The most emails I ever received about an article was Social Science And Social News Sites because of a very small part of the article where we mentioned that we swapped out the Digg submission button with Slashdot.

My take was that our kind of serious science content is just not right for Digg, since the last hundred or so articles were buried by readers and thus not a good fit for their audience. Not so, said the people who wrote. They contended Digg has an internal bury list and that it was probably marketing related rather than being done by users.

Before political science existed as a discipline it was assumed all countries wanted the same thing; land and security. The Industrial Revolution brought a new focus on strategic resources.

In the late 1800s America was already producing more strategic resources than anyone and in World War 2 the USA asserted its industrial might geopolitically. In the post-World War Two era the American focus as a superpower was on ideology and trade.

Since that time, the recurring question has been 'who's next?' Rome fell from power, as did Mongolia and Great Britain. America would fall too, it was said. Some country would replace it.

Albert Fert of Université Paris-Sud and Peter Grünberg of Forschungszentrum received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 for their independent work on Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), which basically blazed the trail for high-capacity storage devices in small form factors like MP3 players.

The Mandala is a detailed sand representation of the residence of the Medicine Buddha and one will be constructed by Tibetan monks over four days in Paris while simultaneously being displayed virtually in Second Life.

This confluence of technology and religion will get the message out about the situation in Burma, according to members of the Mind Science Institute and executives at a London think tank called Unfrozenmind, who have collaborated on the Second Life simulcast of the actual event.

Not everyone - okay, no one outside the Chinese government - is all that happy about things in Burma these days so they believe this will promote awareness of the situation there and aid Monks and Nuns of Burma in their efforts at independence.