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November will bring plenty to see in the night sky, including meteor showers rich with fireballs and a celestial alignment with the moon.

The earthlings are yet again going to experience the breathtaking celestial event known as Leonid meteor shower which will be active from November 3 to December 2 this year and peak overnight from November 16 to 17.

When Earth travels through the debris left behind by comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle the Leonids are produced. It happens during its highly elliptical orbit around the Sun every 33 years, reported Space.

It is worth noting that the Leonids are regarded as some of the fastest meteors, zipping through the sky at 44 miles (71 kilometres) per second, as per NASA.

Computer scientists need to grapple with the possibility they will accidentally create sentient artificial intelligence (AI) — and to plan for those systems’ welfare, a new study argues.

The report published Thursday comes from an unusual quarter: specialists in the frontier field of animal consciousness, several of whom were signatories of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett explains how his functionalist perspective can shed some light on the apparent mystery of conscious experience. Interviewed by Louis Godbout.

(Aria from J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations played by Andrew Rangell, Keyboard Masterworks, Steinway \& Sons).

Sabine Hossenfelder is a very popular science communicator who focuses largely on topics in physics. Although much of her content is effective and without issue, there is an undercurrent of anti-establishment rhetoric that has grown immensely as of late, and it is an enormous problem. Sabine is a not a charlatan like most of my other targets, and this is not a hit piece, but rather commentary on this aspect of her work and how it came to be. If you are a fan of hers, consider this perspective.

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On this day in 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo was correct in believing that the earth went around the sun.


2. In the first place, I wish to congratulate the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for having chosen to deal, in its plenary session, with a problem of great importance and great relevance today: the problem of ‘the emergence of complexity in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology

The emergence of the subject of complexity probably marks in the history of the natural sciences a stage as important as the stage which bears relation to the name of Galileo, when a univocal model of order seemed to be obvious. Complexity indicates precisely that, in order to account for the rich variety of reality, we must have recourse to a number of different models.

This realisation poses a question which concerns scientists, philosophers and theologians: how are we to reconcile the explanation of the world – beginning with the level of elementary entities and phenomena – with the recognition of the fact that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’?