Science News

[Duke of Buckingham]

Why Don't Animals Get Schizophrenia (and How Come We Do)?
Research suggests an evolutionary link between the disorder and what makes us human
March 24, 2015 |By Bret Stetka


Though psychotic animals may exist, psychosis has never been observed outside of our own species; whereas depression, OCD, and anxiety traits have been reported in many non-human species.
Credit: IG_Royal/Thinkstock

Many of us have known a dog on Prozac. We've also witnessed the eye rolls that come with canine psychiatry. Doting pet owners—myself included—ascribe all sorts of questionable psychological ills to our pawed companions. But the science does suggest that numerous non-human species suffer from psychiatric symptoms. Birds obsess; horses on occasion get pathologically compulsive; dolphins and whales—especially those in captivity—self-mutilate. And that thing when your dog woefully watches you pull out of the driveway from the window—that might be DSM-certified separation anxiety. "Every animal with a mind has the capacity to lose hold of it from time to time" wrote science historian and author Dr. Laurel Braitman in "Animal Madness."

But there’s at least one mental malady that, while common in humans, seems to have spared all other animals: schizophrenia. Though psychotic animals may exist, psychosis has never been observed outside of our own species; whereas depression, OCD, and anxiety traits have been reported in ...

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Widely Used Herbicide Linked to Cancer
The World Health Organization's research arm declares glyphosate a probable carcinogen. What's the evidence?
March 25, 2015 |By Daniel Cressey and Nature magazine


Glyphosate is the world’s most widely produced herbicide, by volume. It is used extensively in agriculture and is also found in garden products in many countries.
Credit: Chafer Machinery via Flickr

The cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization last week announced that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, is probably carcinogenic to humans. But the assessment, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, has been followed by an immediate backlash from industry groups.

On March 23, Robb Fraley, chief technology officer at the agrochemical company Monsanto in St Louis, Missouri, which sells much of the world’s glyphosate, accused the IARC of “cherry picking” data. “We are outraged with this assessment,” he said in a statement. Nature explains the controversy.

What does the IARC report say?
The IARC regularly reviews the carcinogenicity of industrial chemicals, foodstuffs and even jobs. On March 20, a panel of international experts convened by the agency reported the findings of a review of five agricultural chemicals in a class known as organophosphates. A summary of the study was published in The Lancet Oncology.

Two of the pesticides — tetrachlorvinphos and parathion — were rated as ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Poverty Shrinks Brains from Birth
Studies show that children from low-income families have smaller brains and lower cognitive abilities
March 31, 2015 |By Sara Reardon and Nature magazine | Véalo en español


Researchers have long suspected that children’s behaviour and cognitive abilities are linked to their socioeconomic status, particularly for those who are very poor.
Credit: BerSonnE/Thinkstock

The stress of growing up poor can hurt a child’s brain development starting before birth, research suggests—and even very small differences in income can have major effects on the brain.

Researchers have long suspected that children’s behaviour and cognitive abilities are linked to their socioeconomic status, particularly for those who are very poor. The reasons have never been clear, although stressful home environments, poor nutrition, exposure to industrial chemicals such as lead and lack of access to good education are often cited as possible factors.

In the largest study of its kind, published on March 30 in Nature Neuroscience, a team led by neuroscientists Kimberly Noble from Columbia University in New York City and Elizabeth Sowell from Children's Hospital Los Angeles, California, looked into the biological underpinnings of these effects. They imaged the brains of ...

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Human Brain Project Needs a Rethink
The European Human Brain Project's effort to simulate the entire brain in a supercomputer is premature, a new report says
March 28, 2015 |By Nature magazine


The brain project is failing and must be fixed.
Credit: BULIEKOV ROSTYSLAV/Thinkstock

Just like the human brain itself, the European Commission’s billion-euro Human Brain Project (HBP) defies easy explanation. Launched 18 months ago, the massive project is complex and, to most observers, confusing. Many people—both scientists and non-scientists—have thus accepted a description of the project that emerged from its leaders and its publicity machine: the aim of simulating the entire human brain in a supercomputer and so find cures for psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Like many simplistic explanations of the brain, that characterization of the project provoked a backlash from neuroscientists. This climaxed in a full-scale uprising last summer, when hundreds of researchers signed a critical open letter to the commission (www.neurofuture.eu). Autocratic management, they complained, was running the project off its scientific course and exaggerating its clinical reach.

