Fire up the tradition-making machine: It's time to update the Thanksgiving menu for future eaters.Image: Lore Sjöberg

This Thanksgiving, millions of Americans will sit down to a traditional meal in celebration of all that the New World has given us.

In memory of our ancestors — or the ancestors of the people who bought our ancestors, or the ancestors of the people who decided our ancestors didn’t really deserve land if they weren’t going to properly exploit it, or the ancestors of the people who resented our ancestors for coming over here and taking all the jobs they didn’t want — we’ll sit down...

Last year, federal officials warned that Americans were on the verge of “a post-antibiotic era.” And that’s exactly what the Pentagon’s far-out research agency is after.

As long as they’ve got a replacement at the ready, of course. In the military’s latest round of small business solicitations, Darpa is making a long-shot request for an all-out replacement to antibiotics, the decades-old standard for killing or injuring bacteria to demolish a disease. In its place: the emerging field of nanomedicine would be used to fight bacterial threats. The agency’s “Rapidly Adaptable Nanotherapeutics” i...