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. September 1, 2002 1 min read From the fixed past to the tangible present to the undecided future, it feels as though time flows inexorably on. But that is an illusion By Paul Davies Join Our Community of Science Lovers! If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. I’ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. If you subscribe to Scientific American, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.
In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can't-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world's best writing and reporting. The idea of decline in Western history. Synthetic life patents '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. 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.