The biggest and fastest growing threat to humanity is disease and religion (including anti-human greens). Think 12 monkeys or "The White Plague" (frank herbert).

in 2011 a researcher invented a flu strain with human mortality of probably about 50%. A small number of motivated nut jobs, perhaps even a single person with a couple of million dollars could probably replicate this with far less visibility than for example nuclear weapons programs. There are a large number of highly educated people in the world who would like to wipe or cut down the human population by a large degree.

Even a worst case global nuclear war is unlikely to kill so many. There is nowhere on the planet more than 2 days travel away. Nowhere to hide, and no means of preventing such a thing coming to pass if released in a mobile 1st world population centre with millions of motivated individuals desperate to escape an epidemic.

Marianas trench is 11km deep. A neutrally bouyant gun barrel inclined at about 20 gives a barrel length of 30km and is relatively cheap to build (a couple of billion for a few meters diameter).

If you immerse the astronauts in water (body hugging 'bath') they can easily withstand 10-20g for 15-30 seconds. That gives you 2.5-3.5km/s muzzle velocity, and a relatively simple rocket to prvodie the additional 5-6km/s - similar to current rocket second stages.

The gun can also be used at higher g to launch inert payload to orbital speeds without less rocket propulsion.

Guns are ok for lower speeds (up to perhaps 2-3km/s) but ram - accelrators are better than light gas guns for higher speeds.

Leaked figure from IPCC AR5 report shows just how far off even updated IPCC model predictions are:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/ipcc_ar5_draft_fig1-4_with.png
note that the grey bands are nothing more than an attempt at IPCC arse covering in light of failed predictions, the temps are consistently riding the low side and even outside of the coloured prediction bands, and most importantly the temperature trend is much much lower than predicted.

The IPCC's models are massively over estimating the impact of increased CO2 - unsurprising when they assume large positive water vapour feedback that don't appear to operate as they assume in practice, and temperature suppressing aerosol impacts that appear to have been overestimated too. They also don't have the capacity to model other dominating effects (like PDO and AMO oceanic cycles, solar variations etc), and have shown no ability to model or explain historical variation covering a 3 C band during the current interglacial - including eras like the Medieval, Roman and Minoan warm period and the little ice age.

An honest question: how many years of no temperature rise would it take for the catastrophic CAGW thesis to be rejected? We've had about 15 years of near stasis, and recent results show that the heat isn't 'hiding' in the ocean - it simply doesn't exist, though CO2 continues to rise. So just how many more years are needed for the IPCC to let go of the millenialist thermageddon fantasy and bring the temperature rise predictions back to a more realistic level (seems likely to be about 1-2C rise for a CO2 doubling).

So Current costs in France: $6500/kW installed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants
Current cost in China $2000kW (using latest AP1000 design), targeting $1000/kW in near future. Which is why China is going to dominate the global nuclear industry. The cost reductions enabled by building large numbers of plants of the same/similar design are huge.

The changing tides on the moon are month long solar tides due to the moon being tidally locked to the earth. And the smaller diameter of the moon means that even those tides will be weaker, tidal accelerations being proportional to the distance from the centre of mass cubed.

recent data doesn't show any increase in rate of sea level rise:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
looking at the decadal rate of increase it has actually been falling off for last 5 years:
http://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/sea_level_rise_fig1.jpg
doesn't appear to be any significant alteration in rate of rise over last 100 years, rate of rise in 30's-60's was about the same as current:
http://www.oceanclimatechange.org.au/content/images/uploads/2012_sea_level_fig1.jpg

A rather big factor that needs to be taken into account is that since the 1950's there has been a massive amount of ground water abstraction for agriculture that is estimated to contribute something like 0.4-0.8mm/year to sea level rise (15-25% of total).
http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2012/05/120531-groundwater-depletion-may-accelerate-sea-level-rise/

Richard Muller was never a skeptic, but is a publicity hungry showman. He claimed he was a skeptic so that he could stage a road-to-Damascus style conversion that would play well in the media. Eg check out this interview from 2008: http://grist.org/article/lets-get-physical/

"The bottom line is that there is a consensus — the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] — and the president needs to know what the IPCC says. Second, they say that most of the warming of the last 50 years is probably due to humans. You need to know that this is from carbon dioxide, and you need to understand which technologies can reduce this and which can’t."

He was critical of Mann's woefully poor hockey-stick analysis just as all scientists and statisticians are, though at least he made those critical comments in public (where most scientists were too afraid of fall-out)

That said his work on BEST (reanalysis of historical global temperatures) is decent science.

Kourou vs Canaveral gains typically about 2% payload. For a $100 million dollar launch that is worth nearly $2million. Not a big deal if you are a US company, but given Europe's lack of alternatives it is definitely the place to be for Arianespace

Instead of developing Ariane 6 Arianspace could just buy up 51% of SpaceX after their IPO - then they can mostly do what they want with it.

