Is Nanotechnology the New Intelligent Design?

And other issues: fighting AIDS, cyberthreats, and children’s health problems.

• Remember those severed feet in Vancouver? Two of them have been matched up.
• A new study suggests the ancestor of the virus that causes AIDS evolved millions of years earlier than believed, opening the door to further understanding of how broadly HIV-like viruses are currently distributed, and how animals carry them without getting sick.
• People in religious countries are more likely to see nanotechnology as immoral, according to a new report. I’m dying to know how this was assessed for the report. I wouldn’t have thought most people had a working understanding of what nanotechnology is, much less a sense of it as a moral or immoral force.
• And speaking of answering questions: if you’re pregnant, consider signing your unborn child up for the largest long-term study of children’s health ever planned, to be conducted from pregnancy on through birth, childhood and young adulthood. And 21+ years from now, as all the data gets analyzed, you may get to feel really righteous, or really guilty.
• The U.S. Commission on Cybersecurity is calling for rapid action from President-elect Barack Obama, due to the country’s precarious position in the battle against cyber-threats. Read more about that threat here, here and here.