At The Conversation, Edward Wastnidge writes about how the Iranian nuclear deal, by reincorporating Iran into the international system, is making Saudi Arabia feel insecure next to its main regional challenger. This insecurity can lead to risk-taking, indeed.

As 2015 drew to a close, you could have been forgiven for cautious optimism as far as ( Read more... )

• Crooked Timber is skeptical of the idea that technology has a relationship with secular stagnation.
• D-Brief notes research suggesting that human brains cannot be sorted into distinct categories of male and female.
• The Dragon's Tales links to speculation on embedding American marines in Filipino units, the better to deter China.
• Far Outliers notes the ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Jonathan Tirone notes how, even in the aftermath of the nuclear deal, the extent of Iran's nuclear program is likely to be unclear for some time.

Questions will probably be left unanswered when International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors conclude their assessment of Iran’s past nuclear activities next week ( Read more... )

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross starts a discussion about the consequences of satellites getting knocked down. How would a newly satellite-less world cope?
• Centauri Dreams looks at red dwarfs and the challenges of their potentially habitable exoplanets.
• The Dragon's Gaze considers ways to detect the spectral signatures of rocky impacts on young stars.
• The ( Read more... )

CBC's Max Leighton reports on how Elon Musk's talk with Stephen Colbert of using nuclear weapons on Mars' polar icecaps, presumably with the goal of releasing their water and atmospheric gas into the thin Martian atmosphere, was received.

(At very most this would be just the start.)

[T]hings turned sinister when Colbert brought up Musk's plans ( Read more... )

Writing for Bloomberg View, Daniel Gordis explains coherently the concern of Israelis over the Iran nuclear deal. They feel beseiged on all fronts, it seems.

Our ability to defend ourselves, our knowledge that we are thus different from the Jews who died in those forests -- while the world looked on and the U.S. sealed its shores -- has been a ( Read more... )

• The Big Picture has a photo essay about albino children in Panama.
• Crooked Timber considers African-American radicalism.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper imagining the frequency of habitable planets in other universes, and links to another suggesting that to host habitable worlds exoplanet systems will need their worlds to have aligned orbits.
• Joe ( Read more... )

If Shannon Tiezzi's report in The Diplomat is correct, I'm not sure that I substantially disagree with the position of the Chinese government. At least insofar as the Japanese government seems to be minimizing the Second World War and Japanese atrocities committed therein, elevating Hiroshima and Nagasaki to such a position is--at least-- ( Read more... )

At The Space Review, in the article "Starfleet was closer than you think" authored by Major Brent Ziarnick and Lt. Col. Peter Garretson, the argument is made that the Project Orion nuclear bomb-powered spacecraft of the 1960s could and should have been made, that our world would now be an enthusiastically spacefaring world.

Today, the United ( Read more... )

• The Big Picture has photos of the winter snowtowns in New England.
• blogTO has old photos of various Toronto intersections.
• Centauri Dreams notes how atmospheres can break the tidal locks of close-orbiting planets.
• The Dragon's Gaze suggests Fomalhaut b is a false positive, speculates on the evaporation time of hot Jupiters, and wonders if planetoids ( Read more... )