Frankenstein From Within
Will We See “Monstrous” Neuroscience?
By Neuroskeptic
The science story of the past week was the claim from Chinese scientist He Jiankui that he has created gene-edited human babies. Prof. He reports that two twin girls have been born carrying modifications of the gene CCR5, which is intended to protect them against future HIV risk.
It’s far from clear yet whether the gene-editing that He described has actually taken place – no data has yet been presented. The very prospect of genetically-modifying human beings has, however, led to widespread concern, with He’s claims being described as “monstrous“, “crazy” and “unethical”.
All of which got me wondering: could there ever be a neuroscience experiment which attracted the same level of condemnation?
What I’m asking here is whether there are neuroscience advances that would be considered inherently unethical. It would, of course, be possible to carry out any neuroscience experiment in an unethical way, by forcing or tricking people into participation. But are there experiments which would be unethical even if all the participants gave full, informed consent at every stage?
Here are a couple of possibilites:
Renoir Vanished
The Renoir Landscape Was Ready for Auction. Then It Was Gone
(Bloomberg) — A man and two accomplices walked into a Vienna auction house on Monday and hijacked a Renoir landscape before splitting up and slipping from the building into the crowd, police said.
The French impressionist’s coastal landscape “Golfe, Mer, Falaises Vertes”—estimated to be worth between 120,000 euros ($135,000) and 160,000 euros and pictured below after being shared on Twitter—had been on display ahead of an auction planned for Wednesday.
Surveillance video showed a group of three men who went to the second floor of the Dorotheum gallery before pulling the painting from its frame, police said in a statement. Local media had earlier reported a single thief. The “obviously professional” trio dispersed and left through different exits, with two of them carrying shopping bags, pictures from the cameras released by police show.
Messin’ With The Pope
Porn For Girls
The Feminist Erotic Film Director Making Porn Hot Again: ‘I Want to Show How Sex Feels’
Indie erotic cinema director Erika Lust owns the site XConfessions, where women submit fantasies and she adapts them into beautiful pornographic films.
by Natalia Winkelman
Courtesy Erica LustErika Lust remembers the exact moment she first saw a porno. She was around 11 or 12, chomping on popcorn at a friend’s sleepover party, when the young host pulled out a VHS she’d swiped from her dad’s private stockpile. Before then, porn was something Lust had only glimpsed in Playboy or simulated with Barbie and Ken. When the sex started, the girls all shuddered. Was porn always this ridiculous, this gross?
It would be years before Lust, now a pioneer in erotic cinema—she writes, directs, and runs her own production company, Erika Lust Films—would view porn under more pleasurable circumstances. Studying political science at Lund University in Sweden, Lust, like many of her female peers, considered herself a liberated young woman, with feminist ideals and an open mind. So when her college boyfriend suggested that they pop in a video to get them in the mood, Lust was eager to give it a try.
She enjoyed what she watching more this time around, but there was something about it that still didn’t sit right. The production design was dreadful, for starters. And where was the feeling, the texture of a real erotic encounter? The sex it depicted was all mechanics, no mood.
“I felt this disconnection between my body and my brain,” Erika recalled, perched in a swanky Manhattan cafe in early November. “My body did get turned on. I felt it in my guts, you know?” She squinted and gripped her abdomen. “But the women that I saw were not my women. I didn’t identify with them. I didn’t feel that that kind of sexual encounter had anything to do with my sex life, and what I expected of sex.”
Born and raised in Sweden, Lust is currently based in Barcelona, where she lives with her husband (who doubles as her business partner) and two teenage daughters. She produces the majority of her work around Europe, where porn—and sex in general—are less of a taboo, and she doesn’t often find herself in America.
Stephen Hillenburg Gone
‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Creator Stephen Hillenburg Dead At 57
by Geoff Boucher and Greg Evans
Stephen Hillenburg, the creator of Nickelodeon’s signature cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants, died on Monday. He was 57.
