The promise of 3-D printing is that we can generate any arbitrary shape at the push of a button, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize that auto-generating any arbitrary 3-D shape is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.

When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.

Books have a kind of usability that, for most people, isn’t about to be trumped by bourgeois concerns about portability: They are the only auto-playing, backwards-compatible to the dawn of the English language, entirely self-contained medium we have left.

The United Nations projects that we’re on track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050. Most of that growth will happen in the poorest countries on Earth.

Despite their poverty, those two billion people will add to the atmosphere at least three times the current greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S.

This fact alone has given the efforts to slow population growth new urgency…

…One radical solution to the problem is to leave most of the energy-containing stuff required to get a rocket into space on the ground. Ninety percent of the weight of a rocket on a launch pad is fuel, after all, leaving only a tiny sliver of usable mass left over for cargo.

…But biology happens for the precise reason that utopian nanotech can’t: The world of the ultrasmall is astonishingly violent. The surfaces of objects turn out to be seething frenzies of motion — atoms vibrating thousands of times a second, bonds forming and breaking. This energetic mess is what powers cellular machinery — but it blows apart anything humans engineer to do the same job.

Industry Challenges: The High Cost of Upholding Moore’s Law
A new leading-edge microchip fabrication facility, or fab, costs $3 billion to $5 billion…

China: A New Processor for a New Market
China represents a huge, and still largely untapped, market for computer makers: in a country of 1.3 billion people, only 40 million computers were bought in 2008, while the 300 million people living in the United States bought 66 million.

Technology Review

The original draft of this story included a discussion of Cooper’s Law, Shannon’s limit and the fact that 3/4 of a circle’s area lies outside an area delimited by half its radius. All of which explain why AT&T isn’t crazy to ask you to pay an extra $150 to make your smartphone’s 3G radio achieve data throughput better than a local WiFi network. But that was a bit much for a piece of this scale.

The real story here is Skyhook. They had a fleet of vans cruising the streets of the U.S., mapping wi-fi hotspots, back when Street View was just a glimmer in Sergey’s eye. Now they’re in every iPhone on the planet.

Worse: our food system is so dependent on fossil fuels that it’s entirely possible that it takes more oil to make the food that allows a person to walk a mile than would be expended in simply driving that mile.

This isn’t a result I expected when I started playing with the numbers, so it’s an object lesson in why it’s important to do the math.

Good’s editors came up with the idea for this one. It’s an interesting take on the problem of fuel efficiency – we all know smaller, lighter cars and the electrification of the drive train are the ultimate solution, but a certain amount of waste is inevitable. So: how can we recover it?

Thing that got left out of the piece: next-gen 4G networks will use transfer accelerators like fasp to do things you didn’t think were possible on mobile devices –- downloads faster than current broadband, for instance.

Sometimes a researcher is willing to talk about their work even before it’s peer reviewed. This can be tricky: whatever you think of peer review, papers are almost always better after experts have read them and demanded that they be revised. In this case I think it turned out all right, because Elliott is an especially smart scientist, and also I managed to catch him right after he’d presented his work at a meeting to 30 of the most knowledgeable researchers in his field.