It’s sometimes hard to determine the REAL cost of things.
The United States has the world’s highest rate of jail incarceration, perhaps because the private the private prisons springing up across the country provide local jobs. But if the prison population shrank to what it was twenty years ago, we could spend more money PREVENTING crime, rather than guarding convicted criminals.
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Who gets the blame?
Fully driverless cars are years away, but car manufacturers think they’ll be in showrooms by 2020, and insurance agencies and lawyers want to be prepared. So far, only California, Nevada and Florida have passed laws about this. It’s preferable for these laws to be put through at the Federal level, to avoid a patchwork of different state laws. If you had an accident while "driving" your self-propelled car in the wrong state, would you program it to leave the scene and cross the next state line? Special licenses for driverless cars are likely to be implemented in many states.
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For the last ten years, theoretical physicists have shown that the intense connections generated between particles as established in the quantum law of "entanglement" may hold the key to eventual teleportation of quantum information–and human beings?
Once considered impossible, in 1993 a team of scientists calculated that teleportation could work in principle using quantum laws. Quantum teleportation harnesses the "entanglement" law to transmit particle-sized bites of information across potentially vast distances in an instant.
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At least our genes are. The Nature website reports that establishing the age of each mutation in contemporary human populations is important to fully understand our evolutionary history and will help to us to develop new medicines for diseases caused by genes.
Many of these mutations have only recently arisen–approximately 73% of all of them (and 86% of the ones that cause disease) have arisen in the past 5,000-10,000 years, which sounds like a long time, but is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
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