The animator and former marine biology instructor created a powerhouse property with the quirky SpongeBob SquarePants — the global merchandise sales alone have gone north of $13 billion for a brand that has also yielded two animated feature films — with a third due in 2020 — nine music albums, a video game and a Tony-winning Broadway musical.
Hillenburg revealed in March 2017 that he was battling the neurodegenerative disease ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. His death was announced today in a Nickelodeon statement that framed his singular sensibility, which gave the world a loopy but lovable classic of television animation.
Bertolucci Gone
Bernardo Bertolucci, Director of ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ Dies at 77
By Dennis Lim
Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian filmmaker whose sensual and visually stylistic movies ranged from intense chamber dramas to panoramic historical epics, died on Monday at his home in Rome. He was 77.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Clare Peploe, in a statement that did not specify the cause.
Mr. Bertolucci’s early work reflected the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s and ’70s, in particular the shifting social and sexual mores of the times. While several of his films delved into the traumas of his country’s recent past, he fashioned himself as a global auteur.
Coming of age as the Italian neorealist movement was on the wane, he drew inspiration from the French New Wave and routinely worked across borders and with international casts.
Many of Mr. Bertolucci’s films were warmly embraced by Hollywood. “The Last Emperor” (1987), a lavish biopic of Pu Yi, who became the emperor of China at the age of 3, won all nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including best picture and best director.
Nicolas Roeg Gone
How Nicolas Roeg Broke Movies—and Rebuilt Them in His Own Image
At their best, the director’s masterpieces like ‘Walkabout’ and ‘Don’t Look Now’ added up not to a complete picture but a kind of Rorschach test
By
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Nicolas Roeg, who died Friday at the age of 90, didn’t just bend the medium of film to his will. He broke it, splintered it, and sutured it back together. He was a like a surgeon gifted with second sight, and his movies would have probably died on the operating table with anybody else in charge. A former cinematographer who left his mark in several different areas of 1960s cinema—doing unit work for David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia; shooting Fahrenheit 451 for François Truffaut and The Masque of the Red Death for Roger Corman—Roeg had an undeniable eye for color and composition. But it was his attention to editing that made him a legend. His movies were jagged jigsaw puzzles that the viewer had to try to put together in real time; at their best, the pieces added up not to a complete picture but a kind of Rorschach test. “I prefer it,” he said once, “when the familiar is made to feel strange.”
Strange was Roeg’s sweet spot, and his run of five films from 1970 to 1980—Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing—has yet to be equalled in terms of consistently virtuoso weirdness. (The only real contender: Roeg superfan Ben Wheatley, whose Kill List is deeply indebted to Don’t Look Now, and who put an admiring quote from Roeg on the poster for his midnight-mindfuck comedy A Field in England). Because he was initially drawn to genres like gothic horror and sci-fi, Roeg attracted a cult audience, and the way that he used movie stars and rock stars guaranteed studio backing, although more often than not his financiers hated the final product: Even in 1990, when he scored a gig directing an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches for Jim Henson’s production company, he freaked out his collaborators by making Anjelica Huston’s witch queen too flamboyantly sexy for a kids movie—and pissed off Dahl by changing the book’s ending, leading to the author’s attempt to take his name off the movie.
Wherefore Art Thou, S. Mundi
The fate of Leonardo’s ‘lost’ Salvator Mundi
Salvator Mundi vanished after it was sold last year for $450 million. There are fears for its safety
Salvator Mundi before it was sold at Christie’s in 2017GETTY IMAGES
Wanted: Leonardo da Vinci’s spectacular Salvator Mundi, the long-lost, then found painting of Christ — the “saviour of the world” — holding an orb. His enigmatic expression has led some to consider it the male Mona Lisa. The Renaissance master was thought to have painted fewer than 20 works, including The Last Supper, so when Salvator Mundi was authenticated less than a decade ago, it took on a mystical quality all of its own and, eventually, the heftiest price tag in history.
