Happy 4th Of July!

Driving Policy and Driverless Vehicles.

The Evolution and The Origin of Life on Earth.

Phanerozoic Eon Goddesses Moodboards (1/3)

Paleozoic Era: Goddesses of Early Life

Some Possible Models of The Future Evolution of The Cosmos are presented Here.

This Is Why Dark Energy Must Exist, Despite Recent Reports To The Contrary

“We do not do science in a vacuum, completely ignoring all the other pieces of evidence that our scientific foundation builds upon. We use the information we have and know about the Universe to draw the best, most robust conclusions we have. It is not important that your data meet a certain arbitrary standard on its own, but rather that your data can demonstrate which conclusions are inescapable given our Universe as it actually is.

Our Universe contains matter, is at least close to spatially flat, and has supernovae that allow us to determine how it’s expanding. When we put that picture together, a dark energy-dominated Universe is inescapable. Just remember to look at the whole picture, or you might miss out on how amazing it truly is.”

20 years ago, the supernova data came back with an extraordinary surprise: it looked like the Universe wasn’t just expanding, but that the expansion rate was increasing as we head further into the future. While there were many dark energy skeptics to start, the increased flow of improved data from many lines of evidence that all kept pointing to the same conclusion has led to a cosmological consensus: dark energy dominates the Universe today. Last week, a story made waves, as Subir Sarkar and collaborators published their second paper (the first was in 2016) claiming that the evidence from supernovae is not good enough to support the existence of dark energy, and our cosmological foundation for it is extraordinarily shaky.

This is not true. This is demonstrably untrue. And the claim shows a deliberate unwillingness to pay attention to the rest of the field. Find out why dark energy must exist, despite recent reports to the contrary.

Nice Cars to Look at.  

LA Auto Show 2015

CNET Car Tech brings you the latest news from the 2015 LA Auto Show with tons of galleries and the latest unveilings from all the major car companies.

Sunrise at Stonehenge marks The Longest Day of The Year and The Start of Summer!

Here's Why It's so important to at least try to get about 8 hours of Sleep every single night that You can.  

Here’s what sleep deprivation is doing to your body

Not getting enough sleep? Just one week of sleeping fewer than six hours per night can lead to serious health issues, including the modification of over 700 genes, reports the Huffington Post on a study published in PNAS last year. Other symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation include everything from bloodshot eyes to quadrupled stroke risk. This infographic fromHuffington Post’s Alissa Scheller explains.

Read more

Here’s a Look at Kepler’s Second_Law of Planetary Motion.  

This image displays Kepler’s second law of planetary motion.

“A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time” (Meaning that each triangle seen there has equal area.)

The black dot represents a planet, the point where the black lines intersect represent the sun.

The green arrow represents the planet’s velocity,

The purple arrows represents the force on the planet.

(Image source: here)

Really?

Startup wants to upload your brain to the cloud, but has to kill you to do it 

A US startup is promising to upload customers’ brains to the cloud using a pioneering technique it has trialled on rabbits.

The only catch, according to the company’s cofounder? The process is “100% fatal”.

Nectome, founded in 2016 by a pair of MIT AI researchers, hopes to offer a commercial application of a novel process for preserving brains, called “aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation”. The process, which results in the brain being “vitrifixed” – the startup’s self-named term for essentially turning it into glass – is promising enough that it has won two prizes from the Brain Preservation Foundation, for preserving a rabbit’s brain in 2016 and a pig’s brain in 2018.

Influential startup accelerator Y Combinator has taken Nectome in, with the organisation’s chief executive, Sam Altman, becoming one of the 25 people to pay a $10,000 deposit to join its waiting list. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” Altman told MIT Technology Review.

But there is one pretty large downside. In order for the vitrification process to preserve a brain well enough to leave hope of accurate upload or revival, it has to be carried out at the moment of death. Or, more precisely, it has to be the cause of death: the subject/customer/victim has the blood flow to their brain replaced with the embalming chemicals that preserve the neuronal structure, even as they kill the patient.

I remember These!  I wonder what has ever happened to Them? 

This is The Smallest Sized EXOPLANET Discovered by NASA's TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE so far!

NASA's TESS mission finds its smallest planet yet

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.

Two other worlds orbit the same star. While all three planets’ sizes are known, further study with other telescopes will be needed to determine if they have atmospheres and, if so, which gases are present. The L 98-59 worlds nearly double the number of small exoplanets – that is, planets beyond our solar system – that have the best potential for this kind of follow-up.

“The discovery is a great engineering and scientific accomplishment for TESS,” said Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “For atmospheric studies of small planets, you need short orbits around bright stars, but such planets are difficult to detect. This system has the potential for fascinating future studies.”

A paper on the findings, led by Kostov, was published in the June 27 issue of The Astronomical Journal.

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