Macrocosm

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…