The 30,000-Year-Old Cave That Descends Into Hell. Tech. Collective-intelligence 2. 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. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley.
It’s an audacious task, but he has the intellectual breadth for it. “At some point,” Dr. “The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Is Time an Illusion? As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment—right now—is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present.
Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content.
That Mysterious Flow. The idea of decline in Western history. "Peter Singer's Solution to World Poverty," New York Times Sunda. September 5, 1999 By PETER SINGER 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. Is it possible to quantify our charitable burden? N the Brazilian film "Central Station," Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Bob is close to retirement. Sn't it counterproductive to ask people to do so much? Synthetic life patents 'damaging' 24 May 2010Last updated at 22:02 By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News 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.
Professor John Sulston said it would inhibit important research. US-based Dr Craig Venter led the artificial life form research, details of which were published last week. Prof Sulston and Dr Venter clashed over intellectual property when they raced to sequence the genome in 2000. Craig Venter led a private sector effort which was to have seen charges for access to the information. "The confrontation 10 years ago was about data release," Professor Sulston said.
"We said that this was the human genome and it should be in the public domain. 'Range of techniques' But Professor Sulston, who is based at the University of Manchester, said patenting would be "extremely damaging". Spooky Eyes: Using Human Volunteers to Witness Quantum Entanglem. 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. Photons make up light—and the fact that scientists regularly entangle these tiny packets of energy raised the possibility that humans might actually be able to observe this effect. Does dark matter come in two types? 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. Lurking in the 'hidden sector' Tantalizing hints. 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. Since then, Roth has made significant progress. “A lot of animals hibernate through the winter, and they share two key features: They get really cold, and they use very little oxygen,” he tells Danger Room. Roth’s Darpa-funded research might come in handy as he works out the kinks in this new procedure.
See Also: Video: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.