An independent committee was established to investigate and ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Jupiter, Destroyer of Worlds, May Have Paved the Way for Earth
Careening toward the sun, Jupiter cleared the way for Earth to form—with help from Saturn, too
April 1, 2015 |By Lee Billings


Jupiter may have paved the way for Earth's formation early in our solar system's history.
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

In Greco-Roman mythology Jupiter is the king of the gods, a deity who destroyed an older race of titans to become the jealous and vengeful lord of heaven and Earth.

Strange though it may seem, scientific theory lends credence to this historical fiction. As the largest, heaviest object orbiting our sun, Jupiter’s namesake world is the lord of planets, a dominant force in the solar system. Eons ago, while flinging leftover debris from planetary formation out of our solar system, Jupiter probably also tossed some down toward our primordial globe, delivering some of the water that now fills our oceans. Jupiter still shepherds swarms of asteroids, occasionally sending some whizzing harmlessly into interstellar space or on destructive collision courses with Earth and other planets. Jupiter may have even played a role in the asteroid-linked extinction of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, an event that ushered in the reign of our mammalian ancestors. Without Jupiter, humans might not exist.

A new study, however, suggests that without Jupiter ...

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NASA Assures Skeptical Congress That the James Webb Telescope Is on Track
The program will not repeat past mistakes, officials vow, and will launch as planned in 2018
March 30, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz



A telescope project that has become notorious for its ballooning cost and repeated delays has lately been operating on schedule and within budget, NASA officials told Congress last week. One of the most ambitious and powerful observatories ever built, the $8.8-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is on track to launch in 2018, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor hired to build the telescope, has lately been troubleshooting a problem with the “cryocooler” meant to stop heat from interfering with the telescope’s sensitive infrared camera, which requires frigid temperatures to see such long wavelengths. The issue raised fears in Congress that the observatory would be delayed, or worse—that it might not work, just as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, failed to operate properly at first and had to be repaired by shuttle astronauts. Unlike Hubble, however, James Webb is not designed ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Power structure
A power structure is an overall system of influence relationships between any individual and every other individual within any selected group of people. A description of a power structure would capture the way in which power or authority is distributed between people within groups such as a government, nation, institution, organization, or a society. Such structures are of interest to various fields, including sociology, government, economics, and business. A power structure may be formal and intentionally constructed to maximize values like fairness or efficiency, as in a hierarchical organization wherein every entity, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity. Conversely, a power structure may be an informal set of roles, such as those found in a dominance hierarchy in which members of a social group interact, often aggressively, to create a ranking system. A culture that is organised in a dominance hierarchy is a dominator culture, the opposite of an egalitarian culture of partnership. A visible, dominant group or elite that holds power or authority within a power structure is often referred to as being the Establishment. Powers structures are fluid, with change occurring constantly, either slowly or rapidly, evolving or revolutionary, peacefully or violently.


Plutocracy
Plutocracy (from Greek πλοῦτος, ploutos, meaning "wealth", and κράτος, kratos, meaning "power, dominion, rule") or plutarchy, defines a society or a system ruled and dominated by the small minority of the wealthiest citizens. The first known use of the term was in 1652. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy. The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.


Plutonomy
In three reports for super-rich Citigroup clients published in 2005 and 2006, a team of Citigroup analysts elaborated on their thesis that the share of the very rich in national income of plutonomies had become so large that what is going on in these economies and in their relation with other economies cannot be properly understood any more with reference to the average consumer: "The rich are so rich that their behavior – be it negative savings, or just very low consumption of oil as a % of their income – overwhelms that of the ‘average’ consumer."

The authors of these studies predicted that the global trend toward plutonomies would continue, for various reasons, including "capitalist-friendly governments and tax regimes". They do, however, also warn of the risk that, since "political enfranchisement remains as was – one person, one vote, at some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich."


Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of government. Juan Linz, whose 1964 description of authoritarianism is influential, characterised authoritarian regimes as political systems by four qualities: "limited, not responsible, political pluralism"; that is, constraints on political institutions and groups (such as legislatures, political parties and interest groups), a basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" such as underdevelopment or insurgency; neither "intensive nor extensive political mobilization" and constraints on the mass public (such as repressive tactics against opponents and a prohibition of anti-regime activity) and "formally ill-defined" executive power, often shifting or vague.


Biopower
"Biopower" (or biopouvoir in French) is a term coined by French scholar, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault. It relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations". Foucault first used the term in his lecture courses at the Collège de France, but the term first appeared in print in The Will To Knowledge, Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality. In Foucault's work, it has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation, among many other regulatory mechanisms often linked less directly with literal physical health. It is closely related to a term he uses much less frequently, but which subsequent thinkers have taken up independently, biopolitics.


