# space
A study says that more of Mars than Earth should be hospitable to life. But the data on which this conclusion is based is incomplete.
# politics
R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens, 04.13.1949 - 12.15.2011
# science
It would be amazing for the LHC to find the Higgs boson. It would be even more interesting if it doesn't.
# tech
A disagreement between academic and industrial computer science is threatening to leave students in an educational no-man's land.
# space
How big are some supermassive black holes? Just trying to scale them down to numbers we can wrap our minds around is a challenge in and of itself.
# space
An Italian mathematician is trying to replace dark matter observation by playing with models of gravitational measurements.
# politics
The Arab Spring is not turning the Middle East into a hotbed of secularism. But given the history and demographics of the region, it would be strange to expect it to.
# politics
PROTECT IP and SOPA aren't just threatening to gut the internet under the guise of fighting piracy, they're giving cranks and quacks a powerful new weapon ripe for abuse against their critics.
# tech
Bitcoin is supposed to be a whole new way to manage money. But the humans handling it are still the same and falling into old habits with this new currency.
# space
Kepler-22b is now of the our best candidates for extraterrestrial life. But there are a lot of questions left to answer about this planet.
# oddities
Even a cursory glance at post-modernism shows that it's basically just trendy nonsense. Emphasis on nonsense.
# politics
Intelligent Design was a compromise no one wanted and the wrong answer to a question no one even asked.
# education
In computer science, a PhD offers fewer jobs for slightly more money and fewer opportunities for growth.
# tech
The problem with John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is that its premise is woefully outdated in computer science terms.
# tech
No, computers didn't predict the Arab Spring. Their vague outputs are just being sold as predictions after the fact.
