Game Changer: LIQUID Water found on MARS

FTA: These globs were seen to apparently move and grow between snapshots, and 22 members of the Phoenix team, including principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson, think that this behavior combined with other Phoenix findings indicates that these blobs might have been liquid water that was splashed up onto the spacecraft as it landed.

Prepare to gloat. Evidence of life will not be far behind.

Film trailer for Kurzweil's "Transcendent Man"

For me, Kurzweil's money in the bank... up to a point. All prediction models break down past the singularity- yet he continues to make predictions about what will come after it. Now, all that being said, I think he's broadly right. We stand at the cusp of three major revolutions (see my post about Juan Enriquez) all of which are likely to break in the next ten to twenty years. Anyone of them could fundamentally change the world. All three of them definitely will.

What kind of world will our grandkids live in? To us, it will truly seem like magic- especially on the holodeck.

"We do have a bit of a situation."

This makes my heart warm and my anger rise all at once.

http://xkcd.com/154/

Darwinism

I understand this guys point... but I kinda feel like he's missing it, too. I mean, from my experience, the only people repeatedly using the term "Darwinism" are exactly the people who are TRYING to belittle the science. No self respecting biologist, anthropologist, geneticist, etc etc would ever use the word "Darwinism" to describe the science of what they do. It's the crazy nutters who believe the world is only 6,000 years old, our ancestors were chimpanzees and dinosaur bones were put in the ground by God, who call evolutionary science "Darwinism". At any rate, an interesting piece nonetheless.