Hierarchy
A hierarchy (in Greek: Ιεραρχία; this comes from ιερός-hieros, sacred, and άρχω-arkho, rule) is a way of ranking and organizing things or people. Beneath the top of the hierarchy, each part of it is below some other part. This turns out to be like a pyramid. It is a system to decide who can make decisions, and who is forced to comply with those decisions.

An example with people would be the structure of a company. There is the top manager, and there are a few levels of middle and lower management. At the bottom are the common workers. Another example would be an army that might have a general, followed by colonels, corporals, and sergeants, then privates.

In democracy this is done by educating people in the issues and then voting - in an election to choose leaders, or a referendum to actually choose one option from several. Competing power networks each form a political party and each offers only one leader or one option to the public, to simplify the issues to make decisions possible. After the decision, they typically do not fight it to the point of civil war, but wait for the next election.

In dictatorship this is done by asking one powerful person to make the decision and then agreeing to force everyone to follow it. Any who will not are exiled, imprisoned, or killed, even if the decision is not very important, since the refusal to follow is taken as a challenge to the power structure itself. There is only one power network and all others are forced to become part of it, or fight it. Civil war is much more common in a dictatorship than in a democracy.

In these examples, people who are higher up have more authority and power than people below them.


Anarchism
Anarchism is a political belief that is against the domination of one group or person over another, believing that people can organize themselves without needing state, government or other hierarchy in power, and emphasizing that such organizations can be easily used for evil. Anarchists also believe that participation should never be forced by other people.

Anarchism is "a cluster of doctrines and attitudes centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary." The term "anarchism" derives from the Greek αναρχία, "without archons" which means "without rulers", not "without rule"; it is also occasionally translated as "without government". In the common language, the word anarchy is often used to describe chaos or anomie. However, anarchists usually do not promote this. Rather, they define "anarchy" as a way of relations between people. They believe that, once put into place, these relations work on their own.

Individual freedom, voluntary association, and opposition to the state are important beliefs of anarchism. There are also big differences between anarchist philosophies on things like whether violence can be used to bring anarchy; the best type of economy; the relationship between technology and hierarchy; the idea of equality; and the usefulness of some organization. Anarchists are not against authority (eg. the authority of someone skilled in self-defence over someone that wants to learn self-defence), they are only against unjust human domination.

There are many anarchists who reject capitalism and support socialism or communism (but in another sense, without a totalitarian state or power), they are called anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists. Also, there are some people called anarcho-capitalists who oppose domination, but support capitalism (but in another sense, neither corporatist government nor state capitalism), although many of them are okay with socialism between consenting participants, as long as they don't force them into the socialist system. Other anarchists say that they are not really anarchists, because anarchism is traditionally a socialist philosophy. Finally, there are "anarchists without adjectives" who hold that because people will be free in an anarchy to pursue voluntarily any economic structures they want (including communes, worker co-ops, and capitalist-owned firms). Anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists believe that people can voluntarily participate in socialist/communist systems without having to be forced to, unlike their authoritarian counter-parts that believe everyone should be forced into their system whether they like it or not.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think
The great divide between our beliefs, our ideals, and reality
March 31, 2015 |By Nicholas Fitz


According to Pew Research, most Americans believe the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard.
Credit: Allan Danahar via Thinkstock

In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, "Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets." The findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become.

In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population. Next, they asked people to construct their ideal distributions. Imagine a pizza of all the wealth in the United States. What percentage of that pizza belongs to the top 20% of Americans? How big of a slice does the bottom 40% have? In an ideal world, how much should they have?

The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.

We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution ...

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Did the Anthropocene Begin in 1950 or 50,000 Years Ago?
Scientists debate whether hunting, farming, smallpox or the nuclear bomb define the start of irreversible human impacts on our planet
April 2, 2015 |By David Biello


Rice terraces in Yunnan show just how radically humans can change the surface of the planet.
Courtesy of Jialiang Gao, www.peace-on-earth.org

There are no more woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos or giant ground sloths. Around 50,000 years ago the biggest land animals in the world began to disappear. The number-one suspect: Homo sapiens. Hunting combined with the burning of landscapes in places like Australia seem to be the main reason there are no more giant kangaroos, along with these other big animals.

The lethal pairing of hunting and burning is just one of the ways humans have been changing the world for millennia. Another is planting crops such as corn or wheat, which now cover most of the world's arable land. Chickens, cows and pigs have become the dominant megafauna, thanks to ranching and herding. Forests have been cleared to make room for agriculture and the mass expansion of the rice paddy may have led to enough greenhouse gas emissions to stave off a long cool-down into an ice age starting 5,000 years ago.

