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The lack of atmosphere in space means that missiles travel predictably, but it also means that decoys such as balloons move identically. How to identify a decoy dressed up as a warhead, or a warhead wrapped in a decoy? Critics such as Theodore Postol, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say this problem is insurmountable, however powerful the radars and other sensors. "It is like trying to find a bomb hidden in a pile of suitcases only by looking at them, without being able to shake them and without sniffer dogs," he argues.

During the second world war computers had been built to crack codes (Colossus, in Britain) and calculate artillery firing tables (ENIAC, in America). As the cold war began, along came the perfect opportunity: the hydrogen bomb, whose construction would require detailed mathematical modelling. Von Neumann did a deal with his American military paymasters. They got their bomb, and the scientists got their computer, a key ancestor of all modern machines. The subsequent explosion of computing changed the world.

Scientific papers do not drive messages home as convincingly as the de­struction of a city.

An unmanned sampling mission to the moon is pencilled in for 2017, with the objective of gathering lunar soil and returning it to Earth. By 2025 the goal is to send a manned mission there. Imagine the symbolism, wrote Bruce Sterling, a science-fiction author, if in the coming decades a spacecraft containing several young Chi­nese (or Indian) astronauts were to land on the moon, where the group would carefully fold away the American flag planted by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and plant their own flag in its stead.

Victor Hugo: "No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come."

Named after the Roman goddess of love, Venus could have been a sister planet to Earth. The two orbs are almost identical in shape, volume and mass. Both have solid surfaces, an atmosphere and a weather system. Even their distances from the sun are not so different: Venus is about 108m kilometres (67m miles) from the centre of the solar system while the Earth is about 150m kilome­tres out. Yet Venus is far from lovely. Probes sent to the planet by America and the Soviet Union from the 1960s to the 1980s re­vealed that Venus would be deadly to humans. The atmosphere is mostly noxious carbon dioxide, the pressure at the planet's sur­face is equivalent to being almost a kilometre under water and the temperature is a roasting 465C.

Representatives of Diageo, which owns Guinness, one of the most widely sold brands of stout, approached Dr Lee in 2009. They wondered if he might be able to construct a mathematical model of the formation and growth of bubbles in stout. Dr Lee was happy to oblige. And once he had produced the model, he started thinking more about the problem.

If the ultra-Orthodox were in heaven he would rather not go there.

Genes are acquired at conception and carried to the grave. But the same gene can be expressed differently in different people — or at different times during an individual's life. The differences are the result of what are known as epigenetic marks, chemicals such as methyl groups that are sometimes attached to a gene to tell it to turn out more of a vital pro­tein, or to stop making that protein altogether.

George Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Electrons jump between orbits or escape nucleus altogether in attose- conds — on eattosecond is to one second what one second is to the age of universe.

Two private firms are offering moon jaunts to the rich and dedi­cated. And even if the engineering can be perfected, it remains to be seen how many daredevil billionaires will be willing to spend months cooped up in a metal tube eating freeze-dried food.

He had never had enough imagination to be sacred.

Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower monster.

Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic.

His team recently managed to cage a nitrogen atom inside a buckyball (a sphere formed from 60 carbon atoms) and use its electrons as a single qubit.

In the southern hemisphere the moon is in the northern sky and its left and right sides reverse. The Economist can take solace that the original picture showing the waxing phase on the left side of the moon in Rio was indeed correct.

Before you were trying to find a needle in a haystack at least you could see the needle gleaming. Now you have to find a needle in a million haystacks."

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run," observed Roy Amara, an Ame­rican futurologist.

It is, allegedly, now the exclusive right of scientists to answer the three fundamental why-questions with which the authors pur­port to deal in their book. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? And why this particular set of laws and not some other?

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