Bioart emerges where biological science, technology, and aesthetics collide. For one terminally ill artist, it offered a chance at immortality.
Terraforming Mars moves from science fiction to scientific possibility — but what obstacles must we overcome first?
The world’s oldest practicing doctor, Dr Howard Tucker, has revealed his lust for life — and you won’t believe what he has to say.
A new European study out Monday throws into question conventional wisdom that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are on a collision course that will take
Swiss scientists have created a new plastic-like material that’s flexible, biodegradable, and even edible. The secret? It’s still alive.
The material, which was created by a team from Empa in Switzerland, manages to balance biodegradability with toughness and versatility – a feat that is far from easy in materials science.
The researchers processed fibers from the mycelium (the root-like part) of the split-gill mushroom (Schizophyllum commune) into a liquid mixture, without actually killing them off or destroying their natural biological functions.
SpaceX is making significant advancements in its Starship program, with plans for increased production, upcoming Mars missions, and ongoing developments in technology and infrastructure, despite facing some challenges ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.
🚀 Q: What is SpaceX’s target for Starship launches to Mars in 2026? A: SpaceX aims to launch 5 Starships to Mars in 2026, with Elon Musk estimating a 50/50 chance of meeting the 2026 Mars window.
🌎 Q: Which region on Mars is the primary landing target? A: The Arcadia region is the top candidate for landing locations due to its large ice deposits. Mission Objectives.
🛰️ Q: What is the main goal of the first Starship flight to Mars? A: The first flight aims to prove the ability to reach Mars by sending minimum viable vehicles to maximize learning and demonstrate key technologies.
🏗️ Q: What are the objectives for the second Starship flight to Mars? A: The second flight will focus on landing initial infrastructure, confirming resource availability, preparing landing areas, and delivering equipment for future human missions. Resource Utilization.
⛏️ Q: What are the key goals for the third Starship flight to Mars? A: The third flight will prioritize resource mining, propellant generation, road and pad construction, habitat building, and increasing power generation and storage.
Quantum computing, a field of scientific exploration, is based on the quantum mechanical principle of superposition, which allows particles to exist in multiple states simultaneously. This principle, along with entanglement, a quantum phenomenon that enables particles to be instantaneously connected, provides quantum computers with computational power beyond the reach of classical computers. The development of quantum computing, rooted in the early 20th century, is a testament to intellectual daring, as scientists grappled with concepts that defied logic but were supported by experimental evidence.
Craters on the moon could hold over a trillion dollars’ worth of platinum and other precious metals deposited there by asteroids. That means lunar prospecting may be more economically viable than travelling to asteroids individually to mine them – but the legality of doing this on the moon remains unclear.
Jayanth Chennamangalam, an independent researcher in Vancouver, Canada, and his colleagues looked at whether there may be commercial quantities of platinum group metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium) that were left behind by asteroids hitting the lunar surface.
Image: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Mining craters on the moon could be more practical than extracting precious metals from asteroids, but it might also introduce new legal difficulties.
For more than 40 years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization has turned its gaze toward the cosmos in search for an answer to one of humanity’s greatest questions: Are we alone? Often taking the form of the “Fermi paradox”—a 75-year-old thought experiment that explores why there are so many worlds, yet seemingly no alien civilizations—this grand question has inspired a lot of possible solutions. Maybe life is much rarer than we imagine? Maybe it’s incredibly difficult to evolve into a modern civilization like ours? Or maybe aliens are speaking in a language we simply don’t understand.
The universe speaks in mathematics, yet we experience it in poetry. This fundamental paradox — that objective quantities somehow give rise to subjective qualities — represents perhaps the most profound mystery in the architecture of consciousness. At the precise intersection where measurable physical magnitudes transform into felt experience lies perception itself, functioning as the universe’s most elegant translation device, converting the quantitative substrate of reality into the qualitative texture of conscious life.
Consider the photon, that discrete packet of electromagnetic energy oscillating at precisely 550 nanometers. Physics describes it with mathematical precision: wavelength, frequency, amplitude — pure quantity divorced from any subjective dimension. Yet when this photon encounters the rhodopsin molecules within our retinal cells, something extraordinary occurs. The quantitative description remains accurate but suddenly insufficient. The same electromagnetic radiation that physics measures as wavelength 550nm becomes, through the alchemy of perception, the irreducible experience we call “green.” This transformation represents not merely a change in descriptive language but a fundamental ontological shift — the emergence of an entirely new category of being.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty recognized this threshold when he observed that “the body is our general medium for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 147). The lived body serves as the crucial mediator between the quantitative realm that physics describes and the qualitative realm that consciousness inhabits. Through our sensorimotor engagement with the world, objective magnitudes undergo a metamorphosis into subjective meanings. The body is not merely a receiver of information but an active participant in the creation of experiential reality itself.