Each of these world-changing actions should be considered when ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Thought-Controlled Genes Could Someday Help Us Heal
Scientists combined a brain–computer interface with an optogenetic switch to create the first-ever brain–gene interface
Feb 12, 2015 |By Simon Makin


STUART BRIERS

People can control prosthetic limbs, computer programs and even remote-controlled helicopters with their mind, all by using brain-computer interfaces. What if we could harness this technology to control things happening inside our own body? A team of bioengineers in Switzerland has taken the first step toward this cyborglike setup by combining a brain-computer interface with a synthetic biological implant, allowing a genetic switch to be operated by brain activity. It is the world's first brain-gene interface.

The group started with a typical brain-computer interface, an electrode cap that can register subjects' brain activity and transmit signals to another electronic device. In this case, the device is an electromagnetic field generator; different types of brain activity cause the field to vary in strength. The next step, however, is totally new—the experimenters used the electromagnetic field to trigger protein production within human cells in an implant in mice.

The implant uses a cutting-edge technology known as optogenetics. The researchers inserted bacterial genes into human kidney cells, causing ...

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What Should Lufthansa Have Done to Prevent the Germanwings Tragedy?
Someone with a prior history of depression but who has been effectively treated and is no longer symptomatic should not be prohibited from working
April 3, 2015 |By Jeffrey Lieberman, MD


Did Lufthansa conduct adequate medical surveillance of its employees and particularly its pilots, including their psychiatric status?
Credit: Juergen Lehle/Wikipedia

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology.

Since the Germanwings plane crash, speculation has focused on the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, and what role mental illness might have played in this horrible tragedy. This question has been magnified by the emergence of information that he had a past history of psychiatric or psychological treatment for what was reported to be depression and suicidal ideation and that his doctors had recently recommended that he take medical leave from work for as yet undisclosed ailments—advice he apparently disregarded. His employer, Lufthansa, acknowledged that it had been aware that Lubitz had experienced a serious depressive episode prior to his completion of pilot training in 2009. It is also clear that his obscene behavior was premeditated and planned and was not an impulsive or spontaneous act.

This information has raised four key questions: What was the nature of Lubitz’s mental disturbance? What was its relevance to his murderous act? What should Lufthansa have done in light of their knowledge of his situation? And what were his doctors’ responsibilities?

First, it should be said that ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Cryptocurrency Exchanges Emerge as Regulators Try to Keep Up
Trust issues plague bitcoin and other digital currencies. Licensed exchanges could change that
April 8, 2015 |By Larry Greenemeier | Véalo en español


The U.S. has approached cryptocurrency regulation cautiously, meanwhile 80 percent of all Bitcoin volume is exchanged into and out of Chinese yuan, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
Image courtesy of Zach Copley, via Flickr

Digital cryptocurrencies—including bitcoin and litecoin, along with dozens of others—have struggled to win mainstream acceptance in the U.S. Interest in this so-called “Internet money” is not going away, however, which is why regulators are developing rules that that they hope can avert a repeat of last year’s Mt. Gox meltdown, when the world’s largest bitcoin exchange unexpectedly shut down after losing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins in a cyber attack.

The U.S. government has largely sat on the sidelines, leaving states to regulate digital cryptocurrency exchanges. The exchanges, with names such as BitPay and Coinbase, are Web sites for buying, selling and exchanging digital currency. Bitcoin and its ilk are referred to as cryptocurrencies for their use of cryptography to secure transactions and mint new virtual coins.

More than a dozen states and Puerto Rico already issue licenses for bitcoin exchanges, which represent the lion’s share of the world’s cryptocurrency transactions. California is working out the details of its own licensing guidelines while New York State’s Department of Financial Services plans to finalize its BitLicense regulatory framework in the coming weeks. Other countries are likewise ...

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Watch the First Artificial Gravity Experiment
By Caleb A. Scharf | April 6, 2015 |


High above Baja California, the first artificial gravity experiment (Credit: NASA)

Gravity, as the old joke goes, sucks.

It drags us down, pulls on our weary limbs, makes our feet tired, makes parts of us droop. But it’s also a critical factor for our long term well-being. Astronauts and cosmonauts circling the Earth over the past 60 years have discovered that zero-g, or microgravity, is really not very good for you.

The human body has evolved in a piece of curved space-time where objects experience a close to uniform 9.81 meters per second per second acceleration. Blood and fluids are pressurized accordingly and arteries and veins are squeezed by muscles, so as not to all pool inconveniently in our feet. Eyeballs are tensioned so as to retain an optically proper shape. And our microbiome is adapted to an environment with a definite up and down – especially when it comes to digestion.

