“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
“If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they’re the most perfectly organized part.” says Noble-Prize winner, physicist Sir Roger Penrose, comparing the complexity of the universe to the human brain with its cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper, where “matter is transformed into the mystery of consciousness.” (more…)
“The collision with Kraken must have been the most significant merger the Milky Way ever experienced,” said astrophysicist Diederik Kruijssen at the Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg (ZAH), about artificial intelligence analysis of ancient globular clusters almost as old as the universe itself orbiting the Milky Way that revealed a stunning picture of successive mergers with neighboring galaxies creating what is, in effect, a galactic “family tree”.
“One can best feel in dealing with living things how primitive physics still is,” said Albert Einstein. “Can life be explained in terms of physics or will it always be a mystery? And if physics can explain life, is existing physics up to the job, or might it require something fundamentally new – new concepts, new laws even?” asks Arizona State University cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and astrobiologist, Paul Davies answering Einstein.
In a half-second flash of light in May of this year, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected the most powerful explosion since the Big Bang –the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible, unleashing more energy in a blink of an eye than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. This near-infrared emission was 10 times brighter than predicted, defying conventional models.
