“Such stunning cosmic coincidences reveal so much about nature.” ~ Leonidas Moustakas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away, the inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 and approximately 11 billion light-years. The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Raphael Gavazzi and Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Treu says the odds of seeing such a special alignment are so small that they “hit the jackpot” with this discovery. “When I first saw it I said ‘wow, this is insane!’ I could not believe it!” But this sight is more than just an incredible novelty. It’s also a very rare phenomenon that can offer insights into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and the curvature of the Universe itself. The discovery is part of ...

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A group of experts from around the world held a first of its kind conference July 2008 on global catastrophic risks. They discussed what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as we know it. Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain talked about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet. On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference, experts focused on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens. "Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species." Bostrom is a philosopher and a leading thinker of transhumanism, a movement that advocates not only the study of the potential threats and promises that future technologies could pose to human life but also ...

“No one can surely say that they’re going to be alive tomorrow.” –Eurípides Man is constantly worried about the future. It is inevitable, to a certain extent. We want to have control over every possible variable: we will be restless in our monetary pursuit to cover our daily necessities, we will buy medical insurance to count on the necessary attention if we fall ill, we’ll write our final will and testament, we’ll ask our mate if they want to grow old with us, we will make up a plan B, C and D in case we get fired from our job, and we will try to save up enough money to face any emergency. It is commonplace, almost inherent to our existence. Our constant worry about the future is probably part of our survival instinct: it seems indispensable to gather up every possible tool to face this unknown and unavoidable period. But, while we may be sure that what we desire is to be prepared to overcome any misfortune, our primordial fear is to lose our life in the attempt. We don’t want to die, even though we know for a fact that the moment will get us sooner or later. The thousand year ...

Machines as a measure of man Explorer Henry Morton Stanley, in his 1877-78 expedition, descended the Congo river and tried to travel the African continent from east to west. In the small village on the isle of Bumbireh, on lake Victoria, he had disputes with the natives and when he felt surrounded he opted to flee in a shooting spree. But the Welsh journalist and adventurer, renown for coining the (probably unauthentic) phrase: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”, returned a couple of months later to give the hostile villagers a lesson with a little 285-strong army armed with 50 muskets and 200 lance carriers. Stanley and his men decimated that population, annihilating a number of villagers, who, “never having heard the firing of a weapon before”, threw rocks and arrows but remained uncovered, “as if they were birds”1, trying to drive the invaders away. The incident, described by the British consul at Zanzibar, Sir John Kirk, as an episode “without parallel in the annals of the discovery of Africa”2, reflects the experience of those who clashed head-on with the future, those who all of a sudden and without previous notice, revealed that the machines had been made the measure of man, in ...

"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them." -Albert Einstein The default situation, whether in human affairs, technological systems, or natural patterns, is always the preexisting system, which often works "satisfactorily", but only because the system itself sets our standards! We're so used to the default cluster of reference points because it's all we see. The default is the most common. Don't expect what's common to be the same as what's optimal. In fact, don't expect anything you believe in or anything you witness to represent optimality, the best possible option. "Optimal relative to the options I have available" or "optimal relative to what I've seen so far" may carry a strong psychological weight, but you can't confuse it with true optimality. And don't feel defensive if people point this out, they may be trying to help you. For example: as you are leaving for an important job interview someone points out that your shoes are scuffed. Even though your shoes might look like this normally, the default situation, it is not their optimal appearance. We're all only human. In different worlds, universes, or in our imagination, there are beings stronger than humans, smarter ...

The cars of the future have been held back by the economic crisis and climate change. 20 years ago I stumbled upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 60’s at a friend’s house. It contained an article that talked about what cars would be like in the then distant apocalyptic year 2000: family vehicles that would travel through the air with propellers (yup, like helicopters). I remember that in some area of the article it said something like “people from all over the world would substitute garages with heliports from which drivers would step out of their flying vehicle to head on to their destination.” Nothing like that happened, nor has happened up till this 2009, nor is there a forecast for the next decades that metallic birds—like I imagined them when I read the article—will become a reality. For the first year of the XXI century, the cars that got closest to the concept of the future car—which were commercially viable—were Honda’s hybrid cars: vehicles that contain a gas motor as well as an electrical one. In 2006 these cars started circulating in Mexico (the first Latin-American country to use them) which work with electricity until they ...