knee-jerk reactions and generalizations like "no need to cut science funding to help the needy!"

$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.

Carl Sagan wrote:Less than a century after Maxwell's prediction of radio waves, the first quest was initiated for signals from possible civilizations on planets of other stars. Since then there have been a number of searches, some of which I referred to earlier, for the time-varying electric and magnetic fields crossing the vast interstellar distances from possible other intelligences - biologically very different from us - who had also benefited sometime in their histories from the insights of local counterparts of James Clerk Maxwell.
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What are those things? For the past eight years, astronomers have been scratching their heads over a series of strange radio signals emanating from somewhere in the cosmos. And now, the mystery has deepened.

A new study shows that the so-called "fast radio bursts" follow a weirdly specific pattern -- a finding that the researchers behind the study say "is very hard to explain. There is something really interesting we need to understand," study co-author Michael Hippke, a scientist at the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, told New Scientist. "This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an E.T."

4/2/15
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/0 ... 84870.html