Yet, despite its enormous art-historical importance, those who care about it the most say they have no idea where the painting is — and they have concerns about how it is being cared for and how that could affect its condition.
Be Careful Whom You Try To Colonize
US tourist killed by arrow-shooting Indian tribe
Contact with several tribes on the Andaman islands, set deep in the Indian Ocean, is illegal in a bid to protect their indigenous way of life and shield them from diseases Contact with several tribes on the Andaman islands, set deep in the Indian Ocean, is illegal in a bid to protect their indigenous way of life and shield them from diseases AFP/File
An American tourist was killed by arrows shot by protected tribesmen living in one of the world’s most isolated regions tucked in India’s Andaman islands, police said Wednesday.
John Chau, 27, had taken a boat ride with local fishermen before venturing alone in a canoe to the remote North Sentinel Island where the indigenous people live cut off completely from the outside world.
As soon as he set foot on the island, Chau found himself facing a flurry of arrows, official sources told AFP.
Contact with several tribes on the islands, set deep in the Indian Ocean, is illegal in a bid to protect their indigenous way of life and shield them from diseases.
Odessa Young Interview
Odessa Young interview: Young women are set up for failure by society
Young and true: Odessa Young says new film Assassination Nation portrays modern teenagers as they really are ( AAP/PA Images )
“In the world we live in now, you can’t win as a young woman,” declares actress Odessa Young. The 20-year-old is explaining why her latest film, Sundance hit Assassination Nation — a sort of woke Mean Girls-cum-horror film-cum-allegory for the social media age — resonates with her and her peers.
Young women have been “set up for failure” by society’s double standards, she says. “The most typical example is the Madonna and the whore complex. Of, ‘Well, if I’m a virgin then I’m a prude, but if I feel myself, I’m badass, then I’m a slut and a whore.’ So that’s the simplest way of explaining it, there’s no way to win.”
From Freud to flat whites, no topic feels too big or too small for the bright and down-to-earth Young. When we meet, on a stormy day in New York at a basement coffee shop near Times Square, her demeanour is so unstarry that I almost miss her casually scrolling her phone at a nearby table.
Such anonymity, however, is unlikely to last long. In addition to Assassination Nation, she has recently made her professional theatre debut off-Broadway (or “Broadway-adjacent”, as she jokingly refers to it) in Days of Rage by Steven Levenson, the Tony Award-winning writer of Dear Evan Hansen. This year she is also in A Million Little Pieces, a film based on James Frey’s controversial book directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. Oh, and she’s also just finished filming Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss as horror writer Shirley Jackson, in Upstate New York.
The Cannibal Earth
The Earth Is Eating Its Own Oceans
As Earth’s tectonic plates dive beneath one another, they drag three times as much water into the planet’s interior as previously thought.
Those are the results of a new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature. Using the natural seismic rumblings of the earthquake-prone subduction zone at the Marianas trench, where the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the Philippine plate, researchers were able to estimate how much water gets incorporated into the rocks that dive deep below the surface. [In Photos: Ocean Hidden Beneath Earth’s Surface]
The find has major ramifications for understanding Earth’s deep water cycle, wrote marine geology and geophysics researcher Donna Shillington of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in an op-ed accompanying the new paper. Water beneath the surface of the Earth can contribute to the development of magma and can lubricate faults, making earthquakes more likely, wrote Shillington, who was not involved in the new research.
Condi To Take Over The Browns?
Condoleeza Rice Under Consideration For Cleveland Browns Head Coach – ESPN Report
by Bruce Haring
If Rice actually moves forward, she would be the first woman to ever interview for an NFL head coaching job. The league currently has three women in assistant coaching positions, but none in key coordinator positions that would merit consideration as a head coach.
Rice is reportedly a lifelong Browns fan. She would inherit a mess, as the 3-6-1 Browns have disappointed this year and are just one season removed from an 0-16 record.
