David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind, best known for his argument about the difficulty of what he termed the "hard problem" of consciousness, which he typically discusses by way of a thought experiment featuring zombies who act and talk exactly like humans, and yet have no …

2

1

Astronomers have used a high-energy burst of light from a distant galaxy to test the fabric of space and time. The work is the best test yet of attempts to create a 'theory of everything'. More Articles

16

9

What is time? No, really, what is it? A dimension of space-time, says relativity, but is it physical? Or just mental? Why does it seem to move forward and not back? Does the universe acknowledge the arrow of time that we experience? How big is time? Does our notion of "now" h …

19

12

Hypercompact stellar systems result when a supermassive black hole is violently ejected from a galaxy, following a merger with another supermassive black hole. The evicted black hole rips stars from the galaxy as it is thrown out.

21

15

Now a segment of the Green movement presents a fresh challenge to mankind's place within nature. Humans, the thinking goes, are one species among the many, a life form coexisting with others, our rights commensurate with those of snail darters, mosquitoes and coral reefs.

20

58

The nearby, well-known and very bright star may soon explode in a supernova, according to data released by U.C. Berkeley researchers Tuesday. More Articles

56

113

Ray Kurtzweil envisions a good future in the melding of man and machine. He is described as leading a cult of Singularity followers. What do you think?

0

0

Who Hears A Horton ...

In our galaxy there are over 700,000,000,000 stars, each capable of creating conditions suitable for the evolution of intelligent life. And our galaxy is over 13,000,000,000 years old.

6

24

Like some kind of massive cosmic toilet bowl, the multitude of galaxies that populate the known Universe are swirling inexplicably toward a tiny 20-degree plane of deep space. More Articles

42

46

Hubble was not the first space telescope but it is by far the most sophisticated, providing earthlings with unprecedented detail and spectacular views of their universe.

4

3

A Duke University professor and his graduate student have discovered a universal principle that unites the curious interplay of light and shadow on the surface of your morning coffee with the way gravity magnifies and distorts light from distant galaxies. More Articles

11

7

For the first time, superstring theorists can point to a place where their formulas help other physicists understand something they can see in their experiments.

17

13

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

4

5

This is a brief technical writeup of the specs behind Google's new CADIE project. I sure hope they know what they're doing, it sounds like they're really pushing the envelope. 20% time indeed!

2

4

Introducing CADIE! Looks like those folks at Google have done it again. Google CADIE is sort of an AI that basically uses Google's search data to create a "personality" for the internet. "She" created her own homepage and everything!

3

2

..the universe underwent an unimaginably brief but enormous growth spurt immediately after birth. The baby cosmos ballooned from one billionth of a trillionth of a hydrogen atom's diameter to that of a soccer ball within just 10-35 seconds...

9

4

In the first observation if its kind, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University were able to watch what happens when a star the size of 50 suns explodes.

21

12

In a nominating letter, Nidhal Guessoum, chair of physics at American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, wrote that d'Espagnat "has constructed a coherent body of work which shows why it is credible that the human mind is capable of perceiving deeper realities."

5

4

Two newfound black holes on the verge of crashing into each other could be creating "ripples" in the fabric of space-time, astronomers suggest. More Articles

28

69

d/t

.:⋅⋅⋅ SPACE ⋅⋅⋅:. Why is time so hard to comprehend? Should it be easier to comprehend than space?

51

136

About 1 MILLION-fold cheaper in 6 years! Only about 20 human genomes have been fully sequenced to date. Complete Genomics said it will sequence 1,000 by year's end. Elsewhere the company has said that they will sequence 1 million humans in the next five years!

1

1

The Singularity is one of the more interesting things to come out of fiction in the last 20 years or so, however this article incorrectly credits Ray Kurzweil with popularizing it.

0

0

# Conventional wisdom has it that a large star eventually collapses to a black hole, but some theoretical models suggest it might instead become a so-called naked singularity.

5

7

The Event Horizon

A simplified definition of the event horizon is the threshold where an object or particle must be traveling at the speed of light in order to prevent falling into the black hole.

13

22

Physicists don't like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea.

18

88