I have always been in awe of the incredible acts of valor and selfless sacrifice our military are capable of. More recently, I have been puzzled—and have questioned—why there have been so few Medals of Honor awarded to our heroes who have continued to “distinguish themselves conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of their lives above and beyond the call of duty” in combat in...

Asus eBook Reader Amazon and Sony have their eBook readers. Now Asus wants a piece of the action with their cool looking device (from the Times Online – UK): Tech news: For the smarter kind of bookworm Asus, inventors of the netbook, is about to shake up the ebook world with the arrival of the world’s cheapest digital reader By ALEX PELL The world of ebooks is about to start a new chapter with the...

ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar says of the device: It’ll be “bigger than Facebook.” It grows: No real animals were hurt during the filming! When I’m an old codger I expect a relational robot will watch over me; he’ll be my friend, bring me my pills, take my blood pressure and call 911 in an emergency. Pishevar’s TechCrunch visit was in reaction to being dissed by Michael Arrington...

I very nearly didn’t write this column, given some of the recent partisan acrimony over web voices who would never utter a word regarding the Obama administration being wrong about anything or acknowledge that a Republican could ever have a good idea, but I refuse to play that game. While there has been precious little to praise the President over on the domestic front, when he does something right I like...

Is it time to, “completely forget the classic Left-Right dichotomy and apply what we’ve discovered about left- and right-handers to today’s problems?” In this tongue-in-cheek article from Frederico Bastiao of Portugal’s Jornal de Negocios, a completely new way of addressing the world’s problems needs to be considered. For the Jornal de Negocios, Frederico Bastiao writes...

David Hume Kennerly sees fakery: The Sept. 14th Newsweek cover line — “Is Your Baby Racist?” — should have included a sub-head, “Is Dick Cheney a Butcher?” Featured inside the magazine was a full-page, stand-alone picture of former Vice President Dick Cheney, knife in hand, leaning over a bloody carving board. Newsweek used it to illustrate a quote that he made about C.I.A. interrogators. By linking...

After bitterly contesting the case, a British oil trading giant has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades, reports The Independent. The Western world has shown remarkable tolerance towards economic/business/environmental/political criminals, while...

A beer cooler as part of a successful scientific mission in Outer Space — returning photos no less? Not a joke, but for real. It’s a story that shows how young, enterprising scientific thinking and MIT rock. Details here.

Ever since the collapse of the mighty Soviet Union, the doomsayers are having field day predicting the break-up of India and Pakistan. Last year, a leading Russian political analyst stated that the economic turmoil in the USA had confirmed his long-held view that the country would divide into separate parts. Cashing on this phobia, Slate offered last month a “week-long thought experiment” on “the...

As I wrote yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates planned to address the Air Force Association (AFA) today. U.S. News & World Report compared Gates’ appearance at the AFA, an association “made up in part of retired pilots and Air Force brass who were shocked when Gates last year fired the Air Force secretary and chief of staff over reports of a nuclear mishap,” and who were further shocked...

People who read “hard sci-fi” or who paid attention in their basic Physics class (assuming they were even required to take one, sigh…) are aware of the concept of magentic monopoles. If they exist, they would be similar in behavior to the proton and electron, the electric monopoles for positive and negative charge respectively. In other words, there would be a “north pole” particle...

I’m surprised to read that Pew finds the Internet has actually shifted more power to the educated, well-to-do citizens already engaged in the political process: In a survey conducted in late August 2008, Pew found that only 8 percent of people with a household income of less than $20,000 had participated in two or more online political activities—emailing their representatives, donating money through...

In April of this year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates recommended several military budgetary cuts, including for the production of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet to stop at 187 aircraft, which means that only four more F-22s will be produced. It was a move that drew a firestorm of criticism from Congress, the military, the military aerospace industry and the military aerospace community. The move, however, wasn’t...

Guest post by Jonathan Powers Jon Powers is the Chief Operating Officer of the Truman National Security Project. He is a veteran of the Gulf War and the founder of War Kids Relief. He was previously Veterans Program Director at the Eleison Group, where he worked on outreach efforts by the progressive community to veterans and military families. This post, co-written with Jon Soltz, was originally published at...

Announced today at the TechCrunch50, a new visual way to display Google News: The name “Fast Flip” comes from the idea that with this visual look, you can easily flip through the news. If you find an article you like that looks interesting, you click through to read it, if not, just flip left or right to go to another. And it is fast. Really fast. If you do like an article, there is a “like” button,...

His name may not have been as well known as some others but Borlaug, who died this past Saturday at the age of 95, was quite probably one of the most important figures of the 20th century. He was called the father of the Green Revolution, a sweeping transformation of agriculture that occurred during the middle part of the century. Perhaps his most famous achievement was the development of dwarf wheat, a special...

How I use RSS. RSS is too slow. RSS is dead. No it’s not. Rest in peace. RSS is alive and well. We’re seeing the rise of the real-time web. I’m reminded that back in the day I had a small spat with Fred Wilson when he said Email is dead. And I said no it’s not. I felt vindicated this week when Wilson implored, Don’t forget about email. Indeed, everything old is new again and many...

As we have been seeing for months, when it comes to provisioning the population with health care, the behavior of U.S. Republicans is far more incomprehensible to Europeans than even for most U.S. Democrats. According to columnist David Francis of Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland, President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress on health care came close to sealing the deal while exposing...

Andrew Sullivan: [Alan Turing] was one of the greatest minds of modern time, a founding father of computer science, and his legendary breaking of the Enigma Code may have been a tipping point in the struggle against Nazism. Few men have contributed so much to human learning or to his country’s survival. But Turing was persecuted into suicide by the homophobia of his time and barred from entering the US...

I want to take a breather for a couple of minutes from bashing Joe Wilson and other stupid Republican claims about our health care legislation and discuss a condition that has bothered me the past several months. For no apparent reason my brain insists I sleep 10 to 12 hours a day. Anything short of that, I feel like I’m hungover but I don’t drink booze. Furthermore, less than that amount of sleep...

Rogue proteins spread prion diseases all by themselves — Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice. —

Guest post by Frankie Sturm Frankie Sturm is communications director at the Truman National Security Project and a free-lance journalist. The debate over climate change and energy legislation is becoming a debate over America’s national security. And this is just where the debate belongs. As nearly 150 veterans gear up to visit Washington to ask their senators to take serious action on climate change,...

India’s favourite spiritual book, The Bhagavad Gita, has made a dramatic impact at Harvard, Wharton and other business schools with its universal message of “concentration, consistency, and cooperation”. In a nutshell: “You can’t succeed in business (or war) unless you develop the intellect, which controls the mind and body.” The Gita remains relevant in the conduct of any...

My wife and I bought a GameBoy for our son when he was in his early teens, some fifteen years ago or so. Phil is out of the house. But the GameBoy has remained with us and is far from being exiled to the Island of Unwanted Toys. Many a night while watching the evening news or catching something else on the tube, my wife and I play Tetris. Now, comes evidence that this addictive game “may boost the size...

Three British Muslims were convicted yesterday of plotting to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” by blowing up transatlantic airliners in an attempt to kill thousands of people in the air and on the ground, reports The Independent. “Last night, senior Scotland Yard detectives told The Independent that, if the plot had been successful, the death toll could easily have exceeded the...