Just so happened that I read this today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass
These guys think they are smart. That if other smart people are put in charge, their ability (if they actually possesses it) would be recognized and rewarded. But if their innovation disturbs the power of elites that they are proposing to put on top, whom they think will grand them reward for innovation, they are reading history (if they have read history) wrong.

Seriously. If you imagine that you will come out on top when your competition in a job interview is a noticeably lesser-able, but probably competent, son of the CEO, you got to examine your understanding of human society.

In fact, because he is a member of the National Academy of Science, he could publish paper on PNAS (Proceeding of the NAS) without much peer review (or find sympathetic scientists to review his paper). In the old day, there was an honor system with respect to publishing in PNAS that the author should get their paper properly peer-reviewed. Pauling submitted a series of very shoddy vitamin studies to the PNAS and as a result, he single handedly changed this policy and now makes publishing to PNAS a lot more rigorous. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/02/18/vitamin-c-and-cancer-has-linus-pauling-b/

But what did she do? What is the underlying science/technology? The NBC report got nothing. Click-through to Intel's website for the competition did not immediately yield any more information, except an inspirational paragraph about her:

Will be doing some more Googling, but seriously, a link to the lab in which she worked or article/abstract published would be nice. Surely these are gifted kids, but I can't help but think the reporter really doesn't understand what she's done to write any thing more than a press release.

It is not going to stop that. But the additional work required to do that means only enthusiast (like yourself, perhaps?) will go out of his/her own way to own one. Creating sufficient friction for entrance is often enough to protect established players from competition. It also gives politicians an excuse to say: I am not against your freedom to buy a Tesla, I am just for a little more freedom for our local, lovable, car dealerships. FREEDOM!

Like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdpGd74DrBM

Never underestimate what people are willing to go through (on any device) to mask the cognitive dissonant that the latest precious they just bought does not justify its price or hype. The effort people go through to justify the sunk cost, both in economy and psychology.

It seems someone at Apple is reading xkcd: http://what-if.xkcd.com/10/
And all those distorted map image makes sense once you realized Apple is mapping our dreams, Inception style.

Something wrong with the 'y' key on your keyboard?

Even more to the point, there are multiple methods of measuring the age of the universe. Some more precise than other; Some more accurate than other. They are not in huge contradiction with each other, certainly no where near the ridiculus claims religion is making. http://astro.berkeley.edu/~dperley/univage/univage.html

People really needs to learn statistic and in addition to findings, reporter really need be able to report on the uncertainty of the findings.

I failed to google up the university's site. Reading similar reports in Chinese, it seems that Huai'An university is probably closer to what we call a trade school in the state. Students attends very career oriented majors: accounting, education, law, management and there is no research faculty (I wouldn't be surprise if most of the teacher does not hold PhD degrees).

that we manage to get an atheist state and a theocracy in bed with one other.

Nothing like a forbidden/unavailable product that fires people up. In fact, a few of my friends are already discussing going to Oregan (no sale tax) to grab the new generation of iphone when it comes out and fly back to HK/China/TW with them to make enough profit to cover the said flight because Apple generally releases its phones later in Asia.

The difference is as follow: in proper scientific papers and textbooks, the said gravitationally collapsed objects are actually called "blackhole". It is not a term exclusively for layman. Physicists are actually very good at naming important things (unlike in biology and medicine): black hole, dark matter, dark energy, red dwarf, photon, etc. Only when things become hardly distinguishable that physicists give them boring names: muon, tauon, pion, etc. Unless "god" actually can convey some distinguishing physical properties, it is not suited for a physics name.

The same reason when a cancer patient manage to live well pass the X months diagnosed by his physician, thanks god, instead of blaming the doctor, or better yet, learn some damn statistics.

Instead of thinking G+ as a Facebook clone/competition, I like to think of it as a replacement of iGoogle, Google's attempt at a personalized home page and portal to all Google's services, now the "social" element. Considering how bad iGoogle used to be, I would say G+ is a great success at replacing it. The interface is so much cleaner now.