Yeah, as the OP said, there is a lot of concern about Putin's crackdown on human rights. Why, the rumor is that he is using the tax administration to harass opponents and that his chief Justice has grabbed phone records from news agencies that don't tow the line.

Fortunately, such things would never happen in the US.

I remember reading similar research in the 1980s. Biologist Remy Chauvin was observing rejuvenating effects of transfusions in animals and trying to generate interest for seriously studying and understanding the phenomenon. The ossified "scientific community" laughed him out of the room. He was very bitter about it because he knew he was up to something.

Even if this doesn't translate into a fountain of youth, this is still a major scientific breakthrough.

The Chinese government had grabbed the rare earth market by cutting down prices (yes, labor camps and lax pollution rules help). Then they restricted supply, attempting to force Western manufacturers to bring to China all productions of materials using rare earths. Within months, out-of-China RE production that was shut down because of cost resumed, and prices actually went down. It's all in this amusing article written by a guy who used to trade this stuff.

Some new study. It was "new" when it was first published in Science in 2001? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5520/1367.short

This is one of many papers showing that 1. The Mayan empire was subject to a series of droughts that finally offed them, and 2. That variations of solar activities caused these droughts.

It doesn't "suggest" anything, it forcibly affirms it with tons of data to accompany it.

Yup, the machine fell on its side. It wasn't ruined, just damaged. Fixing it wouldn't have been a huge project. That's what makes it unforgivable. Twenty years wasted.

The Delta Clipper (DC/X) performed the very same stunt back in the 90s: Take off and land on its rocket. That was 20 years ago.

The DC/X was a demonstrator of a single-stage-to-orbit project. It promised to bring down the cost of space flight by an order of magnitude and make the Space Shuttle obsolete.

It flew several times, achieving perfect flights, then was given to NASA. They "acccidentally" forgot to connect the hydraulic line that deployed on of the landing struts and the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing. And oh darn, they couldn't find the couple of millions needed to fix it.

This dangerous competitor to the shuttle was thus killed. The Shuttle program was safe. Whew.

Now that the Shuttle is no more, revolutionary concepts such as DC/X or its Xombie imitation might safely crawl out of the hole in which NASA had thrown them. Maybe.

The first rule of a bureaucracy is self-perpetuation. The fact that a bureaucracy is building space shuttles doesn't change its bureaucratic nature.

What do you do now?

You get your law school buddies on the phone. One of them knows alumni who are lobbying in DC. You get them to write a law making it illegal to dispense robot-assisted legal services. To, ya know, protect the public. Then you slip the law as an amendment into the Turnip Calibration and Uniformization Act of 2012, and important 450-page text regulating the color, texture, size and water content of turnip for sale in the US that will be passed at 3 AM during the electoral campaign, and that nobody will bother to touch, much less read.

If you think I am joking, look at the way the MAFIAA got artists to work for free: they slipped an amendment in the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999 that turns most new recordings into work-for-hire jobs where the studio owns the copyright.

The exact same thing happened when will-writing software started to appear. The call to ban was not very effective -- only family law practitioners were threatened, after all. But if you threaten the very income of trial lawyers, they'll be surprisingly effective at quashing the threat.

There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S., enough to power 600,000 homes.

This would mean that each home consumes 5 kW. That's really low. Most small houses have a 100 A panel if their stove is electric. 200 A panels are pretty common. The reality is closer to 10 kW.

For comparison, 3 GW is either three large gas or coal thermal plants, or 1.5 nuclear reactors.

Remember, on top of that, that you cannot store electricity unless your production is near a hydro dam -- you can then pump up water back into the dam as storage, at a 30 to 50% efficiency loss. So your 3GW solar plant need a load-following thermal or nuclear plant to absorb the loss when the sun hides or at night. You have to factor that in the cost. That adds $5 to $10 per watt.