Stephen Collinson: President Donald Trump's legal team will go into his Senate trial on Tuesday arguing that he should never have been impeached because his conduct over Ukraine does not amount to a criminal offense. read more
The University of Vermont: A team of scientists has repurposed living cells -- scraped from frog embryos -- and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide "xenobots" can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient) -- and heal themselves after being cut. "These are novel living machines," says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism." The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM--and then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University. "We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can't do," says co-leader Michael Levin who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts, "like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microplastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque." read more
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has begun informing Republican officials he plans to appoint financial services executive Kelly Loeffler to the state's soon-to-be vacant Senate seat, according to three people familiar with the conversations. read more
Marsha Blackburn is, was and always will be a nut case only right wing idiots would vote for.
Unfortunately the talking heads spend to much time trying to understand how elected republicans can take the positions that they take. It's easy! They are political cowards unwilling to confront their voters. More time should be spent trying to understand republican voters.