Today’s news briefs range from fiction to reality…
- Nicolas Cage’s trippy new sci-fi movie uncovers a weird field of dream science.
- Is time travel really possible? Here’s what physics says.
- Most researchers behind the recent sensational ‘room-temperature superconductor’ claim now want their paper retracted.
- Scientists fear cataclysmic ‘Factor X‘ will emerge from Earth’s melting permafrost.
- Copper Age woman survived two skull surgeries up to 4,500 years ago.
- The haunting of modern China: in Nanjing, Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, rapid urbanisation is multiplying a fear of death and belief in ghosts.
- Consciousness can’t be explained by brain chemistry alone, one philosopher argues.
- A man is sending his DNA to the Moon so that aliens can clone him and put him in a zoo.
- Did microphones recently capture the ‘mystery sound’ of unidentified anomalous phenomena?
- Shark has virgin birth after no male contact for 4 years in Chicago zoo.
- AI influencers are worried about AI’s influence.
Quote of the Day:
If people start thinking that Alexa, or something like that, deserves any kind of respect, that works to Amazon’s advantage – that’s something that Amazon would try and amplify. Any corporation, they’re going to try and make you think that a product is a person, because you are going to interact with a person in a certain way, and they benefit from that. So, this is a vulnerability in human psychology which corporations are really trying to exploit.
Ted Chiang, on AI hype
