The single most important puzzle in today’s cosmology (the study of the universe as a whole) can be summarized in one question: How old is it? For nearly a century — since the discoveries by Einstein, Hubble, LeMaitre and others led to the big bang model of creation — we have known the answer. It is about 13.8 billion years old (using current data).
“Lots of people just don’t understand that there’s a darker side to Antarctica,” says Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London. “What we’re seeing is great power politics play out in a space that a lot of people think of as just frozen wastes.”
“Why Mercury?” Joana Oliveira, a scientist at the European Space Agency, said during a news conference in September. “That is the first question we should ask ourselves. Mercury is one little piece of the puzzle that helps understand the evolution of our solar system.”
Without mind, there might as well be nothing. Colin McGinn at the University of Miami, believes that no matter how much scientists study the brain, the mind is fundamentally incapable of comprehending itself. “We’re rather like Neanderthals trying to understand astronomy or Shakespeare,” McGinn said. Human brains suffer from a “cognitive gap” in understanding their own consciousness.”
Is evidence of a twin Earth buried in unexamined Kepler Mission data? Kepler’s latest observing campaign, Campaign 19, started on August 29 after the spacecraft’s configuration had been modified in order to adapt to a change in thruster performance. During the following 27 days, Kepler observed more than 30,000 stars in the constellation of Aquarius. The stars included dozens of known and suspected exoplanet systems — including the well-known TRAPPIST-1 system with its seven Earth-sized planets.
“It’s not just that humans are smart because we have more neurons and a larger cortex. From the bottom up, neurons behave differently,” says neuroscientist Mark Harnett with MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “In human neurons, there is more electrical compartmentalization, and that allows these units to be a little bit more independent, potentially leading to increased computational capabilities of single neurons.”
“Given that the overall mission of the Space Force remains unclear, there could be a push for human spaceflight efforts to be subsumed under a Space Force. NASA’s recent failures in the development of the Space Launch System, or SLS, and the James Webb Space Telescope only further reinforce the image of a NASA spread too thin to accomplish major space endeavors.”
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and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.