> No one else with a functioning brain wanted that outcome.

In fairness, Oppenheimer was dead-set against nuclear proliferation too, once he saw what his bomb could do in action. Pretty much any scientist with moral objections would have been sidelined in favor of someone else without them.

Yeah, that jumped out at me too. At first glance, she seems like a dillettante actress who "invented" a few articles of clothing until you get to the rocket scientist part…

I'll allow myself one shameless self-promotion for the year: buy someone you love and/or don't know what to get The Miniature Book Of Miniature Golf. It's a tiny, working miniature golf course, in book form! A wonderful gift that every man, woman, and child in America should own several copies of. (although it seems…

And that wolf will never bother him again!

Okay, word from on high is that flagging is still our best weapon against trolls. If someone picks up enough flags, it notifies the editorial staff, who make the call on whether to ban someone. So that actually is the fastest way of reaching the staff.

I think you are misreading it. The last option on that list (profile page, username, etc.) was to link to a specific comment, and today's troll has given us plenty to choose from. To link to a specific comment from the Disqus profile page, just control-click / right-click on the comment's timestamp (ie. "2 hours ago")…

Hi. I wrote this article, and just wanted to remind everyone that, as @Dikachu:disqus helpfully pointed out, you don't just have the ability to flag posts from trolls, you can also report them to Disqus by clicking on their profiles, and Disqus can shut down their accounts. Hopefully, our latest troll infestation will…

Think about how many cancer survivors you know. I have a friend who beat both breast and ovarian cancer a few years apart. In the 70s and earlier, if you have ovarian cancer, you just died. That was it.

Are you kidding? We're 3d printing working human organs for transplant. Wifi. Hydrogen fuel cells. Digital cameras. GPS. Taking the internet from a text-base exchange of research papers to the vast pornography archive we know and love today. Sequencing the human genome. Cloning.

Still, Verne was able to conceive of the possibility. You can't fault him for not inventing the correct process 100 years in advance.

All you need to know about America can be explained by what kind of reactors we decided to build in the '60s.

I still love that album. My absolute favorite recording of any Christmas song is John Denver and Rowlf singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."

[Adjusts nerd 3D glasses]
I actually researched this while writing the article. According to Wookiepedia, Shyriiwook is one dialect of the Wookiee language, and the larger language family is called "Wookiee". I decided that Shyriiwook was too obscure for non-hardcore-nerds, and Wookiee-ese was funnier. Say it out loud.…

I think the publisher just thought it was too much of a downer. Yes, there was a lot of bleeding to death, but there was still a lot of variation. And I used the deaths to talk about either the person's life, or the state of medicine at the time. But it's still a small, impulse-buy kind of book, and people tend to go…

You're right. I should stick to trusting muppets, alcoholic robots, and dick-nosed Pokemon from now on.

Yikes. There's the Wiki Wormhole/Savage Love crossover I never wanted and now can't unsee!

That's exactly what Joaquin Phoenix would say.

Zoe Deschanel, what have you wrought?!?

I once researched a short book (which never got written) on famous people who were killed by their doctors. Before 1800 or so, doctors main job seemed to be killing their patients, either via bleeding, which was immensely popular despite doing more harm than good in virtually every instance, or giving medicines with…