Hence the 'angry' in 'angry inch'. Mostly just an excuse to post a link to part of that amazing extravaganza.

1cm left you say. I guess that's the metric equivalent.
He doesn't need a lifetime of anti-rejection meds - he could just have followed Hedwig's example:

This is the argument of 2312 in large part. Worth a read if you're interested.

You're right about 2312 - but he leaves the hard part of hard scifi behind there since the molten crust would take many centuries if not millenia to cool. Randall Monroe did the math about speed up earth's rotation just a couple seconds and it turns out that it would require stupendous amounts of asteroids that would…

But there's a suggestion via Swan's miraculous recovery that maybe there are xeno-biota that could take on that role and replace the sabbatical. He never comes out and says it, but the it's an easy inference. Plus the smalls don't seem to need it ("no small has ever died from natural causes").

It actually does say: in cursive.

Among other wonderful effects like ruining your supply of red blood cells, dasitinib causes neutropenia so it's a good case of 'More healthy years, in a bubble!'

This looks great and reminds me of the the military version of one the story ideas Heinlein sent to Ted Sturgeon about a society where the afterlife is known and priestly agents are sent there to get justice for misdeeds in this one. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/help-f…

No, it is a cure, like it can prevent any relapse ever. That's the point about eliminating latency. So you may still have viruses hiding in your DNA, but they can't ever cause disease again.

This was a big deal in China way before the west even guessed about it. Pretty much folks would put up outhouses to tempt travellers into pooping and thereby enriching the soil. Likewise people used to buy the human stuff, not just get paid to take it away.
http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Humanure_…

This is Stevies cousin from the same assembly line, just without the artificial flesh covering and fully extended limbs.

Between Ascension and Interstellar, the second half of 2014 was all about hard scifi premises mutilated by an obsession with magical little girls. Here's hoping for less fake outs in 2015!

Reading comprehension fail on my part - I was trolled out of believing they were all NASA by a satellite called Suomi NPP since Suomi is the Finnish word for the Finnish language I thought it was a Finnish satellite. Thanks for the clarification!

Yeah, I'm confused too, there's 3700 of them up there. Maybe these are just civilian remote sensing / imaging satellites?

It's all about the energy level of those photons. Below the visible band, EM radiation doesn't have enough energy to do much work at the chemical level directly. This is because photon energy is proportional to frequency - low frequency is low energy (AM, FM, TV, WIFI, Microwave [like satellites and the ovens],…

Depends on the bottle - some very bitter big reds are delicious 24 hours after opening, but most whites, not so much.

Depending on the wine, it might actually need some oxygen in there for aging. Twist-offs are fine for wine that won't age, or will age only a bit, but you need cork for something you want to age for a long time so that the oxygen can slowly diffuse through the cork and oxidise the tannins without supplying enough…

If they followed their method for meat and broke down vegetables by type (Cruciferous, Nightshade, Leguminous, Umbellifers) they'd have numbers much lower for each that the total for eggs alone.

I imagine we'd have to go through brain-to-brain language first and then move towards affect-colouring those messages - I remember a project a few years ago to use polygraph information to create a kind of sensation tattoo on another person, so that you'd have a live feeling that was about what someone else was…

The phosphene experiment has fascinated me since I first heard about it months ago. To see where it's going, think about the 'brain-reading' technology that can decode a letter viewed by a person using fMRI - together these system could generate a kind of automated telegraph - perhaps even using electrodes or the next…