News Inventory

The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning. In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last ... Read More

Science fiction is all about showing us new and startling worlds — and it doesn't hurt to sell a few widgets along the way. Like Eureka, which recently proved that you can save the world using Degree antiperspirant. Or the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which showed on Monday that a certain brand of car is the official vehicle of the anti-robot resistance. Product placement has been a part of science fiction for decades, but it's grown as the genre has become big business. ... Read More

From the dynamics of social networks to market bubbles, science has a lot to say about the world of technology. One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is ... Read More

Things may have slowed down a bit now that we're in the heat of the Northern Hemisphere's summer, but the world of science and technology has continued to pump out the data faster than most of us can take it all in. Nobel Intent gives both its readers and writers the opportunity to slow down and take a careful look at whatever papers they find interesting. In case you missed any of the big stories of the past week, here's a glimpse ... Read More

You can tell a lot about a science fiction book from its first sentence. Those first few words (or few dozen, in some cases) have to pull you into the story and bring you into a whole alternate world. A good first sentence "hooks" you, pulling you into the story with a quick jolt of action and mystery. But a great first sentence does way more than that — it establishes a tone, it sticks in your mind, and it's like a ... Read More