February 24, 2014

This is Your Brain on a Laser Beam

It’s mathematically possible for your consciousness to exist without your body.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

We are closer to achieving science fiction: your brain–your personality, your mind, your soul, your entire being–may one day be available on a disc. It’s mathematically possible for your consciousness to exist without your body. This big idea and the research that supports it is explored in the chapter “Mind Beyond Matter” in Michio Kaku’s latest book The Future of the Mind, released Tuesday. Catch him Tuesday night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Starts With A Bang

Could dark matter be the same thing as dark energy?

Two parts of our Universe that seem to be unavoidable are dark matter and dark energy. Could they really be two aspects of the same thing?

Close-up of an analog weight scale needle pointing to zero grams, with a black background.

Hard Science

You’re made of energy: The strange truth about where mass comes from

“A person’s mass is made not of ‘stuff’ in the way we normally think about it, but rather our mass is made of energy.”

An illustration of Galileo Galilei with a historical text and a lunar sketch alongside.

13.8

Why seeing Galileo’s original experiments left me speechless

“I was stunned. Here in front of me was the original apparatus through which a new vision of the world was slowly and painfully brought to light.”

Global geoid map with colorful variations representing differences in Earth's gravity field. The scale ranges from -100 (low) to 100 (high). Europe's position is central.

Starts With A Bang

Scalar fields: the secret sauce of theoretical physics

Scalars, vectors, and tensors come up all the time in physics. They’re more than mathematical structures. They help describe the Universe.

Collage of geopolitical symbols, featuring a close-up of a man's bald head, China's flag, a globe highlighting Taiwan, and circuit patterns.

The Present

Why the USSR and China fell behind the US in the Chip Cold War

Both nations made missteps, but China still has a chance to make up lost ground.

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Surprising Science

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