Three-dimensional manufacturing is making something out of practically nothing. People are buying these printers at a rapid rate–one New York outlet that sells 3-D printers sold 15,000 of them last year.
But it won’t be that way for long: When "three-dimensional assemblers" become practical, they will be able to replicate themselves, eliminating shipping costs.
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Will life on Mars go the way of the dinosaurs before we have a chance to discover it? Incoming Comet C213/A1, discovered on January 1st, is expected by some astronomers to pass within 28,000 miles of Marsin 2014. But cometary trajectories change, and an impact is not impossible, although NASA estimates that the object will pass Mars at a distance more like 80,000 miles.
Should it hit the planet, it will cause a spectacular explosion, releasing the equivalent energy of billion megatons of TNT. This is roughly the size of the blast that climaxed the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
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The areas hit by Hurricane Sandy have mostly been rebuilt, but there is one dangerous problem still lurking there: MOLD. It’s erupting in fuzzy streaks of brown and black in flooded houses. Some of it could even be deadly if inhaled, but so far, there have been no cases of respiratory illness, so this type of mold may not be toxic.
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Americans tend to think that our IQ is a combination of the genes we were born with and the way we were educated, but the Chinese think that at least half of the variation in intelligence quotient, or IQ, is inherited. The average person’s IQ is 100. The average Nobel laureate’s IQ is 145.
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