Ethan Siegel, Forbes
When you're taught the scientific method, you think of a neat procedure you can follow to gain insight into some natural phenomenon about the Universe. Start with an idea, perform an experiment, and either validate or falsify the idea, depending on the outcome. Only, the real world is a lot messier than that.
John Wenz, Sci American
A long time ago in a galaxy far awayNGC 4993, to be exacttwo neutron stars collided and created a spectacular light show.After billions of years spent slowly circling each other, in their last moments the two degenerate stars spiraled around each other thousands of times before finally smashing together at a significant fraction of light-speed, likely creating a black hole. The merger was so violent it shook the universe, emitting some 200 million suns' worth of energy... Читать дальше...
Charles Q. Choi, Live Science
You've likely heard of conscious thought and subconscious thought, but humans may in fact possess three levels of consciousness, a new review suggests and this concept could help scientists develop truly conscious artificial intelligence (AI) someday.Though AI technology has been advancing at a rapid clip, in many ways, computers still fall short of human performance.
James Geach, Conversation
The PhD thesis of perhaps the world's most famous living scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking, was recently made publicly available online. It has proved so popular that the demand to read it reportedly crashed its host website when it was initially uploaded.But given the complexity of the topic Properties of Expanding Universes and the fact that Hawking's book A Brief History of Time is also known as the most unread book of all time, you might benefit from a summary of its main result.
Fred Watson, Cosmos
Andrew Grey discovered a four-planet solar system 600 light years from Earth. He's not a professional astronomer. He's a 26-year-old car mechanic from Darwin. His persistence in trawling through a thousand or so light curves star brightness graphs has been rewarded big-time. On live television, to boot.
Michael Byrne, Motherboard
For the entirety of recorded history, humans have worshipped nuclear fusion. It's gone by different names over the millennia, of course: the Egyptians called it Ra, the Greeks called it Helios, and the Aztecs knew it as Tonatiuh.Today, most of us know it as the Sun, but leading physicists around the world regard it with the same sense of awe as our ancient ancestors.
