The Pentagon’s experimental research and development department, known as DARPA, has put a 100-year time frame on its goal of sending a manned mission to another star.
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This is probably your last chance to see Venus cross directly in front of the sun as the event will not reoccur until 2117. Scientists want to gather data to find exoplanets similar to Earth.
Cosmologist Charley Lineweaver argues that the potential diversity of life in outer space requires a change in the definition of life, from biological boundaries to physical ones.
The word’s biggest science experiment has found a home. Well, two homes. Radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia will search for data from the early days of the Universe.
Here’s a little philosophy/psychology experiment you can try for yourself. It just takes a few minutes, and the rest of this post will make much more sense if you do […]
Here’s an article by Thomas C. Terry getting a lot of attention on how openly our professors disparage Mormons in ways they would be ashamed to talk about members of […]
Now there’s one more thing that parents can give their children to ensure their future success in life – a digital trust fund. Yep, that’s right, it’s no longer enough for […]
I’ve been thinking in speculative directions lately, and nothing is more speculative than the question of whether we’ll one day be able to extend the human lifespan. The notion of […]
Late on Friday afternoon, AQAP posted this video “appeal” from a Saudi diplomat. The man, Abdullah al-Khalidi, is the deputy Saudi consul in Aden. He was kidnapped several weeks ago […]
Rosalind Franklin was instrumental to the discovery of DNA, but as the film photograph 51 demonstrates, hers was a life out of balance.
The blogosphere won’t stop talking about the Facebook IPO story. The stock (FB), which has been publicly traded for less than 2 weeks, has fallen below $30/share and the bearish […]
What is the Big Idea? Residents of Ciudad Juárez, home of the highest murder rate in Mexico, now have some relief from the violence through a virtual reality therapy program […]
Several video game companies have released mind-reading headsets that let players control virtual objects. Psychiatrists say the technology could help improves patients’ mental health.
What’s the Big Idea? Our Lady of Lourdes appears 18 times to a miller’s daughter collecting firewood in a small market town in France. A young woman leads an army through […]
What’s the Big Idea? What does it mean to be connected in the 21st century? Hope, interdependence, and possibly the creation of a new consciousness, says Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is the […]
To solicit financial support from the public, something the government has made easier recently, it helps to create funding tiers that allow you to connect personally with your audience.
Jane McGonigal discusses the skills we learn from gaming and how can they help us enhance, rather than detract from our ambitions as humans.
What’s the Big Idea? On May 20, Pakistan shut down Twitter for eight hours after the microblogging site refused to remove tweets that linked to a page encouraging people to post pictures […]
Facebook is working to release its own brand of smartphone. After a $16 billion payday at its IPO, the company has found it needs to justify its paycheck, especially as ad revenues decline.
Access to mobile computing, to allow employees to check email outside of working hours, increases productivity up to a point. After that it just burns people out and makes them unhappy.
I don’t know why this still surprises me (particularly since expressions like the one in the title to this post have been floating around for several hundred years), but whenever […]
A Russian Internet security firm has discovered what is perhaps the world’s most complicated computer virus ever. Given its complexity, a specific country may be behind the attacks.
New facial recognition technology that reads faces for emotional cues could be applied on a mass scale to better understand the general mood of entire populations, even whole nations.
Google’s chairman recently warned a British audience that the Web will remain vulnerable to cyber attacks for the next ten years. Education is essential to maintaining a free and open Internet.
However hard most political leaders try, almost whatever they do in an attempt to look fashionable and plugged into the real lives of voters, it never seems to quite work. […]
Thus did the Economistcharacterize the dynamic between China and India, arguing that how they “manage their own relationship will determine whether similar mistakes to those that scarred the 20th century […]
I’d like to add to the recent wave of eulogies in honor of Paul Fussell, poetry and culture critic, veteran of the Second World War and author of a classic […]
In response to a lot of feedback on yesterday’s post, the loudest and nastiest of which came from people who deny climate change, I have revised the essay to […]
I was raised to honor our military. One of my grandfathers was a Marine sergeant during World War II. The other was an Army lifer who served in three wars […]
It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also the bright thing to do, says former IOSCO chair Jane Diplock.