Sunday, August 02, 2009

While I'm on the August issue of WIRED...

There were a couple of other articles in this unusually compelling issue.

One is by Noah Shachtman on the auroral research facility called HAARP: it may have a lot of uses, and it's doing some very interesting things for science and the military. It is not anywhere near powerful enough to be the superweapon some conspiracy-watchers allege - but proponents contributed to the public-relations problem by making unrealistic weapons-related promises to military funding sources.

The other is Erin Biba's story on the revival of microbes tens of millions of years old. So far, they have not yielded medical breakthroughs, but prehistoric yeast still work for the important human endeavor of making beer.

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