An IEEE Spectrum podcast asks the question, Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers? The blurb: With terrorism back in the news, so, too, is a curious footnote: Of the hundreds of individuals involved in political violence, nearly half of those with degrees have been engineers. This finding, first published in 2008, has been substantiated by two [...]

We have reports from a couple of Foresight members who have toured the Allosphere, part of the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara, and it sounds truly impressive. From their website: The AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a 3-story near-to-anechoic (echo free) cube, allows for synthesis, manipulation, exploration and analysis of large-scale [...]

Projects exist for aggregating personal computers into one large project for various worthy purposes, from space to biology research, some nanotech-related such a protein folding.  Now IBM has a similar project with the goal of developing nanotechnologies for clean water.  From Grist.org: In China, Tsinghua University researchers, with the help of Australian and Swiss scientists, [...]