Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, once declared, I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.
When a person tells a lie, he simultaneously has to know the truth, concoct the lie, and rapidly analyze the consistency of this lie with previously known facts.
La forma humanoide con simetría bilateral, la misma forma que utiliza Hollywood para representar a los alienígenas en el espacio, no tiene por qué aplicarse necesariamente a toda la vida inteligente.
You might one day be able to send the experience of dancing the tango, bungee jumping, or skydiving to the people on your e-mail list. Not just physical activity, but emotions and feelings as well mig...
When the Ramanujan function is generalized, the number 24 is replaced by the number 8. Thus the critical number for the superstring is 8 + 2, or 10. This is the origin of the tenth dimension. The stri...
We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work, says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the ma...
This solves a long-standing mystery in cosmology. Our bodies are made of heavy elements beyond iron, but our sun is not hot enough to forge them. If the earth and the atoms of our bodies were original...
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. —G. K. Chesterson W
The geometry of a universe is very like the grammatical structure of a sentence. Just as a sentence has no structure and no existence apart from the relationships between the words, space has no exist...
The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object in the solar system.
Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. —BILL WATTERSON
Sin un científico no hay futuro. Los guapos y atractivos personajes pueden ganarse la admiración de la sociedad, pero todas las invenciones maravillosas relacionadas con el futuro son consecuencia del...
Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. —M. C. ESCHER
Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn is more optimistic and says, Every sign, including genetics, says there's some causality [between telomeres] and the nasty things that happen with aging. She notes t...
It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degree...
Indeed, brain scans done by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis indicate that areas used to recall memories are the same as those involved in simulating the future. In particular, the lin...
In the novel Janus Equation, writer G. Spruill explored one of the harrowing problems with time travel. In this tale a brilliant mathematician whose goal is to discover the secret of time travel meets...
In our society, wisdom is hard to come by. As Isaac Asimov once said, The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Unlike information,...
In 1994 another bombshell was dropped. Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Paul Townsend of Cambridge University speculated that all five string theories were in fact the sam...
If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of t...