Frey on Friedrich Kunath
Friedrich Kunath’s “One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor” at Blum & Poe, New York
Blum & Poe at New York is presenting “One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor,” Friedrich Kunath’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, which is on view through December 22.
This show follows Kunath’s “Frutti di Mare” (2017) —a carpeted, scented, multi-room installation flecked with tie-died tube socks and outfitted with mirrored floors, a mechanical spinning canvas, and a vertical piano.
According to the gallery press note, Kunath carries on his study of a dichotomous human condition—an exploration in happiness and sadness, romanticism, nostalgia, longing, the fetish of authenticity, and the myth of genius. This exhibition negotiates the facets of personal experience registered on a psycho-emotional pendulum that swings between the search for deep existential meaning and purpose, and a frenetic, nonsensical and humorous nihilism.
The gallery reveals that in conjunction with this exhibition, a new major monograph devoted to the last fifteen years of Kunath’s work will be released by Rizzoli Electa. Entitled “I Don’t Worry Anymore,” this book offers new insights into the artist’s work across media, organized conceptually rather than chronologically in eight chapters.
The book features new writing by four contributors—art historian James Elkins takes an historical approach to Kunath’s work, linking him to both recent and older traditions of European painting; Ariana Reines contributes a poem inspired by the artist’s work; James Frey offers a short essay motivated by Kunath’s persona; and the artist and John McEnroe, the famed tennis player, have a spirited conversation about their shared passion for the game of tennis.
William Goldman Gone
William Goldman, Butch Cassidy screenwriter, dies at 87
William Goldman, screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, has died aged 87.
Goldman, who received Oscars for both of those films, also wrote Marathon Man, Magic and The Princess Bride, which he adapted from his own novels.
His memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade is famous for his memorable declaration that “nobody knows anything” about the movie business.
He was also a noted “script doctor” who worked uncredited on many features.
Born in Highland Park, Illinois in 1931, Goldman started out as a novelist before breaking into movies with 1965 spy caper Masquerade.
He followed that with The Moving Target, also known as Harper, in which Paul Newman played a laconic private eye.
Skull-collecting Ants Cool
Florida ant species collects skulls, uses chemical weapons to kill prey
“It’s really unusual for an ant species to display this much variation in chemical signature,” researcher Adrian Smith said.
By Brooks Hays
Florida is filled with strange creatures, but skull-collecting ants are near the top of the creepy list.
“In 1958, shortly after this ant was described as a species, scientists reported something weird about it,” Adrian Smith, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, said in a news release.
Researchers found dozens of decapitated heads of trap-jaw ants in the nests of the newly discovered ant species, Formica archboldi. Scientists theorized the species either uses the abandoned nests of trap-jaw ants or is specially equipped to hunt their ant relatives.
Until now, however, scientists haven’t studied the behavior of skull-collecting ants in detail.
Dark Matter Hurricane Coming
Scientists predict a ‘dark matter hurricane’ will collide with the Earth
Yes, here’s the story of the dark matter hurricane — a cosmic event that may provide our first glimpse of the mysterious, invisible particle.
BY JACKSON RYAN
Space Telescope Science Institut, NASA, ESA, the Hubble SM4 ERO Team, and ST-ECF
Don’t panic.
Yes, astronomers suggest it’s very likely a “dark matter hurricane” will slam into the Earth as it speeds through the Milky Way — but it shouldn’t cause any damage. In fact, in the hunt for the mysterious particle (or particles) that makes up dark matter, the “hurricane” may provide our best chance at detection.
Throughout the Milky Way there are a number of stellar streams, gatherings of stars that were once dwarf galaxies or clusters. In ancient history they collided with the Milky Way and were torn apart — leaving a stream of orbiting stars that circle the galactic centre. One such stellar stream, dubbed S1 and discovered last year by scientists examining data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, passes directly through the path of our sun.
