Space

This is my last posting for the next few days. I will be taking my office apart so that we can move to our new apartment downtown next Tuesday. I will be unplugged and disconnected except by tablet. Expect me to be back in the saddle before the end of next week probably in time to provide you with some more headlines. In the interim these are the stories I share with you this week:

Another interesting week of technology and science announcements has led me to pick the following five stories:

• World's Biggest Companies Tackling Climate Change;
• Idaho Potato Gets Better by Mixing Genes from Five Spud Varieties;
• Google Timelapse Shows Decades of Planetary Change in Seconds;

It occurred to me today as I was reading about researchers being able to reliably predict snowstorms on Mars, that what we humans are doing here on Earth could be perfect for terraforming our red neighbour.

This week's roundup of stories include:

• Mystery remains around honeybee deaths;
• Researchers discover hypothalamus key to slowing aging and cognitive decline;
• New 3D-printed ear combines biology and electronics;

What technology and science stories caught my eye this week? Several in biomedicine. And two involving 3D printing, one for making liver, the other for mass customized manufacturing. A forecast of changes to climate zones as our atmosphere continues to heat. And a new commercial rocket joining the competition for low-Earth orbit missions. So here they are:

For those of you so inclined on Wednesday, April 24th at 11 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time (2 p.m.

Bigelow Aerospace was the unnamed partner when Charles Bolden, NASA's administrator, stated that the space agency would not "take the lead on a human lunar mission." There has been a lively debate on

Two overarching trends that get little attention today are those of rapidly increasing precision and awareness. As both travel up the exponential growth curves of the emerging big data industry, what inevitably becomes possible is an ability to distinguish a person’s identity from a distance, even space. On the surface this may be a frightening prospect. Having someone know where I am at any moment of the day, does indeed make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Most of you, my readers, are too young to remember the old Perry Como song "Catch a Falling Star" but I think the lyric captures the mission that NASA is proposing.

How life first originated on Earth is always an interesting subject. A structural biologist and his team of researchers at Florida State University College of Medicine have identified 10 amino acids that existed on our planet for 4 billion years.