Grain Production: NOAA's studying a lot of the factors that play into growing foods.
Fruit Production: Organic fruits are a desired luxury. A much better status symbol than shark fin soup, and suggests that we can make labor more lucrative without environmental harm.
Dairy Production: Even in modern, wealthy economies shortages will follow changes in weather and diet patterns.
Housing: Is David Cameron trying to help bring down the marginal product of capital, and thus mean house prices, Europe and world-wide?
Health: Free market economic theory assumes both buyer and seller understand their own interests, end of life health care often fails that check.
Transportation: The FAA's long term funding bill is alive and kicking.
Energy: The amounts are small, but this fuel program suggests there's progress to leverage.
Security: Lacing Europe with tripwires right after talking about this being the Asian century? This is either a very deep and interesting story or bureaucratic inertia at its finest.
Pie-in-the-sky: Projects like this offer an opportunity to motivate the next bunch of kids to reach for the stars. Hopefully, this will turn out to be the most important discovery of the 21st century.
In a previous PCMIN-Pie, I suggested the "Romans" had a steam engine. A better way of putting that would have been to say: The Hellenistic world had examples of a steam engine, intricate clockwork and jars with interchangeable lids, all of the power, mechanical and craftsmanship required for an industrial revolution. Hopefully our descendants won't tell the same story of our space program.
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