The issue is solar radiation. A solution to the solar storms, which have the ability to decompose our DNA in a matter of days, would be a deflector shield much like the one used by the Starship Enterprise.
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So let me remind you that The Atlantic does the best job of popularizing scientific studies. For one thing, it’s remarkably unideological. Both the left and the right—and the libertarians and the […]
Based on recent findings, scientists in the Netherlands believe that diamond crystals may one day form what amounts to an Internet connecting far flung quantum computers.
Could social media have found the Boston Marathon bombing suspect faster? Could they have prevented the bombing in the first place? These are just two of the questions technologists are now asking.
The manufacturing revolution that 3-D printing was meant to facilitate has stalled. Given that much of the printing hardware is decades old, fault lies with 3-D printing software, says Matthew Griffin.
The three winners of the Toshiba/NSTA ExploraVision Program, the world’s largest K-12 science competition, showcased their project at the White House Science Fair hosted by President Barack Obama.
130 years after Thomas Edison created the lighting industry with his invention of the incandescent bulb, new digital technology is creating novel uses for the unique properties of light.
You want to make this macroscopic object, you want to keep it behaving quantum mechanically which means isolating it very carefully from, within itself, all the interactions and the outside world.
In cosmology we are at a similar place to where Darwin was in biology.
Last week a paper ($) was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that is rocking the world of neuroscience. The crack team of researchers including neuroscientists, psychologists, geneticists and statisticians analysed […]
Last week taught us some important lessons about fear. One is that fear is neither good nor bad. What matters is how we let fear affect us. It spurred racism […]
Last night Ben Goldacre appeared on BBC Newsnight (viewable from UK ip addesses or portals only, for the next 7 days) discussing the ongoing havoc caused by the MMR scare in […]
In the age of social media we might have large networks but few if any real relationships.
It took India’s Jadav “Molai” Payeng 30 years to plant what’s now a 1,360-acre haven for birds and other animals. He says the second one may take another 30 years “but I am optimistic about it.”
The Regional Cabled Observatory — the largest of its kind — will use underwater sensors and cables to transmit many different kinds of data about the northeast Pacific Ocean.
No bodies of water exist on Mars. But they used to, thousands or perhaps millions of years ago, as this photo attests.
Everything is a bit more complicated in space. For instance, try wringing out a wet towel.
These are some of the highlights of the last three years in the life of our star.
It seems to me that programming is quite possibly the last job that people on this planet will have.
The main thing that we should be focusing on is how to create goals for AI that are compatible with what we value.
A pet peeve that I have in the context of happiness research is that it’s called happiness research.
I think almost all strategic problems could at least be improved upon if people would do more careful game theoretic analysis.
There are people who throw themselves on a live hand grenade to save their buddies and these folks don’t rise to power.
When you have a capitalistic society, to the extent that you encourage and nurture these kinds of prosocial, generative, giving attitudes, the more you will have success, not the less.
There’s every reason to think that in almost all theaters of human endeavor, education, business and the like, this kind of activity is a positive, not a negative.
This is becoming the central paradox of the Information Age: the easier it is for humans to create content and information on their digital devices, the more likely it is […]
Darwin appreciated the ways in which groups have to evolve compassionate, sympathetic, helping, altruistic behaviors, at least within those groups in order to survive and be successful, vis a vie, other groups.
The purpose of physics is to tell us the story about our world and where we as human beings fit in a wider cosmological scheme. That is why outsider physics, like folk art, works as good imaginative brain teasing.
I don’t think God can or should be the mascot for physics.
The Straw Vulcan is a nice trope for Hollywood to use such that Captain Kirk can save the day, but in reality we can’t be emotionless.