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he panel finds the 2005 order to find 90% of Earth-threatening asteroids 460 feet or larger infeasible,

No method for diverting asteroids has been experimentally demonstrated

Options include a "gravity tractor" orbiting slow-moving objects and tugging them off course with tidal tugs, a "kinetic" impact of a heavy spacecraft into an asteroid, or a nuclear explosion

The interconnections fueled a cascading effect, with the failures coursing back and forth. A damaged node in the first network would pull down nodes in the second, which crashed nodes in the first, which brought down more in the second, and so on. And when they looked at data from a 2003 Italian power blackout, in which the electrical grid was linked to the computer network that controlled it, the patterns matched their models’ math.

Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.

For those who felt that Geoffrey glossed over the implications for cities and companies, the following article in the New York Times did a respectable job of drawing conclusions from Dr. West's paper: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html