And that would be because paralyzed people are less human or less valuable? How about practicing and perfecting it on rats first, then higher animals?

Actually, computers and the internet, etc. do follow the laws of nature, quite well. Technically speaking, everything we do follows the law of nature, otherwise it would be miraculous. That said, it still doesn't address the morality of the issue.

Because it's not really about building sustainable plants, but avoiding US taxes. If you're going to build a new plant, it's not significantly more expensive than a regular one. It's not about saving the planet, it's about seeking tax shelters.

If the universe always existed, then we don't know that entropy is always increasing. Maybe the universe always existed, but there is some mechanism that causes entropy to cycle between increasing and decreasing? Who knows? OTOH, this is just a hypothesis and has yet to be accepted.

Isn't this just a rehashing of the steady state theory of the universe?

Nothing. As accepted, currently, time began with the Big Bang, so there was no before the Big Bang.

But wait, girls excel at math and science according to test scores in elementary schools, so it must be the teacher's fault that by high school and college they drop from it. Of course it couldn't have anything to do with a culture that hypersexualizes young women. Look at the upcoming 50 Shades movie. Obviously, a young woman can't be complete and productive unless she is first an object of desire.

If you want more women in science and math, you need to change the culture that tells them that their primary role is of being an object. That's not the school system, but the media. As long as the media emphasizes cleavage over brains, the problem will continue to exist. But go ahead and blame the schools, we'll pour lots of money into fixing the problem, but since it is the wrong problem, nothing will change.

Technically, it is, because it is a resource. But usually when speaking of economic cost, the focus is on lowering the cost of production. In this case, water is a resource for production, but the focus is usually on the price of the water, not on the impact to the surrounding communities that might be impacted by using it for fuel production.

This is not restricted to bio-fuels. We see it all the time, usually, though it is more likely to be an issue of damming some river for tourism purposes at the expense of downstream agriculture needs.

There are more costs than economic ones to consider. Making ethanol uses vast amounts of water -- water that is then not available for other uses. If they could find a way to do it with, say, sea water, that would be one thing, but in the Midwest, where much of the production is, water is becoming a scarce resource.

Actually, it is a 3d printed evaporation cooler (swamp cooler). The "technology" has been around since ancient times. In hot, dry climates, soaking a porous object in water and letting it evaporate cools the air around it. The larger the object, the greater the effect. What's new here is using a 3d printer to create the substrate. Whether that substrate is more efficient than clay or cloth (the two most common substrates), is yet to be seen. In the US, there is limited locales that this could be used, such as the southwest. However, in many parts of the world, this could work wonders. Would it cool as much as modern air conditioner? No, but it would still cool.

Why should I hold your opinion on something outside your field of expertise in higher esteem just because you are an engineer? My neighbor down the street may be just as well read on the subject, but may be a mechanic, but you posit that your opinion is more valuable to society because you are a scientist/engineer? I would assume, you have empirical data to support that premise.

I go to my doctor when I am sick. If I needed advice about nuclear engineering, I'd go to a nuclear engineer. Likewise, for other fields. But no matter how well read a nuclear engineer may be on various medical texts, I'm not going to rely on his unprofessional opinion, when I am sick. Likewise, outside one's field of expertise, our opinions are just as unprofessional as neighbor down the street and should carry as much weight.

This is nothing new. 100 years ago, in small communities, the doctor or the preacher was the most learned person so the community deferred to them for all sorts of decisions. Often, their advice was wrong and led to all sorts of negative outcomes. Why? Because those doctors and preachers were learned, but they weren't often qualified in the areas they were being asked to advise on. Likewise today's scientists and engineers may be more learned than the population as a whole, but that doesn't make us any more qualified outside our fields than anybody else. To think otherwise is just arrogance.

Of course that is assuming that those vast tracts of fertile land would be used to help feed the worlds growing population. Prior to be used to produce biofuel, much of that fertile land was not used for this purpose, so the question for the think-tank would be "Why do they suppose it would be now?"

Coding as the new literacy is putting the cart before the horse. To be able to code, one needs critical thinking skills. They need to understand logic (and not just AND OR NOT, but real logic). Those are the skills required for the new literacy. Coding is just one way those skills can be applied, but it does not make one literate, any more than strumming a few chords on a guitar makes one a musician. It is the underlying skills and understanding that makes one a musician and likewise, makes one literate.

If you put enough chimpanzees in front of enough computers, eventually they will bang out all of the code for any piece of software. That doesn't make them literate. If you want people to be literate, they need to be productive and able to contribute to society. In the 21st century, this means teaching them critical thinking skills and logic, then they will be literate in whatever field they chose.

This could be said about any programming language. Back in my university days (we still had keypunch machines, then), I had a professor state that you could write just about anything in any language. For instance, you could write a banking app in FORTRAN or a program to calculate the trajectory to the moon in COBOL, but in the end, you should use the best tool suited for the job.

So, yes, Pascal can't do anything that C++, Python or Java can't do; that's not the point. Is Pascal better suited to some tasks than those languages? That is what the OP is really asking.

An modern auto plant turns out a vehicle approximately once every minute. These vehicles tax 44 hours per unit. The US alone purchases 16M vehicles/year. How will this ever be competitive?

Of course if one reads the article, they are mainly looking at this for prototyping vehicles, particularly military ones, but not the actual production of vehicles. So in short, this is about using 3D printing to prototype something before going to full production. Haven't we been doing that since the 1970s?