NPR: Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry argue the only way to stop nuclear weapons from falling into terrorist hands is to get rid of all of them. This week the former statesmen and their supporters convened in Oslo, Norway, for a conference.
Nature: Aurora observatory opens on remote Arctic island.
San Francisco Chronicle: The federal government has picked three venture capital firms – two of them from the Bay Area – to take promising energy technology ideas from national laboratories and turn those concepts into companies.
Guardian Unlimited: In space, no one can hear you scream — which is no bad thing, because scientists have discovered that it is a lot filthier than they thought.
Researchers revealed yesterday that limitless stretches of space are strewn with interstellar soot, making it harder to see very distant objects such as exploding stars or supernovae.
Nature: Fermilab’s Jason Steffen became so frustrated over the delays in boarding an aircraft that he decide to do something about it. He has applied a computational technique commonly used to map the movement of atoms and molecules to simulate how passengers move around a gridded space on an aircraft. According to his research the most common way airlines use to board passengers on an aircraft is mathematically, an extremely inefficient technique. Instead he suggests applying a strictly ordered optimal sequence that cuts boarding times by a factor of 7.
The New York Times: In the craggy terrain around the Moon’s south pole, the deepest craters dip 2.5 miles beneath the surface while the peaks reach as high as the highest mountain in North America — a 37,000-foot change of elevation.
Salon.com: Deniers continue to insist there’s no consensus on global warming. Well, there’s not. There’s well-tested science and real-world observations.
Forbes.com: Apparently, it’s time to ban Edison’s venerable, now vilified, light bulb. European leaders, green pundits and the widely reported light bulb provisions of the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 all urgently push the abandonment of incandescent bulbs.
ZDNet: The European Commission has officially launched a €3bn (£2.3bn) public-private partnership aimed at the development of nanotechnology.
Wired: A hundred years after an asteroid flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest in Russia, scientists are proposing to use satellites to keep tabs on potential repeat occurrences.