DARPA commissioned a group to glue control chips to the backs of hawkmoths. They contained tiny radio receivers and wires that plugged into their wing muscles. Original paper here: [mtlweb.mit.edu] and less technical overview here: [babelniche.wordpress.com]

No love for the Island of Stability? Elements 114, 120, 126 with atomic weights 298, 304, or 310? Yes, no human knows how to make them in the lab, much less in nature, but that wouldn't stop the Mysterons. The hero of John C. Wright's "The Golden Age" had armor made out of the stuff, it being tremendously dense.

Not with Richard Nixon in charge

McPhee also wrote about literal forensic geology, as in geology used in the course of police work, in an article in the New Yorker: [www.newyorker.com] .

$500K for a stadium cover seems extremely cheap - these buildings typically run to the tens of millions. Other stadiums have tried retractable covers, but they always seem to have mechanical problems.

I see that Manoug Manougian later became a professor of mathematics, and head of the department, at the University of Southern Florida, bio here: [shell.cas.usf.edu] His field is differential equations, which are pretty basic to rocketry. Some pictures of his rockets are here: [shell.cas.usf.edu]

The article is pretty straightforward - Blue whales shouldn't exist because our model of the causes of colon cancer says that they should all be dead of it by age eighty. Therefore our model is missing something. That, by the way, was exactly the premise of the "bumblebees can't fly" paper - since our model of…

Sure, the exponential curves that lead to Kurzweil's version of godhood are kind of ridiculous, but he's actually right about the growth in photovoltaics. The number of watts shipped has been growing by 50% per year since 2000. In 2010 the industry shipped 15 gigawatts worldwide, which is equivalent to about 3…

The image of Jupiter is about what it looks like from Io, which is about 400,000 km from Jupiter, just as the Moon is from the Earth. The innermost major moon of Jupiter, Amalthea, is only 190,000 km away, so Jupiter would appear twice as large again. It would be utterly terrifying, but the lethal radiation flux…

If people living hunter-gatherer lifestyles are that much stronger and faster than people in developed lands, then why aren't they dominating track and field? Timed foot races have been held since the 18th century. If Australian aborigines or African Bushmen were superhumanly fast they should have won something in…

Cool as this idea is, I don't think we actually need it for interstellar communication. Frank Drake, the SETI pioneer, calculated in the 60s that the Arecibo radio-telescope could communicate with its twin halfway across the galaxy. This paper, [www.setileague.org] gives a more conservative estimate of 10,000 light…

I'm not going to worry about this unless SpaceX shows that they can actually launch rockets reliably and cheaply. Their record so far is not good - 4 out of 7. The Russians do about 4 launches every month.

Ha, just one patent? For something unrelated to anything else she ever did, where her co-inventor probably did the work? The equally stunning Julie Newmar of Catwoman fame has 2 patents:

The only way the Moon is going to crash into us is if something big, like another star, swings through the solar system and disrupts its orbit.

It should also be mentioned that two recent geothermal projects, one near San Francisco and one in Basel, have been halted due to concerns that they enhance earthquakes.

@sibelian: Dunno about the rest of you, but I read and watch SF for the sake of novelty and sensawunda, and I don't get that from sequels and comic book adaptations. "What if a Norse god were living in the present day?" doesn't do it for me. Nor does "What if an American soldier in WW II was really strong?" …