Science & Technology

You can’t accuse Elon Musk of not thinking big. He helped found the internet commerce site PayPal and went on to found SpaceX, which has successfully rocketed a supply capsule to the space station. Now Musk is in the early stages of planning a colony on Mars. As Rob Coppinger…

Thanks to new research with embryonic stem cells, doctors may one day be able to transplant neurons developed from stem cells into patients who suffer brain damage, including Alzheimer’s patients. Connie K. Ho reports for RedOrbit.com: Researchers from the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute [and other research centers] recently discovered that…

Although Reason magazine publishes some pro-liberty articles and videos, it unfortunately publishes an occasional endorsement of statism. Such is the case with a November 19 article by A. Barton Hinkle, “The Case for a Carbon Tax.” Hinkle, granting the highly disputed notions that the globe is warming, that this is…

A few items from the benevolent news front: BBC reports that “A ‘chemo-bath’ which delivers toxic cancer drugs to just one organ in the body has been used on patients in the UK for the first time, say doctors.” Dr Brian Stedman, a consultant interventional radiologist, said: "To cut off…

Surveys Apple’s staggering creation of great products, new markets, and massive wealth—for itself, its customers, and its competitors.

Almost forty years after animal rights advocates began asking us to put down our steak knives, plant advocates may start asking us to relinquish our salad forks as well. Plants have rights too, they say, and we ought to “reconsider our ethical approach to eating them.” Michael Marder, a philosopher…

It came all at once, without warning. . . . It was unexpected and unannounced, sudden and surly, inundating, devastating, mutilating, obliterating. It battered and bludgeoned the shore until there was no more shore, until it was all running water and milling debris, until almost every trace of a human…

Through the invention and sale of its Kindle e-reader, Amazon has brought incredible convenience to many readers. The compact, sleek, and affordable Kindle allows its owners to carry upwards of one thousand books anywhere. It enables easy searching, highlighting, and note-taking; instantaneous book purchasing; transferring of purchases to other devices;…

Lamenting predicted cuts under the Romney budget plan, Neal Lane, former director of the National Science Foundation, called for more “federal investments in science and technology” in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Scientific knowledge and new technologies,” argued Professor Lane, “are the building blocks for long-term economic growth.” According…

On Monday, Alex Epstein, president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, will debate arch-environmentalist Bill McKibben at Duke University. Epstein will argue that fossil fuels improve the planet; McKibben will argue that they harm it. In July, McKibben, whom the Boston Globe has called “the nation’s leading environmentalist,”…