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"his paper takes stock of megaproject management, an emerging and hugely costly field of study. First, it answers the question of how large megaprojects are by measuring them in the units mega, giga, and tera, concluding we are presently entering a new "tera era" of trillion-dollar projects. Second, total global megaproject spending is assessed, at USD 6-9 trillion annually, or 8 percent of total global GDP, which denotes the biggest investment boom in human history. Third, four "sublimes" - political, technological, economic, and aesthetic - are identified to explain the increased size and frequency of megaprojects. Fourth, the "iron law of megaprojects" is laid out and documented: Over budget, over time, over and over again. Moreover, the "break-fix model" of megaproject management is introduced as an explanation of the iron law. Fifth, Albert O. Hirschman's theory of the Hiding Hand is revisited and critiqued as unfounded and corrupting for megaproject thinking in both the academy and policy. Sixth, it is shown how megaprojects are systematically subject to "survival of the unfittest," explaining why the worst projects get built instead of the best. Finally, it is argued that the conventional way of managing megaprojects has reached a "tension point," where tradition is challenged and reform is emerging. "

"The post below describes that "the pitch" has become ever more degrading as more people are put in the position of aggressively hawking more and more elements of their lives on sale…their talents, their time, their apartments, their under-used upscale goods, and even their bodies (and not even in the context of conventional prostitution)."

NASA has recently been planning a new mission called Mars 2020, which entails sending a helicopter to Mars, alongside conventional ground rovers. While the main objective of this mission is to test the feasibility of operating the helicopter on the red planet, if successful, it could open up new possibilities for Mars exploration. In other words, this mission could pave the way toward other missions involving the deployment of Mars copters, which may be able to produce more information about the ground, terrain and obstacles ahead of the rovers.

Breeders have been working to develop new Miscanthus hybrids for years, but the clonal crop's sterility, complex genome, and long time to maturity make conventional breeding difficult. In a new study, University of Illinois researchers mine the crop's vast genomic potential in an effort to speed up the breeding process and maximize its most desirable traits.

Unlike conventional micro-transistors, magnetic tunnel junctions don't use the electrical charge of electrons to store information, but take advantage of a quantum-mechanical property that electrons have, which is referred to as "spin." Known as spintronics, computing technology based on magnetic tunnel junctions is still very much in the experimental phase, and applications are extremely limited. For example, the technology is used in aircraft and slot machines to protect stored data from sudden power outages. This is possible because magnetic tunnel junctions process and store information by switching the orientation of nano-scale magnets instead of moving electrons around as regular transistors do.

An alternative is to have machines pick up the slack on productivity and share the gain with the people displaced so their work week shortens and their quality of life increases.