Macrocosm
cevans | December 4, 2009
Whilst they (as Homer's Iliad in a nut)
A world of wonders in one closet shut
-- Inscription on the Tradescant family tombstone, London
There are two things which have deeply terrified me in recent science news. The first, as you may have heard, is that a bumper crop of some 32 "new" planets was discovered by a team of European researchers armed with a spectrograph called HARPS, or High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Searcher. The second is that Israeli scientists have made a robot small enough to crawl through human veins.
The offending nanobots.
Why do these things strike horror in…