The promise of 3-D printing is that we can generate any arbitrary shape at the push of a button, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize that auto-generating any arbitrary 3-D shape is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.

When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.

Books have a kind of usability that, for most people, isn’t about to be trumped by bourgeois concerns about portability: They are the only auto-playing, backwards-compatible to the dawn of the English language, entirely self-contained medium we have left.

The United Nations projects that we’re on track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050. Most of that growth will happen in the poorest countries on Earth.

Despite their poverty, those two billion people will add to the atmosphere at least three times the current greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S.

This fact alone has given the efforts to slow population growth new urgency…

…But biology happens for the precise reason that utopian nanotech can’t: The world of the ultrasmall is astonishingly violent. The surfaces of objects turn out to be seething frenzies of motion — atoms vibrating thousands of times a second, bonds forming and breaking. This energetic mess is what powers cellular machinery — but it blows apart anything humans engineer to do the same job.

The original draft of this story included a discussion of Cooper’s Law, Shannon’s limit and the fact that 3/4 of a circle’s area lies outside an area delimited by half its radius. All of which explain why AT&T isn’t crazy to ask you to pay an extra $150 to make your smartphone’s 3G radio achieve data throughput better than a local WiFi network. But that was a bit much for a piece of this scale.

The real story here is Skyhook. They had a fleet of vans cruising the streets of the U.S., mapping wi-fi hotspots, back when Street View was just a glimmer in Sergey’s eye. Now they’re in every iPhone on the planet.

Worse: our food system is so dependent on fossil fuels that it’s entirely possible that it takes more oil to make the food that allows a person to walk a mile than would be expended in simply driving that mile.

This isn’t a result I expected when I started playing with the numbers, so it’s an object lesson in why it’s important to do the math.

Good’s editors came up with the idea for this one. It’s an interesting take on the problem of fuel efficiency – we all know smaller, lighter cars and the electrification of the drive train are the ultimate solution, but a certain amount of waste is inevitable. So: how can we recover it?

Sometimes a researcher is willing to talk about their work even before it’s peer reviewed. This can be tricky: whatever you think of peer review, papers are almost always better after experts have read them and demanded that they be revised. In this case I think it turned out all right, because Elliott is an especially smart scientist, and also I managed to catch him right after he’d presented his work at a meeting to 30 of the most knowledgeable researchers in his field.

There has been a lot of speculation about why Steve Jobs thinks the A4 chip at the heart of the iPad is so special. This piece is more of the same, but it comes from better-informed sources.

It’s weird that I had to be sitting in a conference room at NCAR to find this out. You would think it would be news! Just goes to show how little even the journalists who cover this beat really understand the consequences of increasing earth’s radiative forcing even just a little.

I really hope this works out. Because the last audacious technology project I covered – the Iceland Deep Drilling Project – didn’t.

Credit is due to Tom Halfhill on this one, who despite being mentioned only once in the piece, has written thousands of words about the Loongson processor and even traveled to China to really break this story open for Microprocessor Report. His insight was invaluable and there is probably no one else in the West who has thought as much about what a homegrown family of MIPS-compatible CPUs could lead to – especially when it’s backed by the full might of the Chinese government.

If you live in California or Arizona and you have a south-facing roof, there is a startup – possibly even startups – who would like to meet you. Their goal is simple: stick solar panels on your roof at no cost (or virtually no cost) to you. Really.

Imagine a sci-fi future in which a clone of you is modified so that its free will is limited to acts that are morally sound. Now your behavior and thought patterns are compared to it in real time, and if you ever do anything the clone wouldn’t, the thought police swoop in and shut you down. That’s sort of what Microsoft’s new web security invention does, except for web apps.

Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped?
Scientific American

The oceanographers I interviewed for this piece were not kind to v1.0 of the Salter Sink as proposed in Salter’s first paper on the subject. They did want to see more research on it, however. I’m beginning to think that Intellectual Ventures’ policy of revealing its new inventions before papers on them have wound their way through peer review is a mistake.