As our solar system speeds through the outer reaches of the Milky Way, it flies through dark matter at around 230 kilometres per second ( around 143 miles per second). A study, published Nov. 7 and led by researchers at the University of Zaragoza, suggests that the dark matter present in the stream may be travelling at double that speed — roughly 500km/s (around 310 miles per second) — giving us a much better chance at detecting dark matter.
Death By Data
Dark satanic mills 2.0: inside the massive server farms storing your data—and harming the planet
Experts suggest data centres will consume one fifth of the world’s electricity by 2030
A data storage centre: cooling the centres alone can create a large carbon footprint. Photo: PixabayYour family photos are currently in a warehouse on the edge of the M25. Or maybe they are in a warehouse in Swansea. Or maybe, just maybe, they are not in a prosaic suburb, but in a hollowed-out mountain in Norway.
When we think of the “cloud” we are supposed to think of the ether. But data is not immaterial. The route you took to work in your car today, the time at which you logged in to Facebook, the amount of money in your bank account—all this information is physical, perishable, and it is housed in a farm of computers hidden far from your view.
“A lot of people have the perception of the cloud as something out there,” says Tor Kristian Gyland, pushing his hand out into an expanse of thin air. “It doesn’t matter to them if their data is stored in a field in Ireland, or on a hill outside Barcelona or in a mountain in Stavanger.”
Gyland is the affable and surprisingly un-villainous CEO of Green Mountain, a company that transformed an old NATO ammunition store into an underground data centre. “Digitisation has progressed really quickly. Everyone now has an iPhone, an iPad, a Smart TV. But they don’t know where it’s all actually happening.”
When companies store their data (or rather, your data) there are three methods they can use. They can rent “racks” of servers in a form of storage called colocation. Or they can upload the data to the not-so-nebulous cloud, in which case there is no specific server on which the data is stored at any one time, with it instead rebounding from one server to another. Finally, if you are a Facebook or a Google you can just go and build your own data centre.
Whichever way you go, the final product is a warehouse containing thousands of black boxes whirring with billions of calculations. The precious computers are lavished with air conditioning lest they overheat and malfunction. Data centres positively feast on electricity.
“They are growing like mushrooms,” bemoans Dr Anders Andrae, a Swedish academic who studies the ecological impact of technology. “The number of data centres is increasing by 25 per cent every year and this is leading to at least a 10 per cent annual growth in the sector’s energy consumption.”
Stan Lee Gone
Stan Lee Dies: Marvel Comics Icon Was 95
Stan Lee, the co-creator of Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four, is dead. He was 95. Kirk Schenck, the attorney for Stan Lee’s daughter, confirmed to Deadline that the comics culture legend passed away Monday morning after being admitted to Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
As a writer and editor for Marvel Comics, Lee became the most famous comic book creator in the history of the medium — he was the only creator in the field whose fame rivaled that of the characters he created. His career began in 1941 when — at age 17 — he got his first published work, a prose story that appeared in the fifth issue of Captain America Comics. It was the 1960s, however, when Lee minted his reputation and tapped into a vein of pop-culture creativity that made history.
It was Fantastic Four No. 1 in 1961, which teamed Lee with Jack Kirby, and its landmark success changed everything for Lee and for Marvel. It signaled the arrival of a new and dynamic brand of superheroes that were far different than the old-guard heroes of industry leader DC Comics (which published Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern). The Fantastic Four bickered with each other — one looked like a monster and none of them had secret identities. They were at times driven by ego, shame, profit, jealousy or pride. Fans loved it.
HAL 9000 Gone
Douglas Rain, the creepy voice of HAL in ‘2001,’ dies at 90
Rain’s sinuous, detached reading of HAL’s lines made the computer’s murders of four astronauts all the more shocking.
By Alex Johnson
Douglas Rain, the acclaimed Shakespearean actor whose chilling performance as the voice of the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” rendered the amoral emptiness of outer space in sound, died Sunday at age 90.
