In the past decades, the mainstream of microelectronics progression was mainly powered by Moore's law focusing on IC miniaturization down to nano scale. However, there is a fast increasing need for "More than Moore" (MtM) products and technology that are based upon or derived from silicon technologies, but do not simply scale with Moore's law.

A classic R&B/Funk returns with a sublime new album. ConFunkShun had a 10 year run of hits from the late 70s + late 80s, delivering both funky party anthems ("Ffun") and soulful love ballads ("Love's Train") before lead singer Michael Cooper launched a successful solo career. A few years ago ConFunkShun reunited with original singer + songwriter Cooper + Felton Pilate and now deliver this sparkling new album featuring the hits "Your Night" + "I Miss You." ConFunkShun have scored 18 Top 40 R&B hits, with 8 Top 10 smashes. Lead vocalist Michael Cooper went on to a successful solo career with several Top 10 hits of his own.

Bad Religion is punk-rock's Bonnie Raitt, a cult band that persisted and persisted until the world finally came around to them. Around the time Robert Johnson's old Delta blues records started selling in the hundreds of thousands, Raitt started collecting platinum records and Grammys; likewise, in the era of Nirvana's and Green Day's run up the charts, Bad Religion began seeing big returns for the same kind of records they used to make for peanuts. STRANGER THAN FICTION is where Bad Religion cashes in--at the alternative register, anyway. Far from a sellout, it's a confident reaffirmation of all the band's strengths: anthemic rhythm-guitar hooks that are equal parts 70's punk, 80's hardcore and classic heavy metal; a fast but super-tight rhythm section; unswervingly political lyrics; and, in defiant contrast to all of the above, pop harmonies. Songs like "Incomplete", "Stranger Than Fiction" and "Handshake" (which equates record-company business deals with class and race warfare) enter your head as hurricanes of information about the world's ills. They remain there because they're built upon blistering punk-rock guitar hooks.

The human mind is an unlikely evolutionary adaptation. How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than anything a hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, saw humans as "divine exceptions" to natural selection. Darwin thought use of language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but his hypothesis remained an intriguing guess--until now. Combining state-of-the-art research with forty years of writing and thinking about language evolution, Derek Bickerton convincingly resolves a crucial problem that both biology and the cognitive sciences have hitherto ignored or evaded.