Forget air bags, your next Volvo (or more likely BMW) will change its shape when it senses a side-impact accident is irreversible.

Lester Brown has penned a summary of the practice of tax-shifting in Europe for The Globalist. Using taxes to internalize externalities is one of those ideas that just makes sense, but spinning it as a means for reducing income taxes is a really smart approach.

I was about 6 miles from the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and about 7 miles from the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Living as I do midway between the San Andreas and Hayward faults, I tend to cherish my ability to live in denial. I get grumpy when I hear about methods that might help predict major earthquakes, like measuring the change in electrical properties of compressed rock. If you can’t guarantee it will work, please let me live in my happy pretend world.

Geoffrey Miller proposes a solution to Fermi’s Paradox: evolved life cannot overcome the inertia of fake fitness. Or to put it another way, the aliens are too busy taking drugs and playing video games to bother expanding beyond their own planet. Entertaining speculation, but I have a hard time accepting it. Especially considering it fails to account for manufactured intelligence.

Scientists at Delft University have discovered a way to use the motors of biological cells to sort flows of discreet molecules by their colour, using electrical charge to direct the molecules. This is another big step forward for the field of nanomachinery. I’m putting in a pre-order for my home fabricator as soon as someone gets a decent prototype sorted out.