Criticism of the patent system is increasing and abolishment too is being considered for what became a hindrance - not a facilitator - to science

This is not the place to debate the immense subject of climate science but it is necessary to say something about "climategate" in order to explain what happens when scientists and politicians collude to distort, hide and even destroy critical (raw) data and methodologies which, unlike the output of CERN, have absolutely colossal financial implications for every man, woman and child on this planet

AcaWiki is a promising new project to build a body of scientific knowledge that is free to use, study, improve, and redistribute. Instead of waiting for journals to make papers more available, they're building a free equivalent that will be just as useful.

Some time ago I wrote an article about Jim Kent, an American biologist who used free and open software to race Craig Ventnor to the finishing line, sequencing the human genome. That was very big, cutting edge science with a global audience and reach. We live in an age when big science is done, overwhelmingly, in big businesses, universities, research labs and government laboratories.

One of the things that disappoints me is the lack of understanding of what's at stake with open source among some of the other open communities. For example, some in the world of open science seem to think it's OK to work with Microsoft, provided it furthers their own specific agenda. Here's a case in point...

There’s been something that’s been bothering me for quite some time, so I think I’ll climb up on my soapbox for a bit here.

A 3D printer has been prototyped which can create real copies of its own component parts, a self-replicating machine. The people behind it have kept costs down to less than a thousand bucks and are developing it under a GNU public license. They say you will be able to get the machine to copy itself and then give away the copies for free.

While it may not let you go where no man has gone before, Celestia is an amazing desktop application that lets you go anywhere in the known Universe.You can view any object in the Solar System, travel to distant stars, and even leave the Galaxy, traveling faster than the speed of light, viewing high-res images of objects millions of miles away.