Science & Technology

That ObamaCare pervasively violates the rights of individuals to control their own wealth and to freely negotiate terms of health insurance and health care on a free market is bad enough; that ObamaCare does so via ambiguous, nonobjective statutes is even worse. ObamaCare substantially empowers the executive branch and hordes of bureaucrats to create whatever health policies they wish.

Recently Udall announced he was sponsoring the so-called “Not My Boss’s Business Act” to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision and again force businesses to provide employees with health insurance covering the full spectrum of birth control mandated by ObamaCare.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has built a beautiful and technologically innovative house—at taxpayers’ expense. Although the technology in the house appears to work well—as NIST boasted in a recent media release—government should not have built the house, and the house is not economical to operate.

In 2008, twelve-year-old Elana Simon was diagnosed with fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, a rare and deadly form of liver cancer found in some 200 patients each year. A few years later, after doing research for a high school internship, then sixteen-year-old Simon proposed a study to isolate the genetic mutation responsible for her disease.

The Supreme Court delivered an important but substantially mitigated victory to advocates of individual rights by throwing out the ObamaCare requirement that business owners pay for health insurance when doing so violates their religious convictions. At issue was whether the federal government could force businesses to provide health insurance that covers forms of birth control.

Although androids often get a bad rap in science-fiction movies and video games, real-life androids are already improving people’s lives—and making “careers” of it. Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation has actually “hired” two lifelike androids: Kodomoroid will read the latest news from the Internet, and Otonaroid will converse with visitors about science and technology.

Coal is fueling the giant producer of Asia and enabling many of China’s 1.3 billion people to overcome crushing poverty. Goods marked “made in China” might as well be marked, “Made possible by coal.” Americans who use and enjoy products made in China—that is, all Americans—should celebrate this life-serving fossil fuel, as it makes such goods possible.

Physicians and researchers affiliated with the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and with the Battelle research center have pioneered the “Neurobridge,” a device that transmits signals from a chip implanted in the user’s brain to an electrical sleeve on his arm that in turn activates his muscles.

BP launched a thirteen pound drone earlier this month in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. BP turned to a drone (i.e., an unmanned aerial vehicle)—specifically, the Puma AE from AeroVironment—to improve monitoring of operations in the enormous and hazardous arctic environment of northern Alaska.

Why is TransCanada “exploring how to modify existing contracts with Keystone XL customers to allow for rail shipments” of oil (as Bloomberg reports)? The answer is that the U.S. government—spurred by environmentalist groups—has prohibited completion of the pipeline. “This is a market inefficiency created by regulatory impediments,” explains TransCanada CEO Russ Girling.