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Jun 11, 2023

Scientists Have Found the First Branch on the Tree of Life

Posted by in category: futurism

Something had to diverge from the trunk eventually.

Jun 11, 2023

Las Vegas police investigate aliens-in-backyard report after officer spots flying object

Posted by in category: futurism

Las Vegas police officers investigated reports of two unknown entities falling from the sky on the same night in late April that a family reported something ‘not human’ in their backyard.

One officer drove to a home on the night of April 30 and interviewed the family who called 911 after making the sighting, according to body camera footage obtained by USA TODAY. One of the family members told the officer they saw “a big creature” that was “long, 10 feet tall.”

The officer told the family he was looking into the claims because another officer saw something in the sky that matched the family’s description eight minutes earlier.

Jun 11, 2023

Many people believe morality is declining — but that may be an illusion

Posted by in category: futurism

A new study looks at people’s views of kindness, respect and honesty around the world and over seven decades.

Jun 11, 2023

Kierkegaard on the Value of Despair

Posted by in category: futurism

To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.

Jun 11, 2023

The Grand Canyon, a Cathedral to Time, Is Losing Its River

Posted by in category: evolution

Down beneath the tourist lodges and shops selling keychains and incense, past windswept arroyos and brown valleys speckled with agave, juniper and sagebrush, the rocks of the Grand Canyon seem untethered from time. The oldest ones date back 1.8 billion years, not just eons before humans laid eyes on them, but eons before evolution endowed any organism on this planet with eyes.

Spend long enough in the canyon, and you might start feeling a little unmoored from time yourself. The immense walls form a kind of cocoon, sealing you off from the modern world, with its cell signal and light pollution and disappointments. They draw your eyes relentlessly upward, as in a cathedral.

You might think you are seeing all the way to the top. But up and above are more walls, and above them even more, out of sight except for the occasional glimpse. For the canyon is not just deep. It is broad, too — 18 miles, rim to rim, at its widest. This is no mere cathedral of stone. It is a kingdom: sprawling, self-contained, an alternate reality existing magnificently outside of our own.

Jun 11, 2023

Vangelis: Vangelis Spiral

Posted by in category: futurism

Spiral

Jun 10, 2023

This Artificial Muscle Moves Stuff on Its Own

Posted by in categories: cyborgs, robotics/AI

Actuators inspired by cucumber plants could make robots move more naturally in response to their environments, or be used for devices in inhospitable places.

Jun 10, 2023

Europe’s most dangerous ‘supervolcano’ could be creeping toward eruption, scientists warn

Posted by in categories: asteroid/comet impacts, existential risks

Italy’s Campi Flegrei is showing some troubling early warning signs, but scientists caution that its eruption is far from certain.

Jun 10, 2023

The Weirdest Particles in the Universe

Posted by in category: particle physics

Neutrinos at one time it was thought a type of neutrino would become a tachyon.


Neutrinos are bizarre and ubiquitous and may just break the rules of physics.

Jun 10, 2023

Walter Benjamin on the Philosophy of History (and the End of it)

Posted by in category: futurism

How does Walter Benjamin use the insights of Marxism and theology to conceptualize history and the future?