Science
Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studio. Kaku explains how we might transfer our consciousness to laser beams to explore the universe at the speed of light.
With the help of a tiny fragment of zircon extracted from a remote rock outcrop in Australia, the picture of how our planet became habitable to life about 4.4 billion years ago is coming into sharper focus. READ MORE: Oldest bit of crust firms up idea of cool early Earth
A new study links believing in hell, and perhaps even thinking about it, with lower levels of happiness and satisfaction in life.
Most of us have heard of the famous double-slit experiment. Usually it’s played out in a lab in seconds. But there’s one version, dreamt up by physicist John Archibald Wheeler, which can be played out over much of the galaxy, over millions of years. His thought experiment suggests that we could retroactively determine the fate of ancient photons.
Foster Gamble in a short video clip of scientific exploration — illustrating how consciousness comes into form, and its importance in harnessing the energy of the future.
Scientists have developed a way for monkeys to control “avatars” that could be used to help paralyzed people move their bodies. In the tests scientists found that brain signals from the master monkey’s mind could be used to stimulate an avatar’s spinal cord to control its movements
Take 300,000 computer-controlled mirrors, each 7 feet high and 10 feet wide. Control them with computers to focus the Sun’s light to the top of 459-foot towers and you have the world’s biggest solar power plant. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is now operational and delivering solar electricity. At full capacity, the system produces a gross total of 392 megawatts (MW) of solar power, enough electricity to provide 140,000 homes with clean energy. Scientists at Stanford University have recently improved the efficiency of a revolutionary solar cell by around 100 times.
New research suggests that the shapes of both plants and animals evolved in response to the same mathematical and physical principles. By working through the logic underlying Kleiber s Law (metabolism equals mass to the three-quarter power) and applying it separately to the geometry of plants and animals, researchers were able to show that plants and animals display equivalent energy efficiencies
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-02-evolution-geometries-life-scientists-longstanding.html#jCp
A 13th-century Viking code that has eluded scholars was finally cracked by a runologist working at the University of Oslo. So, what was the secret message? “Kiss me.”
Researchers in the US have overcome a key barrier to making nuclear fusion reactors a reality. In results published in Nature, scientists have shown that they can now produce more energy than the fuel put into an experiment. The use of fusion as a source of energy remains a long way off, but the latest development is an important step toward that goal.
Rupert Sheldrake: Now that science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads. These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith. The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.
NASA and Houston-based company GRoK Technologies will work on the development of new “breakthrough products,” noninvasive medical technologies designed to “regenerate bone and muscle tissues.”
Human skin cells have been turned into stem cells which have the potential to develop into fully-formed embryos, simply by bathing them in weak citric acid for half an hour, a leading scientist has told The Independent on Sunday.
On Tuesday evening more than 3 million people tuned in to watch ‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye debate Ken Ham, founder of the biblically literalist Creation Museum on the topic ‘Is creation a viable model of origins?’ Mr. Ham believes that the world was created over a six 24-hour-day period about 6,000 years ago, and that all living land animals today are descended from those taken aboard Noah’s Ark some 4,500 years ago. Nye challenged Ham’s literal biblical view on several fronts, pointing out that radioisotopic and ice core data shows that the Earth has been around for far longer than the 6,000 years that Ham says it is, as does our ability to view stars that are more than 6,000 light years away. Nye also pointed out that Noah’s Ark, were it constructed the way the Bible says it was, wouldn’t actually stay afloat.”
A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests memory is faulty and can insert things from the present into memories from the past. In terms of accuracy, your memory is no video camera. Rather, memory rewrites the past with current information, updating your recollections with new experiences to aid survival. Love at first sight, for example, is more likely a trick of your memory than a Hollywood-worthy moment. READ MORE: Your memory is no video camera: It edits the past with present experiences
