It’s a term you’ve probably heard a lot. Late Stage Capitalism. People use it to describe the absurdities and wild inequalities of the world today. But what is it exactly, and are we really living in it? And if so, what comes next?
Our traditional view of robots as metal machines with computer brains is pretty hard-wired (pun intended) into the human psyche. But there are reasons to believe that living robots – robots made of soft or living tissue – might be the better option. Here’s why.
Magnetars are a type of neutron star with a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than the strongest magnets here on Earth. These stellar monsters are mind-blowing in every way and possibly the source of massive gamma ray bursts and fast radio bursts.
We’re all pretty much over the COVID-19 pandemic at this point, but how close are we to containing the disease, and how will it end?
We’ve been hearing a lot about the potential of solid state batteries over the last few years. But how close are we to the solid state revolution? And will it be a revolution at all?
Space shades are often touted as our last hope if our climate change situation gets too out of control. If we can’t keep carbon emissions down, we could just block the sun. I hear this option get thrown out very casually, but I’ve never seen a realistic look at what that would look like. How big would it need to be? How much would it cost? Wound it even work? So I decided to take a serious deep dive.
Astrophysicists are currently struggling to explain an inconsistency that has become a cosmological crisis, and it has to do with the Hubble Constant, which determines the expansion of the universe.
The Cambrian Explosion was a sudden proliferation of complex life forms in the early days of Earth, which created some of the most bizarre forms of life the would would ever see.
It took humans 10,000 years to go from hunter-gatherers to world domination. Considering the vastness of time that humans and life have been on Earth, could this have happened once before?
This question was put forth by Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt in their paper titled The Silurian Hypothesis, where they tried to figure out what in the geologic record would be a sign of a previous industrial civilization. It brings up a lot of questions and makes you deal with the weight of deep time, as well as the fleeting nature of history.
As weird as it sounds, there are dozens of stories of animals, especially toads, found in rocks. Can this really be real? Because nature has developed some amazing survival strategies and there are creatures that can survive being frozen or entombed for long periods.
In this video, we explore the story of Old Rip, the horned frog that survived being locked in a time capsule for 30 years, and examine tardigrades, which might be living on the moon right now.
