We know we are – but what else is conscious too?
WHEN I was a psychology student in the 1970s, there was a widespread view that the study of consciousness was a passport to irrelevance. Now many scientists grapple with it and anyone who cracks the problem can certainly expect a call from Stockholm.
Philosophers have pondered the issue for millennia and, understandably, are not going to be shoved aside by newcomers armed with electrodes and MRI scanners. Michael Tye, however, is not a neuroscientist, but a physicist turned philosopher, who for the last decade or so has been considering the evidence we use to determine whether other organisms are conscious.
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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will deliver 10 satellites to low-Earth orbit for Iridium, a global leader in mobile voice and data satellite communications. The 10 satellites are the first of at least 70 satellites that SpaceX will be launching for Iridium’s next generation global satellite constellation, Iridium NEXT.
SpaceX is targeting launch of Iridium-1 from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The instantaneous launch window opens on January 14 at 5:54:39 pm UTC.
The satellites will begin deployment about an hour after launch.
NOTE: The official LIVE webcast will begin in 11 hours on following links:
Iridium-1 Hosted Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmbSur4fcs
Iridium-1 Technical Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WimRhydggo
And the discussions for the same will be held in:
@Fizikx and @Everythingsciencechat
Be sure to join us there!
Could Dark Streaks in Venus' Clouds Be Signs of Alien Life?
The question of life on Venus, of all places, is intriguing enough that a team of U.S. and Russian scientists working on a proposal for a new mission to the second planet — named Venera-D — are considering including the search for life in its mission goals.
If all goes as planned, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) could one day be cruising the thick, sulfuric-acid clouds of Venus to help determine whether dark streaks that appear to absorb ultraviolet radiation could be evidence of microbial life.
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Scientists think they've uncovered the 'missing element' inside Earth's core
It’s well known that the innermost part of Earth is made mostly of iron (about 85 percent). Nickel accounts for about 10 percent. That last 5 percent however, has remained a bit of a mystery.
A Japanese research team has been searching for that missing element for decades, and now believes that the final 5 percent is most likely made from silicon, reports the BBC
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Do People Only Use 10 Percent of Their Brains?
The human brain is complex. Along with performing millions of mundane acts, it composes concertos, issues manifestos and comes up with elegant solutions to equations. It's the wellspring of all human feelings, behaviors, experiences as well as the repository of memory and self-awareness. So it's no surprise that the brain remains a mystery unto itself.
Though an alluring idea, the "10 percent myth" is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.
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London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days
London has breached its annual air pollution limits just five days into 2017, a “shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution”, according to campaigners.
By law, hourly levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide must not be more than 200 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m3) more than 18 times in a whole year, but late on Thursday this limit was broken on Brixton Road in Lambeth.
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Seriously guys, it's time to stop cleaning your ears with cotton buds
If you're in the habit of sticking cotton buds (aka Q-Tips) in your ears, snap out of it – that's the latest advice from the American Academy of Otolaryngology, which studies diseases of the ear and throat.
The Academy just published updated guidelines for ear care, warning against over-cleaning your ears and sticking anything inside them – including cotton buds – and advising people to ask for medical help if they experience issues with hearing.
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A cure for ageing is near but you probably can’t afford it
FEEL that? It’s your body, slowly degrading. Ageing affects us all, and it leads to diseases that eventually kill most of us. No wonder so much research is going into creating an antidote.
If we come up with a way to slow, halt or even reverse the ageing process, we could potentially protect people from cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s. The idea is to extend “health span”, the number of years of good health a person enjoys. Extra birthdays are simply a bonus.
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Gotcha: Fast radio burst's home nabbed
A mysterious, recurring blast of cosmic radio waves finally has a home address. For the first time, astronomers have definitively traced a fast radio burst back to its source: a faint galaxy about 2.5 billion light-years away. The finding confirms a decade-long suspicion that these outbursts originate well outside our galaxy, although the mystery as to what’s causing them remains unsolved.
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Bill Nye's new show on Netflix in 2017 - "Each episode will tackle a topic from a scientific point of view, dispelling myths, and refuting anti-scientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders or titans of industry"
https://www.inverse.com/article/25672-bill-nye-saves-world-netflix-donald-trump
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Finland has just launched a world-first universal basic income experiment
It looks like 2,000 citizens in Finland will welcome the new year with outstretched arms.
