This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?" From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

Jamie found a somewhat amusing little essay on putting together a crowd-sourced mission to put a monolith on the moon. The author estimates it would cost half a billion dollars, which is a sum he thinks could be raised.

Let's raise the stakes. I propose raising half a trillion dollars to develop a time machine and put a monolith in Olduvai Gorge three million years in the past to influence Astralopithecus Afarensis evolution. Our very existence might depend on it.

When spacecraft return to Earth, one of the tensest parts of the mission is the radio black out that occurs as the vehicle re-enters the atmosphere. Travelling at hypersonic speeds of between Mach 8 and 15, the spacecraft heats and breaks down molecules in the atmosphere causing a plasma to form. It is this plasma sheath that prevents radio communication.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0704.3103: Communication Through Plasma Sheaths

Kaggle is an innovative solution for statistical/analytics outsourcing. We are the leading platform for data modeling and prediction competitions. Companies, governments and researchers present datasets and problems - the world's best data scientists then compete to produce the best solutions. At the end of a competition, the competition host pays prize money in exchange for the intellectual property behind the winning model.

Fifty-two unanticipated rain showers in a Middle Eastern desert supposedly occurred because of ionizing devices installed in Abu Dhabi as part of a weather-modification project, a company is claiming.

An ingenious new tool triggers a cascade of new insights. In this special section, Science's news reporters and editors mark the end of the current decade by stepping back from weekly reporting to take a broader look at 10 insights that have changed science since the dawn of the new millennium.

NASA has 50 years of experience with reentry capsules, but is fearful of trying something new. SpaceX has no reentry experience and chooses the most efficient engineering approach. Guess whose capsule is overweight and still sitting on the ground? Guess whose capsule completed a successful first flight yesterday?

an ambitious European plan to simulate the entire planet. The idea is to exploit the huge amounts of data generated by financial markets, health records, social media and climate monitoring to model the planet's climate, societies and economy. The vision is that a system like this can help to understand and predict crises before they occur so that governments can take appropriate measures in advance.

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

That's the question John Brockman, editor of the Web site edge.org, posed to about 160 cutting-edge minds in his 11th annual Edge Question. As in years past, they responded with bold, often thrilling, sometimes chilling, answers.

"The corporation promised to clean up the space in ten years by collecting about 600 defunct satellites on the same geosynchronous orbit and sinking them into the ocean subsequently,"

He said the cleaning satellite would work on nuclear power and be capable to work up to 15 years.

Energia said that the company would complete the cleaning satellite work-out and assembly by 2020 and test the device no later than in 2023.

the coveted dream of using self-organization effects in such a way that nano machines assemble themselves is still a thing of the future. The rotors developed in Garching are an important step in this direction.

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.