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Commentary invited by editors of Scientific American
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    The editors of Scientific American regularly encounter perspectives on science and technology that we believe our readers would find thought-provoking, fascinating, debatable and challenging. The guest blog is a forum for such opinions. The views expressed belong to the author and are not necessarily shared by Scientific American.

  • The Future of Computers

    With much progress being made in nanotechnology, the future of computers has two directions: nanotechnology and cells. Nanotechnology is the engineering of a system at the molecular scale. These processes are either “bottom-up” or “top-down”. “Bottom –up” is the construction at the atomic level one atom at a time while “top-down” is using precise tools [...]

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    M@h*(pOet)?ica—Circles, Part 3

    Are There Only 4 Dimensions?

    #StorySaturday is a Guest Blog weekend experiment in which we invite people to write about science in a different, unusual format – fiction, science fiction, lablit, personal story, fable, fairy tale, poetry, or comic strip. We hope you like it. ========================= Today’s lesson will start with something of mine that is so elementary I won’t [...]

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    Dedifferentiation—Turning Back the Cellular Clock

    “But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?” in “The Time [...]

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    The Most Stressful Science Problem

    Last week Forbes Magazine listed university professor as one of the top 10 least-stressful jobs. Academics, particularly scientists, were indignant and flooded Forbes with stories asserting stress levels that induce Einstein hair in a world that doesn’t appreciate their work. There are two sides to science: the deadlines, constant searches for funds, and long hours [...]

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    Saving Lives in Serenity: Can a Fanboy and Physics Change a Movie?

    I was late to Firefly. Nearly ten years after the show first aired and then was subsequently cancelled, I holed up in my room, coffee and external hard drive in hand, aiming to blaze through one of the most beloved sci-fi series. A mix of science fiction and “spaghetti-western” genres, Firefly was wonderful. It certainly [...]

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    The Origins of Directed Panspermia

    The Earth is beaming with life and yet there is no consensus on how life arose or what life is. The origin of life is “one of the great unsolved mysteries of science” (Crick, F. Life Itself).  While there is no accepted definition of life, most of us [humans] can easily discriminate the living from [...]

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    #OverlyHonestMethods, or #SoGladWe’reHavingThisConversation

    This Monday thousands of scientists contributed to the hashtag #OverlyHonestMethods, a collection of methodological descriptions that would never appear in a scientific publication: brazen confessions, sardonic resignations, gleeful editions of may-my-advisor-never-read-this. Most of the tweets react to the specialized and strange set of writing conventions that scientists must conform to in order to publish articles [...]

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    Paying with Plastic: Not Just for Credit Cards

    Plastic money. Source: Bank of Canada

    In 1966, five guys with a bunch of regular office supply store paper created hundreds of thousands of dollars in counterfeit $10 Australian bills. This, just weeks after Australia had introduced a new series of banknotes — what they had touted as their most advanced, most secure yet. The Royal Bank of Australia, stumped, made [...]

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    Go Go Gadget Eyes…and Brain

    Enhancing your level of vision on demand sounds like something out of a comic book. Superman, if you recall, had the power to turn his x-ray vision on and off like a light switch. So is x-ray vision possible? I’m sorry to say: no. The ability of our naked eyes to see through layers of [...]

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    11 Ways to Avoid Answering a Question: A Year in Review

    When my grandfather was alive, each of his children and grandchildren was responsible for reporting to him about the world in which they worked. He loved knowledge; he always had. As the only scientist in the family, I was in charge of “science.” This never quite seemed fair and yet I did what I could [...]

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