The Beer Barrel

Beware Stubby Glasses

By DAVID BROOKS

If you want to deter crime, it seems that you’d want to lengthen prison sentences so that criminals would face steeper costs for breaking the law. In fact, a mountain of research...

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509766/nanotubes-turned-into-super-fibers/

Fibers spun from carbon nanotubes have the conductivity of copper and the strength of advanced composites.

• By Katherine Bourzac on January 10, 2013

Carbon...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/01/google-earth-china-hunh/

Late last month, former CIA analyst Allen Thomson was clicking through a space news website when he noticed a story about a new orbital tracking site being built near the small city of Kashgar in southwestern China. Curious, he went to Google Earth to find it. He poked...

http://irishsavant.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-truly-horrifying-statistic.html

Read Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood over Kwanzaa and it rekindled my interest in the notorious Miami suburb of Hialeah. This is the place...

A federal court has ruled against the Texan teenager who was challenging her suspension for refusing to wear an RFID tag, despite objections on religious and privacy grounds. Last November, Andrea Hernandez, 15, was expelled from the John Jay Science and Engineering Academy in San Antonio, Texas after refusing to take part in a pilot "Student...