All termite jokes aside, this could have applications where disposability is a criterion. Those animated greeting cards could now be more annoying than ever before.

I lived in Phoenix for over thirty years. Everybody there has refrigeration, and in June when the temperature hits 50C, about the maximum, the humidity is below 10%. By mid-July is gets more humid as the weather pattern shifts from the dry westerlies to Gulf air from the southeast, but the temperature plummets to 40C and the humidity never goes over about 30%, with clouds and thunder (not always rain) every afternoon.

Now imagine the temperature at 50C with 60% humidity, and no A/C. And it's not monsoon yet, so no cooling storms.

We have already done aerobraking on Mars, both for orbiters and landers.

As soon as you stop calling yourself an expert on space development.

The first colonists will live underground, to be sure, but the big problem with radiation is going to be on the trip up there. There is going to have to be some meeting-in-the-middle of shielding vs a generated magnetic field.

As they call it, intelligently designing the search results.

" If licenses weren't numbered, the proliferation of taxis would render city streets unnavigable. "

Gee, if loaves of bread were not serially numbered and limited in supply by the Bread Commission, bakers would produce an infinite amount of it, clogging every city street with baked grains.

Mann is somewhat of an outlier, but I don't see Gleick and Hansen pushing to strip dissenters of their credentials and their jobs. I also don't see them writing off every proposed solution and insisting that only a Stone Age existence will satisfy the climate god.

Ah yes, the problem of lame science fair projects.

No, it's not because our kids are not as intelligent as they used to be. It's because chemistry sets no longer contain actual chemicals, and the nuclear kits kids used to be able to experiment with back in the Fifties are longer available at all. Your bright child will now be channeled into law school, to play his/her rightful part in the dismantling of Western civilization.

Handwaves ("dark matter") and faddism exist in many disciplines, but what the article focuses on is biomedicine. Perhaps it's time to supplement those crappy, glacier-slow double blind medical studies with something that makes better use of the incredible data processing resources available to us in the new century. Let's develop a supercomputer model of human biology detailed enough that we can test large numbers of pharma possibilities against it. This would enable us to zero in on cures a lot faster and respond to epidemiological emergencies like the Ebola crisis in a more timely manner.

Can we hope for a Moore's law in medicine?

"Your post hurts Michael Mann's feelings..."

There's no need to mod it down. Mann will sue your ass off, an innovation he has personally added to the scientific method.

But note that the climate screamers and shamers are not the scientists themselves but political activists acting on what they think are the scientists' findings.

The left decided that a species that wouldn't accept Marxism is a species that doesn't deserve to exist at all, so not only are they pulling for any any apocalypse that could eliminate H. sapiens from the sacred Environment, but they automatically come out against any solution that may be suggested for such an apocalypse.

Unless it was a pressure cooker running Linux.

No, I prefer to think we're seeing a peaceful instance of Dyson sphere construction. Years from now this object will show up on the patrol scans as a vanilla-looking cool red giant.

"Get some Huawei developers work on this, and they'll reduce this patch to 64 bytes."
And the hardened, high-capacity espionage backdoor channel to the PLA will serve mankind well should a solar flare takes out our primary communications channel with Curiosity.