On:

In 1998, Whitley Strieber had never heard about climate change, but the Master of the Key burst into his hotel room in Toronto and told him all about it (The NEW, revised edition of The Key, with a foreword that talks about how many of his statements later turned out to be true, will be in bookstores May 12). When it comes to climate change, one of the things we OUGHT to be worrying about is where we can grow food in the future because just like people, plants experience stress.
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On:

Yes, there are problems with cell phones, but there is GOOD news too: A new brain-control interface lets paraplegics make calls just by THINKING of the number. And after a brief training period, these people probably dial fewer wrong numbers than the rest of us do. It could also be the ultimate hands-free technology for people who want to, for example, text or talk while driving.
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On:

Perhaps we could have killed Osama bin-Laden with a drone, but since he rarely left his compound, our soldiers had to go in and get him instead. In Whitley’s new novel Hybrids, he writes about machine-men who are engineered to be soldiers. The US seems pretty complacent about using drones for warfare, but the UK isn’t quite so sanguine about it: They think that growing use of unmanned aircraft in combat situations raises huge moral and legal issues. They also worry that wars will become more common once armed robots take over the fighting.
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On:

A large mass of cold air is moving out of the northwest and will cross the midsection of the United States and Canada later this week. This cold air mass will collide with another surge of warm, humid air moving up from the Gulf of Mexico, with the result that there could once again be a substantial development of storms. There is no way to tell in advance if the number and intensity of storms will reach levels seen recently, but there are likely to be a number of days late this week with severe weather alerts in the southern plains and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. If this activity develops, it will move across the mid-Atlantic states, and possibly down into the southeast. It may also bring much-needed rain to parts of Texas–hopefully without accompanying violent storms. read more