US research universities face serious decline unless the federal government, states, and industry take action to ensure adequate, stable funding in the next decade, says a new report by the National Research Council. Universities must work harder to contain costs, enhance productivity, and improve educational pathways for students to careers both within and outside academia, the report says.

Written by a 21-member committee chaired by Bank of America chairman Charles Holliday Jr., the report responds to a request from Congress to recommend 10 actions that the nation should take in the next five to 10 years to maintain top-quality US research institutions. Among those steps, the committee urged, was that of doubling the budgets of NSF, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and NIST that was called for in the 2007 America Competes Act. But for fiscal 2013, the administration requested just a 4.8% increase for NSF, and a 2.4% increase for DOE’s Office of Science. Only the relatively tiny NIST R&D programs got the magnitude of increase needed to keep it on a doubling trajectory.

Wilczek and Shapere persuasively argued that there's no reason why similar periodic structures couldn't exist in time. And they said that finding them would give physicists a new way to study the process of symmetry-breaking and the laws of physics behind it.

There was just one problem, however. These guys hadn't worked out how to build a time crystal.

Kevin Durant needs about 10 - 20 lbs to contest LeBron, or any other man mountain's 60 lb advantage. That's just physics...

Postman's commentary (link to book follows) is described as a "21^st century description in the 20^th century." Published in 1985 - post the Orwell demarcation - cable news with CNN was just five years old. The Internet (not mentioned) was Zenith computer screens - big and bulky - sending the equivalent of what a teen can do with their thumbs and text messaging. There was no Facebook, Twitter, and blogging would have been the equivalent of exposing your diary to the world, of telling a freezing caveman about fire - Prometheus.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Physics arXiv: Proposal for Neuromorphic Hardware Using Spin Devices

Furthermore, the greatest risk of earthquakes due to fracking does not come from drilling into deep shale or cracking it with pressurized water and chemicals. Rather, it comes from pumping the wastewater from those operations back down into deep sandstone or other formations for permanent disposal, instead of storing it in tanks or open ponds at the surface. In January, wastewater injection was blamed for earthquakes that had just occurred in Youngstown, Ohio, on Christmas Eve and again on New Year's Eve, measuring 2.7 and 4.0 on the Richter scale, respectively. Wastewater injection is also commonly used during conventional oil and gas production.

But he was also subject to scrutiny by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, as it sought to uncover communist sympathizers during the 1950s.

The FBI began keeping an eye on Feynman after other members of the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb, turned out to be Soviet spies, including Klaus Fuchs, the project's primary physicist. The documents, 361 pages, record statement after statement from the physicist's friends and colleagues, mostly praising Feynman for his brilliance, trustworthiness and loyalty to the country.

Like I said: nutty, but safe.

MSNBC Science: FBI Files on Feynman Released