ethics

When former President Bush mentioned human-animal hybrids during a State of the Union speech in 2006, most of the audience probably sat scratching their heads for a second. However, in the years since then, transplanting human genes into animals, whether to make better milk or study human diseases, has become a bigger and bigger issue.

Now, a year after English scientists implanted human stem cells into bovine egg cells, Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences has launched a study to determine the ethics of creating human/animal hybrids.

[ Read Full Story ]

A newly formed International Committee on Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has asked nations to ban military bots from space and prevent robots from toting nuclear weapons. No doubt, human characters from science fiction stories such as "Battlestar Galactica" and "Terminator" might agree.

[ Read Full Story ]

As unmanned drones become a larger part of how America makes war, fully autonomous fighting robots seem less a possibility than an eventuality. But how do we ensure that these future autonomous weapons conform to the ethics we would expect from a human combatant?

[ Read Full Story ]

It seems as though pharmaceutical giant Merck (best known for the deadly painkiller Vioxx), has teamed up with science publishing titan Elsevier (who, not long ago, got caught producing a rather questionable math journal) to put out a fake peer-reviewed medical journal.

[ Read Full Story ]

I can say with fair confidence that if an astronaut died on a short mission to the moon, the craft would turn around and come back. But it gets thornier if the astronauts are on Mars, or even halfway there—any place where turning back would be inadvisable or even impossible.
There are really only two options for the body: Leave it there or bring it home.

[ Read Full Story ]