Hope your remark gets approved, Numitron. Unless the proposed Lockheed fusion reactor pans out, we're looking at ITER based designs taking off after 2040, which isn't good. We needed them 20 years ago. Even worse, the nuclear power industry is looking for power plant designs that are no more complicated than…

Yawn. Replace one 1970s trope (the post-apocalyptic novel) with another trope (the colonize other worlds novel).

Thanks for the correction.

The small irony of Exodus: Gods and Kings: Moses was (probably) a 12th century BC figure, and that puts him firmly in the bronze age. All that iron armor and those steel weapons is ever so slightly—-how to put this?—anachronistic. Like 400 years off or so. Oh well. I guess that's what they had in the prop…

It's worth remembering that Jacques Cousteau's ship the Alcyone uses Magnus effect sails (aka "turbosails"), and the Cousteau Society has sailed her since 1985.

If I remember correctly, Raven's manzanita is also in cultivation in at least one botanic garden. However, others are right that many species, especially orchids, are difficult to impossible to cultivate. That's the nastiest part about poaching orchids, really. The plants last a year or two, and then they're dead. …

The problem with GMOs, as with conventional crops, is that they're effectively clones or close to it. If a pest can crack one, it can crack them all, and depending on a few clones makes us horribly vulnerable. We've known this since the Irish Potato Famine, which, as we all know, was caused by a potato clone (the…

Who were the Celts? I mean, we're talking about a network of people who built cities, traded with the Romans and Greeks, mined iron, salt, etc. And then part of the network was trashed by the Romans, leading to subsidiary collapses in areas the Romans didn't even colonize (cities on the far side of the Rhine from…

Hopefully they'll get the outriggers right. AFAIK, the outrigger is supposed to be on the upwind side of the boat, or it plows into the water and things don't go well. In the picture above, the sail appears to be billowing towards the outrigger, not away from it, although admittedly it's a little ambiguous. Still,…

There's another reason why a *species that can make a starship* would look like us: firemaking.

Yeah, those Maine Durians are so special. They harvest them in the woods every spring.

It's worth framing this in terms of drug discovery. Currently, the number of potential medicines that become actual medicines *after being shown to be efficacious in the lab* is approximately 1 in 2000 or less. That was the number a few years ago.

My longest-lasting legacy is the tons of carbon I've emitted and caused to be emitted into the atmosphere by living as an American. That will probably be around in the atmosphere at least 100,000 years, changing climate the entire time. Oh yeah, and there's probably an ounce or two of radioactive waste somewhere…

Somehow, I got the impression that Egypt was a land with a lot of people and not that many trees. It seems weird to propose a solution that uses a lot of wood and not that many people. Yes, they could reuse those amazingly straight trunks a few times, but the wood is going to wear out, requiring more amazingly…

It's really worth adding Mike Davis' Planet of Slums into this discussion, because it's not clear that gentrification is what it used to be. In the past, one could think of a city as a reef, and redevelopment as the equivalent of one coral head overgrowing another, as an old plan was demolished to make way for a new…

That's okay. There have been an unusually high number of left-handed US Presidents, among others. There's something about growing up with low-level adversity to make some people into overachievers.

You know, if Discovery wants to post a week of horror stories, they could do worse than switching to "Mosquito Week" (http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Le…). It says a lot that we go into spasms of fear about wolves and sharks, each of which kill about 10 people per year (out of 7,000,000,000). Mosquitoes, which…

Oh, I know that, but since the point of ambisinistrous is to make people think of the pre-Medieval assumptions that built into the term ambidextrous. After all, telling a left hander that she's got "two right hands" is not a compliment, if you actually think about it.

So why is it ambidextrous? That implies you've got two right hands. Since most left-handers are forced by circumstances to be ambidextrous, to use their off-hands more than right-handers are (see the stick-shift, scissors, etc. argument above), I'd argue that the proper term is for using both hands at various skills…

Well, you're right in that many drugs interact with grapefruit, and if you're not lucky, you can take one of them at any age. However, one of the most common drug interactions is with statins, and those are drugs that people get pressured into taking in their late thirties or forties (speaking from experience). …