Monthly Archives: December 2008

He Says There’s Probably Life Out There

And he may be right:

Hawking Predicts Discovery of Alien Life: But Asks, Will It be Carbon Based?

On the 50th anniversary of NASA, Stephen Hawking, Newton’s heir as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, answered the question, “Are we alone?”

His answer was short and simple; probably not!

Hawking presented three options. One, being that there is no life out there, and two – somewhat pessimistically, but subsequently, a little too realistic – being that when intelligent life gets smart enough to send signals in to space, it is also busying itself with making nuclear bombs.

Hawking, known not only for his sharp mind, but his sharp sense of humor, prefers option number three. “Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare,” he quickly added: “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

If I were a betting man, I think I would have to go with option one. If aliens were out there, there’s an argument to be made that we should already know about them. Or maybe they’re just avoiding us.

But, hey, I’m ready for the aliens to show up and prove me wrong.

Any time they care to.

Big Bounce

It’s a great question, just exactly the kind we like to ask:

Did our cosmos exist before the big bang?

According to the big bounce picture formulated by theoretical physicist Abhay Ashtekar and others, the cosmos grew from the collapse of a pre-existing universe. Will the same fate await us?It depends. We used to think that the universe was dominated by the gravity of its stars and other matter: either the universe is dense enough for gravity to halt the expansion from the big bang and pull everything back, or else it isn’t, in which case the expansion would carry on forever. However, observations of distant supernovae in the past 10 years have challenged that view. They show not just that the universe is expanding, but also that the expansion is speeding up due to a mysterious repulsive force that cosmologists call “dark energy”. So if the universe fails to contract, has it already bounced its last bounce?Perhaps not. Cosmologists are still very much in the dark about dark energy. Some theoretical models speculate that the nature of dark energy could change over time, switching from a repulsive to an attractive force that behaves much like gravity. If that happens, the universe will stop expanding and the galaxies will begin to rush together. A question mark also hangs over the universe’s matter and energy density, which we have not measured with sufficient accuracy to be sure that the universe will not eventually stop expanding. If it turns out to be a smidgen greater than current observations, then it is a recipe for cosmic collapse.According to the big bounce, in both scenarios the universe will eventually collapse until it reaches the highest density allowed by the theory. At this point, the universe will rebound and begin expanding again – the ultimate in cosmic recycling.

It expands, it contracts. The universe is an accordion!

Or maybe accordion is the wrong analogy — here’s a picture of the cosmos in action:

The slinky is our universe. The stairs would then be…the context in which the universe exists. How big is the staircase, I wonder? Infinite?

More thoughts here.

Friday Videos

A couple of entries from our buddy Harvey this week. First here’s Cher (with a little Sonny) to get us ready for the holidays…

I remember seeing this cartoon when it first aired a zillion years ago. It was pretty neat then and it’s still pretty neat.

Still, whenever I see Cher singing a Christmas song, I think of Paul Shaffer imitating her singing “What Child is This?” on Letterman. That used to be a holiday tradition on Letterman; don’t know if they still do it.

On a somewhat more Speculist note, here’s Fine Young Cannibals singing Don’t Look Back:

Okay, well I said somewhat…

Looking into the Mind's Eye

This is just about as astounding as it gets:

Scientists extract images directly from brain

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

brainscan.jpg

Putting together entries for this blog means that I read an amazing story every other day — sometimes more frequently than that. We see so many huge developments that it’s hard to realize how impressive, how potentially world-changing some of them are.

If this is real, it is a world-changing development. Technology such as this could lead to a revolution in art and entertainment unlike anything that has come before. Such a development has the potential to unite the machine world and the human world in a completely new and powerful way.

But there’s a downside. As surveillance technology has continued to dig its way deeper and deeper into every level of our existence over the past few years, we could always take comfort that the human imagination is the one final refuge for someone seeking privacy.

Now that reassurance is gone. And that is pretty damn scary.

Looking into the Mind’s Eye

This is just about as astounding as it gets:

Scientists extract images directly from brain

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

brainscan.jpg

Putting together entries for this blog means that I read an amazing story every other day — sometimes more frequently than that. We see so many huge developments that it’s hard to realize how impressive, how potentially world-changing some of them are.

If this is real, it is a world-changing development. Technology such as this could lead to a revolution in art and entertainment unlike anything that has come before. Such a development has the potential to unite the machine world and the human world in a completely new and powerful way.

But there’s a downside. As surveillance technology has continued to dig its way deeper and deeper into every level of our existence over the past few years, we could always take comfort that the human imagination is the one final refuge for someone seeking privacy.

Now that reassurance is gone. And that is pretty damn scary.

The Ultimate Storm Chasers

You have got to love a story like this:

Supersonic fighters could snuff out hurricanes

Russians patent shockwave storm-squelch scheme

A Russian professor at an Ohio university has applied to patent a method for snuffing out hurricanes by flying jet fighters around the eye of the storm at supersonic speeds.

Professor Arkadii Leonov and his collaborator Atanas Gagov, both of Akron Uni, actually filed their patent application “Hurricane Suppression by Supersonic Boom” last year. hurrican_snuff_fighters.jpg

There is plenty to love about this idea –

1. It’s original.

2. It relies on existing technology.

3. If it works, it solves a huge existing problem.

But if it does work, I think it will ultimately fall to supersonic unmanned drones to carry out this task. I know we already send aircraft into storms for scientific observation, but something tells me that whipping around the perimeter of a hurricane at supersonic speeds opens up a whole new level of risk.

(Via FuturePundit.)

FastForward Radio

Monday evening Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon presented a special edition of FastForward Radio.

The show was devoted to one of our favorite recurring features — Astounding Science Facts.


Or:

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Or download MP3′s for all the archived shows at:

Listen to FastForward Radio... on Blog Talk Radio

But We Don't Look a Day Over 175,000!

We learned a while back that dogs have been around for quite a bit longer than was originally thought. So it should come as no surprise to learn that we may have also been around longer than was originally estimated.

Using argon-argon dating—a technique that compares different isotopes of the element argon—researchers determined that the volcanic ash layers entombing the tools at Gademotta date back at least 276,000 years.

Many of the tools found are small blades, made using a technique that is thought to require complex cognitive abilities and nimble fingers, according to study co-author and Berkeley Geochronology Center director Paul Renne.

Some archaeologists believe that these tools and similar ones found elsewhere are associated with the emergence of the modern human species, Homo sapiens.

Bottom line: either that was us 275,000 years ago — 80,000 years earlier than the supposed emergence of homo sapiens –or there was another species of human during that period capable of doing then what we would be doing a few dozen millennia later.

Way back then it could have been neanderthals (our possibly their ancestors, homo heidelbergensis, assuming either of these species were ever present in Africa, which I’m not sure about.) Or it could have been homo erectus, which would indicate that these early humans were more sophisticated than we’ve given them credit for. Or it could have been some dead-end offshoot from homo ergaster — Africa would be the right place to look for that. Or, again, it could have been us.

The problem is that there are no human bones, just artifacts suggesting human beings more sophisticated than any humans that were supposed to be around at that early date.

Very interesting.