The Stratford Festival, the Canadian theater company of which Rain was a founding member in 1953, confirmed his death on Sunday night. A cause of death wasn’t reported.
“Today we lost Douglas Rain, a member of our founding company and a hugely esteemed presence on our stages for 32 seasons,” the company said. “He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.”
The HAL 9000 computer was the sentient controller of life support, systems and — although it wasn’t revealed until later in the movie — the very mission of Discovery One, the spacecraft that is sent to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black obelisk in the landmark 1968 science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
Rain’s sinuous, detached reading of HAL’s lines made the computer’s murders of three astronauts as they slept in suspended animation and its subsequent stranding of astronaut Frank Poole to die in open space all the more shocking.
Jodie Turner-Smith To QUEEN AND SLIM
Jodie Turner-Smith To Share The Screen With Daniel Kaluuya In ‘Queen & Slim’
CREDIT: Getty Images
Lena Waite and Melina Matsoukas have finally found their “Queen.” Actress Jodie Turner-Smith, who audiences may recognize for her recurring role on The Last Ship and Nightflyers, has been chosen to star opposite Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Black Panther) in the Waithe-penned film Queen & Slim.
Reported Thursday (Nov. 8) by Variety, the budding actress confirmed the news on Instagram. The romantic drama has been described as a layered love story. After a first date, the duo is embroiled in a high-stakes case of murder when they kill a police officer in self-defense after a traffic stop. Instead of turning themselves in, they go on the run.
The 2019 slated release will be directed by Matsoukas. This will be her first feature film debut. Currently, Matsoukas is the executive producer of HBO’s runaway hit Insecure. She’s also known for her previous gig as a music video director for the likes of Rihanna, Beyonce, Ciara, and Ne-Yo.
“Words cannot express how excited I am to be starting this journey with you,” Turner-Smith captioned to her Instagram post next to her co-star. “[Waithe and Matsoukas], thank you for choosing me to be your QUEEN.”
Paradise Burnt
Video Shows the Terrifying Drive to Escape Massive Fire in Paradise, California
by Matt Novak
The so-called Camp Fire has already consumed over 20,000 acres in Northern California, forcing about 50,000 people to evacuate. But the fire has moved so quickly that some people have barely escaped—like Brynn Parrott Chatfield from the town of Paradise, who posted this video to social media showing her family’s terrifying drive through the flames yesterday.
The video, published to Facebook, truly looks like something out of a movie. They’re surrounded on both sides with flames lapping at the road as they race to get out.
“I feel very vulnerable posting this but I feel I should,” Brynn Parrott Chatfield wrote on Facebook. “My hometown of Paradise is on fire. My family is evacuated and safe. Not all my friends are safe. It’s very surreal. Things always work out, but the unknown is a little scary.”
Migrating Mud Pot in Mojave
A bubbling pool of mud is on the move, and no one knows why
Traveling at about 20 feet a year, the muddy mystery has no obvious driver—and so far, it can’t be stopped.
BY
When it comes to matters of geology and rumbling earth in California, the San Andreas Fault is usually the star of the show. But this time around, the area near the infamous fault has caught people’s attention due to a mysterious pot of bubbling mud.
Refusing to stay in place, a roiling mass of carbon dioxide and slurry-like soil is migrating across the state at a pace of 20 feet a year. So far, it’s carved a 24,000-square-foot basin out of the earth, and it’s set to continue its crusade until whatever’s driving it dies out. Scientists currently have no real idea why it’s moving or if it can be stopped.
So, what do we know about it?
This curiosity appeared in the Salton Trough, an area of California that’s being stretched apart by a tectonic battle between the forces of the San Andreas Fault and the East Pacific Rise, a mid-ocean ridge. This unique environment is where the Colorado River dumps plenty of its sediment, which gets packed up so that the lower layers a few miles down get heated up and squashed a little. (Find out how a powerful earthquake snapped a tectonic plate in two.)
