A "debunked" scientific breakthrough refuses to go away.Wired Magazine's Charles Platt discovers an underground network of reputable scientists quietly chasing the chimera of cold fusion.

When I saw that the Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion would be held in Vancouver within a few weeks, I decided to go there to find out for myself just how wacky these cold fusionists would turn out to be. 
In a huge, grandiose convention center I found about 200 extremely conventional-looking scientists, almost all of them male and over 50. In fact some seemed over 70, and I realized why: The younger ones had bailed years ago, fearing career damage from the cold fusion stigma.

Digital featuritis is making even the simplest appliances strange and complex, observes the Sunday New York Times (free registration may be required).

"When I point the remote of my Toshiba TV in a certain direction while ending the mute command, for instance, I also turn on my Cambridge Soundworks table radio nearby at full volume," Dr. Tenner said.

Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Computers, cell phones, email, and other hard-to-tame new technologies designed to make life more rewarding are driving more and more people into fits of "tech rage."

[A survey] found that 83 per cent of corporate IT managers had seen enraged workers violently abuse computer equipment. . . .Researchers at IBM are working on something called the "Emotion Mouse." Measuring skin temperature, sweat and heart rate, it is designed to know when a user is about to blow - and perhaps suggest, on-screen, that he or she take a break. 

I have to admit that as a published book author, I am not unfamiliar with Googling. Like so many writers, I'm a compulsive auto-Googler . . . 

photo courtesy of Apple

Looking like a 1960s space-age vision of the home computer of the future, Steve Jobs's new line of iMacs has analysts and consumers saying "iWant." "It's elegant and beautiful," said Stephanie Bullis, a design student from Mount Shasta, California. "I love the art of it. If I hadn't just bought a new PowerMac, I'd get one. It reminds me of a little friend. It's like having a little friend for a computer."

20 Years of E-conversation

Since 1981 Internet users have conversed in public newsgroups on every conceivable subject. And now virtually all of it is a free mouse-click away at Google.com - even the teenage postings of American Taliban fighter John Walker.

A plea for assistance in battling the first widespread computer virus, The Morris Worm, was posted in November 1988. The "World Wide Web Project" was announced by Tim Berners-Lee in August 1991, Linus Tovalds proudly posted to announce the new Linux operating system in October 1991, and Marc Andreessen's first Netscape announcement appears three years later.

Peer review is how scientists and scholars keep each other honest and competent whenever they seek to be funded and published. At least that's the ideal. But according to scientist and publisher David Horrobin peer review itself could do with some independent review.

If the pronouncements of science are to be greeted with public confidence - and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that such confidence is low and eroding - it should be able to demonstrate that peer review, "one of the sacred pillars of the scientific edifice," is a process that has been validated objectively as a reliable process for putting a stamp of approval on work that has been done. Peer review should also have been validated as a reliable method for making appropriate choices as to what work should be done. Yet when one looks for that evidence it is simply not there.

- David Horrobin

Exposure therapy is a staple in the treatment of fears and phobias. New research from Emory University suggests cutting edge virtual reality simulations of planes, bridges, Vietnam rice paddies and other phobia inducers can be as effective as the real thing.

The biggest research project to date looks at the safety evidence for wireless phone technology and says . . . it's time for informed consumer consent. Reuters (brief) | The full report (requires free registration)

A revolutionary communications processor delivers buckets o' bandwith in the twinkling of an eye.

"These electro-optic modulators will permit real-time communication. You won't have to wait for your computer to download even the largest files."

It's goodbye World Wide Wait, hello home holodeck.

SPECIAL SECTION Is it Safe? The angst over Genetically Modified foods and Organisms Australia's innovative grass roots Consensus Conference on GMOs makes for a stylish primer on a spooky subject: "Waiter, there's a gene in my food." Arpad Pusztai - the British scientist whose rats were sickened by GM potatoes and lost his job for speaking out about it - is vindicated by his peers. GREENPEACE sows the seeds of a consumer revolt. Twenty independent Canadian scientists take a microscope to Health Canada's "rigorous" approval process for GM foods and find it seriously wanting. Journalist Ingeborg Boyens indicts the Unnatural Harvest. Browse bestsellers on BIOTECHNOLOGY at Amazon.com Tell us what YOU think. But wait . . . Two new strains of GM rice vie to fulfill dreams of a compassionate, enviro-friendly biotech: A Swiss scientist claims his "golden rice" could save a million Third World children from fatal vitamin A deficiency each year.  He and his colleagues promise to give it away free to subsistence farmers. But CBC radio's Quirks and Quarks reports that skeptics say the plan can't work.  By sucking up more CO2, another "amaizing" strain of GM rice could put a chill on global warming and increase crop yields 30 percent.

IN YOUR interFACE

Steven Johnson on building better bridges from HEADSPACE  to CYBERSPACE.