• NASA announces asteroid grand challenge

  NASA announced Tuesday a Grand Challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them. The challenge is a large-scale effort that will use multi-disciplinary collaborations and a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia, and citizen scientists. It complements NASA’s recently announced mission [...]

• Google calls for greater transparency and challenges surveillance gag order

  Google has called on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Tuesday to relax its gag order on tech companies targeted in U.S. security investigations, The Guardian reports. The legal filing cites the first amendment’s guarantee of free speech and follows on from a letter to attorney general Eric Holder asking for permission to disclose the [...]

• METI: should we be shouting at the cosmos?

  Science fiction writer and astrophysicist Dr. David Brin is not happy with the Lone Signal announcement of METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) “beams” to the Gliese 526 solar system. In his Brinstorming Science 2.0 blog, Brin updated his 2006 article on METI (aka active SETI), quoting Carl Sagan, who called it “deeply unwise and immature.” [...]

• New step towards silicon-based quantum computer

  Researchers at the University of New South Wales have proposed a new way to distinguish between quantum bits that are placed only a few nanometers apart in a silicon chip, taking them a step closer to the construction of a large-scale quantum computer. Quantum bits, or qubits, are the basic building blocks of quantum computers [...]

• New fluorescent protein from eel revolutionizes key clinical assay

  Unagi, the sea-going Japanese freshwater eel, harbors a fluorescent protein that could serve as the basis for a revolutionary new clinical test for bilirubin, a critical indicator of human liver function, hemolysis, and jaundice, according to researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. Best known as a culinary delicacy in Japan, the freshwater eel Unagi [...]

Although some visitors to the site may be of Scottish extraction, I am assuming that in some cases, their distance from the land of their forebears has meant that their ability to understand the language has been diluted by the miles and the years! So here are just a few of the terms and words used on the site and in the area.

Since 1978, the nonprofit Freedom From Religion Foundation has been working to keep state and church separate and to educate the public about the views of nontheists. Members include freethinkers from all 50 states, Canada, and other countries. The Foundation monitors abuses of the separation of state and church, taking lawsuits and officially complaining about such abuses.

This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

MIThril, the next generation research platform for context aware wearable computing.

The Tesseract, a look into 4-dimensional space

The Living Universe Foundation seeks to preserve the ecology of the Earth while colonizing the oceans and outer space, all as part of humanity's attaining its highest possible scientific, humanitarian, and aesthetic development.

list of prefixes from latin and greek that can be used to form new words.

The Hermetic Library is the creation of Al Billings and is his attempt to find a place to host his creations and those of others that would not otherwise be available. These creations are, by and large, of a spiritual focus but not the areas of spirituality that you will generally see within the mainstream of American culture.

The largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do.

People are picking and choosing their religious ideals and beliefs from a variety of religions, customizing their own personal belief system, - resulting in what he terms "designer religion."