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Superstition has exerted a powerful force on human psyche and history. Strengthened with a few facts, a superstition becomes accepted reality until new perceptions can reopen debate. That is an exciting possibility in today’s Nouveau Renaissance. Humanity’s new course needs a road sign: “Caution, Falling False Paradigms Ahead”. Climategate has shown that even the most well funded science can be wrong. All objective, science trained minds have left the Global Warming station. Well meaning scientists are already doing damage assessments and future hazard avoidance studies. It is now a perfect time to reassess another possibly defective theory on the origin...

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space. Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each...

A strange and mysterious new object in space may the brightest and long-lasting "micro-quasar" seen thus far, a miniature version of the brightest objects in the universe. The object suddenly began pumping out radio waves last year in the relatively nearby galaxy M82, some 10 million light-years away. Its discovery was announced Tuesday. "The new object, which appeared in May 2009, has left us scratching our heads — we've never seen anything quite like this before," said researcher Tom Muxlow, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in England.

An artificial "black hole" designed to capture wayward atoms has been created. It paves the way for an atom trap that could yield previously unknown states of matter. A team led by Lene Hau of Harvard University has mimicked the death spiral of matter falling into a cosmic black hole by applying a voltage across a carbon nanotube – a rolled-up sheet of carbon atoms. This created a powerful electric field that tugged at nearby rubidium atoms, which had been chilled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero: a positive charge on the surface of the nanotubes attracts...

A supermassive black hole sits inside the galaxy Centaurus A, seen in an artist's conception. Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn't collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a "white hole"...

Note: Photo included. "White House Science ‘Czar’ Tells Students: U.S. Can’t Expect to Be Number One in Science and Technology Forever" SNIPPET: "The Obama administration’s top science and technology official, who has argued for the economic de-development of America, warned science students last Friday that the United States cannot expect to be “number one” forever. “We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely,” Dr. John P. Holdren said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Holdren is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and chairs the President’s Council of Advisors...

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.snip Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. "

There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before. "We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK. The thing appeared in May last year, while Muxlow and his colleagues were monitoring an unrelated stellar explosion in M82 using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. A bright spot of radio emission emerged over only a few days, quite rapidly in...

The phenomenon of time dilation is a strange yet experimentally confirmed effect of relativity theory. One of its implications is that events occurring in distant parts of the universe should appear to occur more slowly than events located closer to us. For example, when observing supernovae, scientists have found that distant explosions seem to fade more slowly than the quickly-fading nearby supernovae. The effect can be explained because (1) the speed of light is a constant (independent of how fast a light source is moving toward or away from an observer) and (2) the universe is expanding at an accelerating...

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world. The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year. Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted...

BERKELEY, CA Discovery of two new "superheavy" elements has been announced by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Element 120 and its immediate decay product, element 121, were discovered at Berkeley Lab's 88-Inch Cyclotron by bombarding targets of lead with an intense beam of high-energy krypton ions. Although both new elements almost instantly decay into other elements, the sequence of decay events is consistent with theories that have long predicted an "island of stability" for nuclei with approximately 187 protons and 199 neutrons. "We jumped over a sea of instability onto an island of stability...

Scientists celebrated at the world's biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era in the quest for the secrets of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light. "This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we...

WHAT KIND OF BEAM TO USE WANT? There are two types of particle beams; the one used depends on what the weapon is used for, either exoatmospheric or endoatmospheric. Exoatmospheric are in conditions where there is nothing, like space or a vacuum tube. Endoatmospheric are in conditions where an atmosphere exists, like on Earth or orbiting Earth. For exoatmospheric use the beam that exits the weapon must be neutral, have no charge, to prevent beam divergence. Beam divergence happens when a beam of charged particles increases in diameter as it travels through empty space. This is not good. If the...

CLEVELAND - (KRT) - The day may come, some cosmologists fear, when they'd be better off as cosmetologists. You know the difference, of course. Cosmetologists are experts at makeup. Cosmologists are experts at making up stories about the universe. For many decades, at least, cosmologists couldn't do much more than make up stories. After the birth of scientific cosmology early in the last century, cosmologists based their theories on next to nothing, other than Einstein's equations for gravity and the observation that the universe seemed to be expanding. In the mid-1960s, though, radiotelescopes detected a faint glow of radiation in...

The new role that quantum information plays in gravity sets the scene for a dramatic unification of ideas in physics One of the hottest new ideas in physics is that gravity is an emergent phenomena; that it somehow arises from the complex interaction of simpler things. A few month's ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over...

Found: 90% of the distant Universe This is fascinating news: 90% of the distant Universe was thought to be missing, but it was recently found. And what’s weird is, it was found to be in the red. Quite literally. [Note: before you ask, this has nothing to do with dark matter. See below!] GOODS_deepfield First, a bit of background. Galaxies are filled with hydrogen gas, and that gas is a major component of the clouds that collapse to form stars. When that happens, the hot stars ionize the gas: the flood of ultraviolet light strips the electron away from the...

'Loading-unloading' effect of grain boundaries key to repair of irradiated metalSelf-repairing materials within nuclear reactors may one day become a reality as a result of research by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists. In a paper appearing today in the journal Science, Los Alamos researchers report a surprising mechanism that allows nanocrystalline materials to heal themselves after suffering radiation-induced damage. Nanocrystalline materials are those created from nanosized particles, in this case copper particles. A single nanosized particle—called a grain—is the size of a virus or even smaller. Nanocrystalline materials consist of a mixture of grains and the interface between those grains,...

After 72 hours of exposure to ambient light, strands of nanoparticles twisted and bunched together. Credit: Nicholas Kotov Light can twist matter, according to a new study that observed ribbons of nanoparticles twisting in response to light. Scientists knew matter can cause light to bend – prisms and glasses prove this easily enough. But the reverse phenomenon was not shown to occur until recently. The researchers assembled strings of nanoparticles, which are tiny clumps of matter on the scale of nanometers (one nanometer is one billionth of a meter). In a darkened lab, the scientists linked nanoparticles together into...

From The Low Beyond. ©1996-©2001 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.  All rights reserved. The address of this document is http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html. If you found it elsewhere, please visit the foregoing link for the most recent version.   Created:  11/18/1996   Updated:  05/27/2001 The short version:If computing speeds double every two years,what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?Computing speed doubles every two years. Computing speed doubles every two years of work. Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work. Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months -...

"Dark flow" is no fluke, suggests a new study that strengthens the case for unknown, unseen "structures" lurking on the outskirts of creation. In 2008 scientists reported the discovery of hundreds of galaxy clusters streaming in the same direction at more than 2.2 million miles (3.6 million kilometers) an hour. This mysterious motion can't be explained by current models for distribution of mass in the universe. So the researchers made the controversial suggestion that the clusters are being tugged on by the gravity of matter outside the known universe. Now the same team has found that the dark flow extends...