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Scientific American editors Mark Fischetti and Michael Moyer discuss some of the sessions they attended at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here s the sort of crazy idea that animates our office conversation at Scientific American . It all started with my colleague Michael Moyer s joke that a certain politician could build his moon base using a balloon: just capture the hot air and float all the way up. Ha ha, we all know that balloons don t work in outer space

In the December issue of Scientific American, author David Weinberger reports from the frontiers of knowledge. His story " The Machine That Would Predict the Future " explores the promise of the FuturICT project , an attempt to build a computer model of all the social, economic, ecological and scientific factors at play in the world.