Brian Gongol
More cell printing by inkjet printer
This is going to be one of the key breakthrough medical technologies of the next 10 to 15 years, and if our lawmakers don't know their science, we could face some bad unintended consequences
Chicago Tribune endorses Mitt Romney
US Senator pushes "Startup Act"
Things to like about the proposed law: Efforts to reduce regulatory burdens, an increase in the immigration limits for people with advanced degrees in science and technology, and reforms to Sarbanes-Oxley. Things not to love so much: Lots of special tax breaks for startup businesses. We all want our taxes to be lower than they are, but cutting special deals is what gets us into the absurdly-complex and utterly stupid tax code that we have today. Nobody deserves a special break; just make the corporate tax code simple and fair for all. One other worry: That people will get the idea that startups all have to be Internet-based service companies. Sure, there are lots of great ideas that make sense to deliver online, but we need a lot of other non-Web businesses, too.
The Milky Way over a thunderstorm
It's too easy to forget to look up into the night sky sometimes
South Korean scientists are going to try to clone a wooly mammoth
There's some leftover bone marrow from a long-dead mammoth that's been recovered in Russia
Self-diagnosis depends on how the symptoms are listed
People turn to the Internet for a lot of help with self-diagnosis of medical conditions. If it means they go in to get serious problems checked, then it's a good thing. If they're only using it to feed paranoia, then it's harmful. Some research by psychologists at Arizona State University finds that the best way to list symptoms alternates between specific ones and broader ones -- the specific ones help winnow out people who are too quick to think they're dying of something awful; the broad ones give people who are too casual about their health cause to think again and check into their health.
