Home  »  Headline News

On:

Next step is machine intelligence – Quantum physicist Stephen Hawking says humans have entered a new phase of evolution, one that will be continued by our creation of intelligent machines. Evolution is one of the topics discussed in the Lloyd Pye subscriber interview this week.

Evolution used to proceed slowly, over millions of years of natural selection from random mutations. But now evolution has speeded up, and Hawking predicts that major changes will take place every 50 years.
read more

On:

Found in a cave? – Scientists have gotten a big Christmas present: Researchers at the Dept. of Energy’s Fermilab near Chicago have detected signals of what CERN is looking so hard for: that elusive substance known as dark matter.

And what are these experiments that have everyone so excited? They’re taking place inside an abandoned mine in Minnesota, right here in the US (instead of at CERN in Switzerland).

The world of physics is filled with gossip too, and in BBC News, Victoria Gill quotes researcher Carlos Frenk as saying that the world of cosmology is “awash with gossip [because] dark matter is what makes the Universe interesting. It is responsible for the bulk of thegravitational forces that give the Universe its shape.”
read more

On:

New research suggests studying the shape of the aftermath of supernovas (exploding stars) may allow astronomers to figure out what caused them (before the same thing happens to our sun?)

A new study of images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory on supernova remnants (the debris left over from these explosions) shows that the symmetry of the remnants, or lack thereof, reveals HOW the star exploded, even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed. Astronomer Laura Lopez says, “It’s almost like the supernova remnants have a ‘memory’ of the original explosion.”
read more

On:

How are marriages holding up in this recession? The holiday season, filled as it is with family, is a particularly tough time to have empty pockets.

It’s an especially bad time to be a working-class man with no college education. Such men have borne the brunt of job losses since 2007, and new research finds that men are 61% less likely to be happy in a marriage if they work fewer hours than their wives. Meanwhile, women’s contributions to family earnings leapt during the first year of the recession, marking the largest single-year increase in the past decade.
read more