On April 11th 2015 I delivered a presentation on the subject of Quantum Gravity in which I questioned the basic assumption that quantum is more fundamental than relativity.  Relativization is the name for the approach I propose.  In a nutshell let us try treating relativity as the more fundamental set of principles and make quantum field theory obey those.  The talk was well received.    There is still lots of work do on this and a lifetime to do it in, but the approach is now firmly not "crackpot".  Indeed as the money plot from my presentation shows this approach gets a very nice result for the behavior of black holes. 

The talk:

Recently two Transgender women were shot to death because they made a wrong turn and did not listen to or possibly did not understand the commands of the guards at the gate of the NSA.*  That was unfortunate.  The tragedy is in a day and age where the non PC complain that people are too PC and the PC proclaim that they are sensitive major media continue to identify those two as "men dressed as women".  With the notable exception of Reuters, all other media did not even mention the chance they were trans. 

During the launch of the latest Soyuz to the space station Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko calmly looked at an iPad.  Other than the cramped confines of the Soyuz capsule, and their space suits, they looked like business men discussing their presentation while flying economy class.  

Windows 10 build 9926 has been with us for 53 days, or almost two months.  While faster releases would be nice for those of us who don't mind bugs, it gives us an idea that Microsoft is going to release something that looks 99.9% like this build in the end.   My opinion after looking at this OS and using it as a daily driver on my Surface Pro 3 while teaching and researching is that it is the OS of the future in many ways.  In the future we will not interact with our computers by mouse and keyboard.  That future is finally becoming technically possible.  If other OS's don't evolve to deal with this shift then they will be left in the dust. 

Apparently, PLANCK says that BICEP2 did not detect gravitational waves.  The signal was mostly intergalactic dust.   That is my reading of a Google translate translation of an official Planck website.   This is even more tentative and un-reviewed than the arXiv postings that often set off a big story.  However, if this holds true it seems that BICEP2 did not indeed detect gravitational waves.  This may have officially finally settled the matter of BICEP2.  

To put it briefly, the habitability of a planet depends on it's distance from its star, the composition of its atmosphere, and the type of star its orbiting.  If our own solar system is at all typical then planets like those known around Kepler 444 and reported in the paper  arXiv:1501.06227 do not have atmosphere or have a Venus like atmosphere. 
If there is another Earth size planet to be found, father out, where it's a bit cooler it could be a home for life.    If it did have life that life could, due to the age of the planet, have been in existence long before life on Earth.