These Finns are the lucky recipients of a guaranteed income beginning this year, as the country’s government finally rolls out its universal basic income (UBI) trial run.
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We now know bacteria can communicate electrically, and we should be worried
We already have a lot to worry about when it comes to bacteria, as more and more strains becoming resistant to our dwindling arsenal of antibiotics. Last year, a woman in the US was killed by a superbug resistant to every antibiotic available.
But scientists continue to discover more worrying facts about the apparently simple, single-cell organisms we call bacteria: such as the way they beam out electrical signals to recruit other species to join their communities.
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SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rocket at sea, following first launch since August
Following today’s rocket launch, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 on the company’s drone ship in the Pacific Ocean. It’s the first landing SpaceX has done since August, and the fifth time one of these vehicles has landed at sea. However, this marks SpaceX’s first launch in the Pacific and the first landing for the drone ship “Just Read The Instructions.” The feat brings the total number of recovered SpaceX rockets to seven, as two other Falcon 9 vehicles have successfully touched down on solid ground after a launch.
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Mini fire extinguishers inside lithium batteries may stop blazes
How do you stop your smartphone from bursting into flames? Implant a tiny fire extinguisher inside the battery.
Lithium-ion batteries are used in phones, laptops and other portable devices because they are lightweight and highly efficient. However, they also carry a fire risk due to their flammable liquid components.
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‘Mars’ Event Series Renewed For Season 2 By National Geographic | Deadline
http://deadline.com/2017/01/mars-event-series-renewed-season-2-national-geographic-tca-1201885744/
For past and future episodes join:
Mars - National Geographic
Your appendix might serve an important biological function after all
One of the first things you learn about evolution in school is that the human body has a number of 'vestigial' parts - appendix, wisdom teeth, tailbone - that gradually fell out of use as we adapted to more advanced lifestyles than our primitive ancestors.
But while our wisdom teeth are definitely causing us more pain than good right now, the human appendix could be more than just a ticking time bomb sitting in your abdomen. A new study says it could actually serve an important biological function - and one that humans aren’t ready to give up.
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A Machine Astronomer Could Help Us Find the Unknowns in the Universe
What have pulsars, quasars, dark matter and dark energy got in common? Answer: each of them took the discoverer by surprise. While much of science advances carefully and methodically, the majority of truly spectacular discoveries in astronomy are unexpected.
Many of our telescopes are built to discover the known unknowns: the things we know we don't know, such as identifying the stuff that makes up dark matter.
But the real breakthroughs are the unknown unknowns. These are the things we don't even suspect are out there until we accidentally find them.
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‘Alien megastructure’ signal may be due to star eating a planet
When you are a messy eater, it can take a long time to clean up after a meal. The slow dimming of Tabby’s star and the sudden dips in its light may be caused by an orbiting cloud of debris left over from when it partially gobbled a planet.
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Colliding stars will light up the night sky in 2022
A team of astronomers is making a bold prediction: In 2022, give or take a year, a pair of stars will merge and explode, becoming one of the brightest objects in the sky for a short period. It’s notoriously hard to predict when such stellar catastrophes will occur, but this binary pair is engaged in a well-documented dance of death that will inevitably come to a head in the next few years, they say.
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What would happen if the Earth abruptly stopped spinning for 42 seconds?
This answer assumes that the earth stops suddenly for 42 seconds and then starts spinning at its normal speed.
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Great Space
NASA is sending a probe to a bizarre metallic world
NASA has green-lit a plan to send a probe to a strange metal asteroid called 16 Psyche, which experts think could be the core of an ancient planet, stripped bare of its original surface and outer crust.
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DeepMind’s AlphaGo is secretly beating human players online
Google DeepMind’s Go-playing AI has done it again. After beating top player Lee Sedol at the ancient Chinese game in 2016, the AlphaGo AI has been secretly taking on more of the world’s best players – and beating them.
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Antigravity: Discovering if antimatter falls upwards
ON 11 November last year, a small birthday party was held in an apparently unremarkable hangar onthe outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. Nothing too fancy, just a few people gathered around a cake. The honourees were there. Well, sort of – they were still locked in the cage where they had spent their first year. But then again, there is no other way to treat a brood of antimatter particles.
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