Cash-strapped General Motors Corp., which is still mulling what to do with its failing gas-guzzling Hummer Division, today showed its greener side when it unveiled Project PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), a compact, battery-operated two-wheeler for two that it's developing with Segway, Inc., maker of the upright electric lawn mower–like vehicle that debuted in 2002...
A new study from the Earth Institute at Columbia University says there’s more seismic activity around the Big Apple than previously thought. Researchers also say they discovered a new active fault line running from Stamford, Conn., 25 miles (40.2 kilometers) west toward the Hudson River...
Good-bye Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., whose resemblance to that other great American satirist, Mark Twain, is almost uncanny. And I believe his literary doppelganger would have enjoyed visiting the Vonnegutian universe populated by Kilgore Trout, Wanda June, Eliot Rosewater, Francine Pefko, Paul Proteus, Billy Pilgrim, Howard Campbell, Jr., the planet Tralfamadore, ice nine, granfalloons, foma, Illium, N.Y., and, of course, the lovely Montana Wildhack.Call him a pessimist, a stoic, or a dark and cranky curmudgeon, Vonnegut, like Twain, supplied what any self-satisfied civilization occasionally needs to keep it honest—a good thwacking from a brilliant satirist.And thwack he did...
After a two-month hiatus, I've finally found the time to pick up the thread on doubts about global warming and humans' role in it. In previous installments, people wrote in with the reasons why they were skeptical and I tried to synthesize the responses...
Since the whole South Korea stem-cell fiasco broke, there has been a lot of discussion about ethics in science. The discussion is certainly necessary, but it has a certain deja vu quality to it...