Once we start building small black holes stars won't matter. You can get 100 times as much energy (hawking Radiation) out of a micro-black hole for the same amount of matter consumed as from complete fusion of hydrogen into iron. That hawking radiation can be collected and used to make new matter of any type that might be wanted - you can even recycle iron into hydrogen.

This will allow life to survive for many trillions of years even as the universe gradually goes dark.

Just need to build a monster converging gamma-ray laser black-hole maker and start spitting out those micro-black holes.

It is sad though to think of all that will be lost - eg all this effort to preserve tigers or whales is ultimately pointless.

Shuttle cost $209 billion over it's life, 134 missions. $1.6 billion per flight.
http://www.space.com/12166-space-shuttle-program-cost-promises-209-billion.html
So more like $200 million per Astronaut on Shuttle.

Russia sells flights to ISS for ~$50 million (Sarah Brightman), though used to be cheaper ($20 million for Mark Shuttleworth).
SpaceX is targeting $20 million per person for its Dragon Capsule

The best explanations for the Flynn effect appear to be improved nutrition and lessened childhood disease. Something like 80% of a babies metabolic output goes into brain function (20% for an adult). So any severe sickness or deficiencies in diet at a young age will always produce a negative impact on brain development (creating a bulge on stupid side of bell curve). The West has mostly wiped out serious childhood disease and famine creating a significant boost compared to places where things like Malaria and poor food and nutritional deficiencies still kill or negatively impact the development of huge numbers of babies.

Also intelligence is correlated weakly with brain size, and bigger people have bigger brains (anecdotally I found it very noticeable in STEM subjects at University how many tall and therefore bigger-brained men and women there were). The average size of humans has increased markedly during the last 100 years with better food availability (eg 5-10cm taller in China in last 30 years).

The genetically determined (Nature over Nurture) aspect of intelligence is contrary to the ideal of the improvable man - but unfortunately it does turn out that genetics dominates Intelligence, with something like .75 correlation between twins even if raised separately. IQ statistics and correlations are very strong and very clear and can be used to predict (with accuracy) a wide range of things about the behaviours and attainments of genetically differentiated groups groups in our society.

This does not go down well in politics or the humanities and has been decried by apologists such as Stephen J Gould. It is OK to recognise genetic differences if they are positive, such as hugely superior athletic ability of West Africans that dominate most sports they participate in, but do not mention average academic outcomes - or find factors other than genetics to blame.

Some of the interesting results of this strong tendency towards genetic determination of IQ are that you get regression to mean (smart parents tend to have slightly dumber children, but stupid parents tend to have slightly smarter children) leading to identifiable trends such as smart first generation immigrants who managed to get to the West then having children who are less talented. And also that your chances of being a genius are massively higher if you come from certain cold climate populations where survival appears to have hinged on non-violent economic competition (han chinese, ashkenazic jew), and massively lower if you come from other hot-climate gene-pools that appear to have placed greater emphasis on disease resistance and athletic/verbal/physical ability in benign climates with frequent warefare. This results in a very large difference of something like 2-3 standard deviations between the Ashkanazic Jews and some of the hot climate gene pools. Which is why given the nature of the tails of the bell-curve the Ashkanazic's are so massively over-represented in elite attainments (nobels etc) and hot climate gene-pools almost invisible. Again this is not popular or politically correct but is nonetheless real and is demonstrates the reality of IQ or 'G' even without needing to devise a test for it - relative differences in group IQ and the bell curve can be elegantly inferred simply from the proportions of individuals in various professions.

So sadly it appears that genes do determine IQ to a large extent, but selective breeding can change average IQ by up to 15 points within a few generations (ashkenazic jews had nearly identical genes to the local population wherever they lived, and yet were on average almost a standard deviation smarter). If we wanted to we could probably eliminate IQ differences between groups within a generation or two using Gatacca style technology.

4 times higher resolution than James Webb, 12 times the light collecting area, 10% of the cost.

Space telescopes are only sensible for the sections of the spectrum the earth-bound just can't do.

It would require a trivial amount of water on a global scale. Total world fuel consumption is about 90 million barrels a day = 12million tonnes. Hydrogen equivalent would be 4 million tonnes, requiring 36 million tonnes of water. which is about half an hour of of flow from the mississippi.

The big issue is where does the energy come from. Nuclear is the only sensible answer,

... Out of a large one.

Alan Gibbs is a kiwi rich-lister who is monomaniacal about amphibious vehicles - typical for otherwise uncreative people who think they have had a good idea. Most engineers I know probably have a more viable commercial idea every month or two.

He has squandered probably in the region of $100 million on developing amphibious vehicles, but to date the world has yawned, because there is almost no one who could or would actually have a use for such an expensive and high maintenance folly with compromised performance on both land and water.