philosophy, paradigm shifts of human's collective conciousness,
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The 30,000-Year-Old Cave That Descends Into Hell
There's a cave in France where no humans have been in 26,000 years. The walls are full of fantastic, perfectly-preserved paintings of animals, ending in a chamber full of monsters 1312-feet underground, where CO2 and radon gas concentrations provoke hallucinations . It's called the the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave , a really weird and mysterious place.
tech
collective-intelligence 2
consciousness
connections
consciousness
Findings - Doomsayers Beware, a Bright Future Beckons - NYTimes.
The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton.
The idea of decline in Western history - Google Books
Arthur Herman is the author of "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" as well as "The Idea of Decline in Western History and Joseph McCarthy." He has been a professor of history at Georgetown University, Catholic University, George Mason University, and the University of the South.
"Peter Singer's Solution to World Poverty," New York Times Sunda
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who later this month begins teaching at Princeton University, is perhaps the world's most controversial ethicist. Many readers of his book "Animal Liberation" were moved to embrace vegetarianism, while others recoiled at Singer's attempt to place humans and animals on an even moral plane. Similarly, his argument that severely disabled infants should, in some cases, receive euthanasia has been praised as courageous by some — and denounced by others, including anti-abortion activists, who have protested Singer's Princeton appointment. Singer's penchant for provocation extends to more mundane matters, like everyday charity.Feature Articles | Mind & Brain See Inside Time is an especially hot topic right now in physics.
Is Time an Illusion?: Scientific American
BBC News - Synthetic life patents 'damaging'
Details of the synthetic cell advance were announced last week A top UK scientist who helped sequence the human genome has said efforts to patent the first synthetic life form would give its creator a monopoly on a range of genetic engineering. Craig Venter led a private sector effort which was to have seen charges for access to the information. John Sulston was part of a government and charity-backed effort to make the genome freely available to all scientists.
The making of mankind's first synthetic cell is a form of genetic engineering that could open a scientific Pandora's box, some ethicists and scientists warned today. Researcher and entrepreneur Craig Venter unveiled the self-replicating bacteria cell overnight in the US after 15 years of research, hailing it a "powerful tool" for designing biology. But critics say Venter is playing God and exposing humanity and the environment to bacteria that could mutate, with unforseen consequences, or even be used as biological weapons. Professor Simpson said this form of artificial life was unlike other form of biomedical advances, where changes are contained within an individual, drug or crop that could be carefully checked before they are released into the environment.
Artificial life breakthrough 'a Pandora's box'
Spooky Eyes: Using Human Volunteers to Witness Quantum Entanglem
SPOOKY DETECTION: Human volunteers may soon get to detect quantum entanglement, a concept that Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance," with their own eyes. Image: iStockphoto The mysterious phenomenon known as quantum entanglement —where objects seemingly communicate at speeds faster than light to instantaneously influence one another, regardless of their distance apart—was famously dismissed by Einstein as "spooky action at a distance." New experiments could soon answer skeptics by enabling people to see entangled pulses of light with the naked eye. Although Einstein rebelled against the notion of quantum entanglement, scientists have repeatedly proved that measuring one of an entangled pair of objects, such as a photon, immediately affects its counterpart no matter how great their separation—theoretically. The current record distance is 144 kilometers, between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife.
Does dark matter come in two types? - physicsworld.com
Contradictory results from experiments searching for dark matter can be resolved if the elusive dark stuff is made up of two types of particle, according to physicists in the US. The new theory could clear up a mystery that came to light in 2008, when the PAMELA collaboration released one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet for the direct detection of dark matter – a substance thought to make up over 80% of the universe's matter. PAMELA saw a bump in the abundance of cosmic anti-electrons, also known as positrons, thought to be generated as dark-matter particles annihilate. But there was no concordant signal for anti-protons, which should also be generated by the annihilation. That isn't the only problem. If the PAMELA signal was indeed evidence for annihilation, the dark matter involved would be of a type that would never show up in direct-detection experiments, such as CDMS-II, located in a mine in Minnesota, US.
Pentagon Zombie-Maker’s New Project: Suffocate, Freeze, Reanimat
The scientist responsible for some of the Pentagon’s wildest research has devised a method that could one day save trauma patients, and even extend the shelf life of transplant organs. Step one: Suffocate the wounded. Step two: Put ‘em on ice. Mark Roth, a biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, has been working on suspended animation — inspired by the processes of animal hibernation — for years now. In 2005, with funding from Pentagon far-out research arm Darpa, Roth managed to reanimate rats suffering from massive blood loss, using hydrogen sulfide to knock them out and curb their oxygen consumption.
The father of parallel universes : Nature : Nature Publishing Gr
Letter to Editor of Nature: Robert P. Crease's thoughtful review of my book, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III, contained two minor factual errors. They are worth correcting, though, because the Web preserves and amplifies misinformation about Everett. 1. Everett did not enter Princeton University in 1953 as a doctoral student in mathematics, and later switch to physics.by Michel Mitov Seuil : 2010. 179 pp. 18 Soft-matter research investigates ambiguous states of matter, the paradoxical properties of which rely on the art of mixture.