Reznor / Ross Score A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross Scoring Amy Adams’ Woman In the Window’
Thriller set to arrive in 2019
By JON BLISTEIN
David Buchan/Variety/REX/Shutterstock
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are composing the score for Amy Adams’ forthcoming thriller, The Woman in the Window, which is set to arrive in 2019.
The Joe Wright-directed film is based on A.J. Finn’s novel of the same name, which was published in January. The story is centered around a reclusive woman named Anna (Adams) who obsessively spies on her new neighbors until one night she sees something she wasn’t supposed to. The film will also star Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman.
Along with The Woman in the Window, Reznor and Ross are also composing the music for HBO’s forthcoming television adaptation of the famed graphic novel, Watchmen. Though an exact release date has yet to be announced, the show is expected to premiere in 2019.
More recently, Reznor and Ross composed the music for A Million Little Pieces – an adaptation of James Frey’s controversial memoir of the same name – and Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, Mid90s. In June, Nine Inch Nails released their most recent record, Bad Witch.
The B-52s 1980
See, I told you they used ramps!
New discovery throws light on mystery of pyramids’ construction
Egyptologists stumble across ramp that helps explain how huge blocks of stones were hauled into place
The mystery of how, exactly, the pyramids were built may have come a step closer to being unravelled after a team of archaeologists made a chance discovery in an ancient Egyptian quarry.
Scientists researching ancient inscriptions happened upon a ramp with stairways and a series of what they believe to be postholes, which suggest that the job of hauling into place the huge blocks of stone used to build the monuments may have been completed more quickly than previously thought.
While the theory that the ancient Egyptians used ramps to move the stones has already been put forward, the structure found by the Anglo-French team, which dated from about the period that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, is significantly steeper than was previously supposed possible.
They believe the inclusion of the steps and the postholes either side of a rampway suggests the builders were able to haul from both directions, rather than simply dragging a block behind them. The team believes those below the block would have used the posts to create a pulley system while those above it pulled simultaneously.
They believe the find to be significant because they say it suggests the work could have been done more quickly, albeit still involving the heavy labour of a large number of people.
Quantum Consciousness
Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute
The emperor of physics defends his controversial theory of mind.
BY STEVE PAULSON
EMERGENT BEAUTY: Roger Penrose has always been in search of deep structures of the universe, reflected in the tiling he created, where basic shapes—in this case the rhombus—give rise to extraordinary patterns.
Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (“One of the very few people I’ve met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius,” physicist Lee Smolin has said), we’d be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand.
Penrose, 85, is a mathematical physicist who made his name decades ago with groundbreaking work in general relativity and then, working with Stephen Hawking, helped conceptualize black holes and gravitational singularities, a point of infinite density out of which the universe may have formed. He also invented “twistor theory,” a new way to connect quantum mechanics with the structure of spacetime. His discovery of certain geometric forms known as “Penrose tiles”—an ingenious design of non-repeating patterns—led to new directions of study in mathematics and crystallography.
The breadth of Penrose’s interests is extraordinary, which is evident in his recent book Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe—a dense 500-page tome that challenges some of the trendiest but still unproven theories in physics, from the multiple dimensions of string theory to cosmic inflation in the first moment of the Big Bang. He considers these theories to be fanciful and implausible.
Oumuamua Invasion
Mysterious interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua could be a giant solar sail ‘sent from another civilization to look for signs of life,’ claim astronomers
- Mysterious object Oumuamua arrived in our solar system in October 2017
- NASA spotted unexpected boost in speed and shift in trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year
- Now one study claims it could actually be a solar sail sent by aliens
By MARK PRIGG
A mysterious asteroid called Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever seen in the solar system, could be a gigantic alien solar sail send to look for signs of life, a new study has claimed.
Astronomers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) analyzed the strange cigar shape of the object, and an unexpected boost in speed and shift in trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year.
They concluded that the strange asteroid ‘might be a lightsail of artificial origin.’
