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What I got out of listening to Craig Venter at The Long Now Foundation lecture last Monday night is a couple of perception shifts about life on Earth that sort of make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. You have to understand that Venter is a guy who has no qualms about busting through to new ...

The other day I posted about some research going on to build unimaginably fast super-computers. The calculation numbers are so mind-boggling that it’s hard to relate to. But research done awhile back on building powerful but relatively inexpensive clusters of computers is paying off by improving a technique of breast cancer detection that wasn’t feasible in the past. Researchers from ...

Building super-computers seems a lot like drag racing: no matter how fast you are there’s always another mark to strive for. The Sandia and Oak Ridge National Labs just formed the Institutes for Advanced Architectures (of computers, not buildings). Their goal is to figure out how to build an exascale computer. “An exascale computer is essential to perform more accurate ...

Here’s a survey by the McKinsey group about corporate philanthropy from the corporate side. It helps you get inside the heads of company execs.