Misinterpretations of entropy and conflation with additional misunderstandings of the second law of thermodynamics are ubiquitous among scientists and non-scientists alike and have been used by creationists as the basis of unfounded arguments against evolutionary theory.
Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundreds of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood.
To the extent that modafinil becomes the latest lifestyle drug, as ubiquitous as Viagra, scientists warn that cutting back on sleep, even by one hour a night, can have long-term neurological and cardiovascular effects that are only now being recognized.
"The key to the future is how can you make such conversations socially even more normal?" Mr. Singhal is talking about what computer scientists call ubiquitous computing or intelligence augmentation — the idea that computers will no longer be devices we turn on, but will be so integrated into our everyday environment that we can ask them to do things without ever lifting a finger.
These materials are so ubiquitous, in fact, that scientists and engineers from a very wide range of disciplines are likely to encounter them in quite disparate settings.
Scientists want these ubiquitous gadgets to be put to work helping them detect and investigate earthquakes.
"I sensed a ubiquitous form of computing for scientists and researchers," says Leonard Kleinrock, 65, the UCLA computer-science professor who installed the first node of the Pentagon-funded Advanced Research Projects Agency network, the forerunner of the Internet, in 1969.
Moreover, the flood of experimental results generated by inexpensive sensors, combined with the Internet's ubiquitous connectivity, is threatening to drown scientists in vast data sets often called "big data".
We observe that these scientists work outside the ubiquitous method-based software development paradigms, using instead a knowledge acquisition-based approach to software development.
I have lost count of the number of scientists who have agreed with the ubiquitous London virologist, John Oxford, and his "dial-an-Armageddon" quotations.
