[SEforA.org]
A group of scientists and concerned citizens have launched a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.

[News.com]
Intel has built a prototype of a processor with 80 cores that can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second. The company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

[SFGate.com]
Four amateur cave explorers in Sequoia National Park have discovered a vast cave formed 1 million years ago, a labyrinth that stretches more than 1,000 feet into a mountain and features some of the most beautiful rock formations ever seen. They've named it Ursa Minor.

[EurekAlert!]
In only a few generations, the male cricket on Kauai, one of the Hawaiian Islands, underwent a mutation—a sudden heritable change in its genetic material—that rendered it incapable of using song, its sexual signal, to attract female crickets, according to a new study by UC Riverside evolutionary biologists.

[The Washington Post]
The federal system for approving and regulating drugs is in serious disrepair, and a host of dramatic changes are needed to fix the problem, a blue-ribbon panel of government advisers concluded yesterday in a long-awaited report requested by the FDA.

[Northwest Florida Daily News]
A new $500 million laboratory officially opens next month with the aim to support an increasingly orphaned mission in medicine: long-term research. Even the most ambitious government grants generally support projects of just three to five years and increasingly are for "more applied" science, says Gerald M. Rubin, director of the new lab. Corporate research typically demands even more immediate, tangible results. Largely missing from the mix, he says, is support for scientists to follow their instincts on big, tough problems without the pressure to meet grant deadlines or hit quarterly milestones. Real breakthroughs come from unexpected or unintended observations, where someone was smart enough to see what they had and then follow up.

[ABC News]
Bill Clinton has announced the launch of an investment fund expected to raise more than $1 billion for renewable energy. The Green Fund would focus on reducing dependence on fossil fuels, creating jobs, lessening pollution and helping to reduce global warming, all while making a profit. Former World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn will be managing the fund.

[The Christian Science Monitor]
New Mexico is building a civilian spaceport.

[BBC News]
Richard Branson will invest $3 billion to fight global warming. The Virgin boss said he would commit all profits from his travel firms, such as airline Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, over the next 10 years. The funds will be invested in schemes to develop new renewable energy technologies, through an investment unit called Virgin Fuels. We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels.

[Technology Review]
Continuous flow pump being developed for artificial hearts that would have no pulse.

[The New York Times]
Researchers have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design. As a result, chip makers may be able to put the high-speed data communications industry on the same curve of increased processing speed and diminishing costs—the phenomenon known as Moore’s law—that has driven the computer industry for the last four decades.

[BBC News]
The Neanderthal may have survived in Europe much longer than previously thought. A study in Nature magazine suggests the species may have lived in Gorham's Cave on Gibraltar up to 24,000 years ago.

[EurekAlert!]
A group of tannins found primarily in cranberries can transform E. coli bacteria, a class of microorganisms responsible for a host of human illnesses, including urinary tract infections, in ways that render them unable to initiate an infection.