The study – ‘Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ‘Oumuamua’s Peculiar Acceleration?’, which recently appeared online – was conducted by Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral researcher at the CfA’s Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) and Professor Abraham Loeb, the director of the ITC, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, and the head chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Committee.
The researchers say the strange acceleration could the the result of solar radiation pushing a giant solar sail.
137
Why the number 137 is one of the greatest mysteries in physics
Famous physicists like Richard Feynman think 137 holds the answers to the Universe.
- The fine structure constant has mystified scientists since the 1800s.
- The number 1/137 might hold the clues to the Grand Unified Theory.
- Relativity, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics are unified by the number.
Does the Universe around us have a fundamental structure that can be glimpsed through special numbers?
The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) famously thought so, saying there is a number that all theoretical physicists of worth should “worry about”. He called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man”.
That magic number, called the fine structure constant, is a fundamental constant, with a value which nearly equals 1/137. Or 1/137.03599913, to be precise. It is denoted by the Greek letter alpha – α.
What’s special about alpha is that it’s regarded as the best example of a pure number, one that doesn’t need units. It actually combines three of nature’s fundamental constants – the speed of light, the electric charge carried by one electron, and the Planck’s constant, as explains physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies to Cosmos magazine. Appearing at the intersection of such key areas of physics as relativity, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics is what gives 1/137 its allure.
Physicist Laurence Eaves, a professor at the University of Nottingham, thinks the number 137 would be the one you’d signal to the aliens to indicate that we have some measure of mastery over our planet and understand quantum mechanics. The aliens would know the number as well, especially if they developed advanced sciences.
Kepler Gone
RIP, Kepler: NASA’s Revolutionary Planet-Hunting Telescope Runs Out of Fuel
The most prolific planet-hunting machine in history has signed off.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has discovered 70 percent of the 3,800 confirmed alien worlds to date, has run out of fuel, agency officials announced today (Oct. 30). Kepler can no longer reorient itself to study cosmic objects or beam its data home to Earth, so the legendary instrument’s in-space work is done after nearly a decade.
And that work has been transformative. [Kepler’s 7 Greatest Exoplanet Discoveries]
“Kepler has taught us that planets are ubiquitous and incredibly diverse,” Kepler project scientist Jessie Dotson, who’s based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told Space.com. “It’s changed how we look at the night sky.”
Death Valley Burros
Love those heehaws and snorts, but Death Valley aims to become a ‘no-burro zone’
As the sun set on a landscape of scruffy mountains and sweeping plains, 20 wild burros watched Mark Meyers with ears erect.
They had reason to be quizzical: Meyers and his hired hands were building traps around their muddy watering hole.
Amid the clatter of hammers and occasional heehaws and snorts in a remote corner of Death Valley National Park, Meyers called out to the descendants of pack animals used by miners and prospectors more than a century ago.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.”
Federal officials have charged Meyers with safely capturing the roughly 2,500 to 4,000 wild burros said to be roaming the 3.4-million-acre park as quickly as possible for transport to adoptive homes and sanctuaries across the nation.
As of Oct. 22 — six days into the campaign — the team had snared 28.
The image of the burro as the grizzled sourdough’s faithful beast of burden contrasts, officials say, with the reality that they breed prolifically and out-compete native vegetarians — stately bighorn sheep, tiny kangaroo rats and bulky chuckwalla lizards — by devouring and trampling available greenery.
“Burros are not part of the natural California desert ecosystem,” said Mike Reynolds, superintendent of Death Valley National Park.
Burro roundups are nothing new in Death Valley, where the hardy and remarkably adaptive animals have come to dominate contoured badlands and carpet life-giving seeps and springs with their droppings. The most recent was in 2005.
But officials hope a five-year agreement signed by the National Park Service and Meyers’ nonprofit Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue may amount to the last large-scale roundup conducted in the park, where 20-mule teams once pulled wagons loaded with borax.