Famed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick asked “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which was adapted into the film Blade Runner. Getting inside the head of a human baby, wrote the science journalist Angela Saini in a 2013 piece for The Guardian, “is like deciphering the thoughts of a kitten.”
Nobody is quite sure what’s going on at the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico, reports Science, which was quickly and mysteriously evacuated on 6 September amid reports of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) probe, and has remained closed. The manager of the mountaintop site, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), released a statement saying the observatory “will remain closed until further notice due to an ongoing security concern.”
Imagine a 2001-like scenario on the Red Planet, suggests astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, the current chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress, where, instead of HAL gone rogue, a camera-operated airlock or some other system—perhaps vital oxygen-supply gear that relies on facial-recognition algorithms—never turns on for a non-white settler. A person could be left, trapped outside her own home, unable to trigger the airlock or to obtain more oxygen, literally asphyxiating in the biases of someone else’s shoddy computer program. The effects would be both fatal and enraging.
`Oumuamua, the first interstellar object discovered in the Solar System, is moving away from the Sun faster than expected. This anomalous behavior was detected by a worldwide astronomical collaboration including ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. New results this June suggest that `Oumuamua is most likely an interstellar comet and not an asteroid.
That’s the slogan of a new Harvard University spinout that plans to put millions behind a hotly disputed rejuvenation discovery. A new anti-aging medicine is so hot even this controversial idea has investors. A startup invests in a way to keep people younger, despite doubts about its science.
“Understanding how Earth regulates climate both in the modern era but also in the distant past is critical for our understanding of planetary habitability,” said Noah Planavsky, a biogeochemist at Yale University. “This will help guide our search for life beyond our solar system and is an example of how the evolution of complex life fundamentally changed our planet.”