Put one of us in zero-g or microgravity, and things get tricky. Our cardiovascular system gets confused quickly, and so fluids accumulate in places they don’t usually – hence the puffy faced appearance that spacefarers can get. Eyes have to accommodate to unfamiliar forces. And to further confound things ...

Read more on http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...ty-experiment/

[Duke of Buckingham]

The Brontosaurus Is Back
Decades after scientists decided that the famed dinosaur never actually existed, new research says the opposite
April 7, 2015 |By Charles Choi | Véalo en español


How researchers see Brontosaurus today—with a Diplodocus-like head.
Credit: Davide Bonadonna/Creative Commons

Some of the largest animals to ever walk on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods—and the most famous of these giants is probably Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard." Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed.

The first of the Brontosaurus genus was named in 1879 by famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The specimen still stands on display in the Great Hall of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 1903, however, paleontologist Elmer Riggs found that Brontosaurus was apparently the same as the genus Apatosaurus, which Marsh had first described in 1877. In such cases the rules of scientific nomenclature state that the oldest name has priority, dooming Brontosaurus to another extinction.

Now a new study suggests resurrecting Brontosaurus. It turns out the original Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus fossils ...

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Farmers Urge Return of Jaguars to Protect Crops
The big cats could return to do the job they once did in Brazil's grassland—hunt a growing population of wild pig relatives, called peccaries, that decimates crop yields
April 9, 2015 |By Brendan Borrell and Mongabay.org


Read the article on Mongabay.com
Leandro Silveira, president of the Jaguar Conservation Fund, is in discussions with farmers and with Odebrecht—a Brazilian petroleum, engineering and agriculture conglomerate that owns much of the cropland—to embrace a “jaguar-friendly” certification scheme.
Credit: paulisson miura/Flickr

Margie Peixoto was driving her pickup across her farm in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul one February afternoon when she spotted some broken corn stalks and a trio of white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari) ambling along the red-clay road as if they owned it. The moment these wild pig relatives spotted the truck, they snorted, snarled and disappeared into the head-high crop, where dozens more likely hid.

“Every year the group gets bigger and bigger, and every year the damage to the crop is greater,” said Peixoto, a fit middle-aged woman from Zimbabwe, who met her Brazilian husband while traveling in Africa, and immigrated here to farm more than 30 years ago.

Peixoto estimates that wild peccaries destroyed as much as 10 percent of her crop last year, amounting to losses of 250,000 Brazilian reals ($100,000). One peccary attacked and killed the family dog.

She is not alone in her concern. Marcos Da Silva Cunha, the director of the nearby Emas National Park, said ...

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[Duke of Buckingham]

Why Is Cell Phone Call Quality So Terrible?
Blame your service provider—and mobile video
April 9, 2015 |By Elena Malykhina


Emerging technologies that enhance voice and stifle background noise are on the way, but the rush to cash in on mobile video has slowed progress.
Image Source/TODD WARNOCK

In the age of social media, texting, mobile e-commerce and video streaming it’s easy to overlook an experience hasn’t gotten better for smartphone users: talking on the phone.

Despite sophisticated smartphones and networks, many mobile users are not satisfied with call clarity. None of the 100-plus smartphones in Consumer Reports’ 2014 phone ratings earned better than a good score for voice quality. A large number of smartphones rated only as “fair.”

In larger part that is because device makers often shrink, flatten and cover speakers in plastic to improve their phones’ overall functionality. Even on a high-end smartphone that uses several microphones and noise-cancellation algorithms, a caller is not guaranteed clear sound, especially in noisy environments.

Change is happening slowly but there are promising new technologies are ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150414


The Billion-Dollar Race to Reinvent the Computer Chip
With the end of Moore's law in sight, chip manufacturers are spending billions to develop novel computing technologies
By John Pavlus

In a tiny, windowless conference room at the R&D headquarters of Intel, the world's dominant microprocessor and semiconductor manufacturer, Mark Bohr, the company's director of process architecture and integration, is coolly explaining how Moore's law, as it is commonly understood, is dead—and has been for some time. This might seem surprising ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150414

[Mumps]

The Billion-Dollar Race to Reinvent the Computer Chip
With the end of Moore's law in sight, chip manufacturers are spending billions to develop novel computing technologies
By John Pavlus

In a tiny, windowless conference room at the R&D headquarters of Intel, the world's dominant microprocessor and semiconductor manufacturer, Mark Bohr, the company's director of process architecture and integration, is coolly explaining how Moore's law, as it is commonly understood, is dead—and has been for some time. This might seem surprising ...

Read more on http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._TECH_20150414

*Sigh*

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