No Death, No Taxes
The libertarian futurism of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
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New York’s Maker Faire: More Than Just Digital Quilting
Technology and society: The “maker” movement could change how science is taught and boost innovation. It may even herald a new industrial revolution
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Seasteading: Cities on the Ocean
Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?
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The Evolved Self-Management System
If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can “give permission” to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn’t have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties…
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Astronomers Find Biggest Black Holes Yet
Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought. Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to…
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The Politics of Famine
A common misconception is that hunger crises are about a lack of food. In Northern Kenya, where an estimated half a million Kenyan children and pregnant or breast-feeding women suffer acute malnutrition, there is food but the real issue is poverty. In April the World Bank reported that 44 million people worldwide were pushed over…
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Three-Quarters of Climate Change is Man-Made
Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, according to a pair of Swiss climate modellers who conclude that most of the observed warming — at least 74 % — is almost certainly due to human activity.
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Earth in Balmy 2080
We cannot say for sure what kind of a home Earth will offer in 2080, but averages made across thousands of model runs help paint a picture of what a 2 degrees Celsius warmer world would look like.
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Signal for Consciousness in Brain Marked by Neural Dialogue
Results indicate that “activity in a certain region is not sufficient to generate consciousness,” neuroscientist Simon van Gaal explains. Instead, he posits, different regions must exchange information before consciousness can arise.
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Would You Kill One Person to Save Five?
This dilemma is a famous philosophical conundrum that was originally called the “trolley problem.” Now a team from Michigan State University’s psychology department has used virtual-reality technology to test how we respond psychologically and physiologically when faced with this problem.