Essay by Richard Dawkins A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane’s exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away […]
NASA today unleashed its “squirting gun” by making bold claims about the presence of very liquid, very flowing water on Mars. Photographs taken over the past seven years reveal changes in Mars’ landscape that seem to indicate the presence of an underground water supply. The subsurface “water” has crept up to feed two gullies clearly […]
A story by Paul Ford: I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! […]
Some say we are likely to go with a bang, others predict a slow lingering end, while the optimists suggest we will overcome our difficulties by evolving into a different species. According to Sir Martin Rees, astronomer royal and professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, humans only have a 50-50 chance […]