http://worldofweirdthings.com/2015/05/07...-own-city/

EXCERPT: [...] While no huge city could be perfectly efficient, on average, any megacity could concentrate resources and shorten supply chains. This can mean less waste, more productivity, and more economic activity. But if we take it one step further and start structuring them around giant, self-contained skyscrapers, we can wring out many of the current remaining inefficiencies in resource allocation. A vertical farm in each skyscraper would double as green space and the perfect place for producing a lot of staple crops that instead of being delivered across a country are delivered to a different floor which saves a lot on infrastructure costs. From a utopian perspective, embracing growing your own crops in a vertical community garden inside a giant building that also has apartments, bars and nightclubs, movie theaters, schools, and offices could return many millions of square miles back to nature should every city in the world make that leap. But would that ever happen? Today, such a transition would be politically dead on arrival and technically hard to execute. It’s not for a lack of ideas though; within the last 30 years there have been no shortage of plans to build these cities in a skyscraper...

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...y-way.html

EXCERPT: This past January, scientists led by University of Birmingham asteroseismologists discovered a solar system with five Earth-sized planets dating back to the dawn of the Galaxy. Thanks to the NASA Kepler mission, the scientists observed a pale-yellow Sun-like star (Kepler-444) hosting five planets with sizes between Mercury and Venus that was formed 11.2 billion years ago, when the Universe was less than 20 per cent its current age. This is the oldest known system of terrestrial-sized planets in our Galaxy - two and a half times older than the Earth.

[...] "There are far-reaching implications for this discovery," said Tiago Campante, from the University of Birmingham's School of Physics and Astronomy, who led the research. "We now know that Earth-sized planets have formed throughout most of the Universe's 13.8 billion year history, which could provide scope for the existence of ancient life in the Galaxy. By the time the Earth formed, the planets in this system were already older than our planet is today...."

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=8521

EXCERPT: Most people are familiar with the notion that energy cannot be destroyed. Interestingly, there is also a rule in quantum mechanics that forbids the destruction of information [...] often illustrated by the example of burning a book: though the book is burned, the information still remain--although it would obviously be much harder to “read” a burned book. [..] My interest here is [...] with [...] the question of whether or not the indestructibility of information has any implications for immortality.

[...] While there are many problems with the memory account of personal identity, it certainly suggests a path to quantum immortality through the conservation of information. One approach would be to argue that since information is conserved, the person is conserved even after the death and dissolution of the body. Just like the burned book whose information still exists, the person’s information would still exist.

One obvious reply to this is that a person is an active being and not just a collection of information. To use a rather rough analogy, a person could be seen as being like a computer program—to be is to be running. Or, to use a more artistic analogy, like a play: while the script would persist after the final curtain, the play itself is over. As such, while the person’s information would be conserved, the person would cease to be. This sort of “quantum immortality” is remarkably similar to Spinoza’s view of immortality. While he denied personal immortality, he claimed that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.” Spinoza, of course, seemed to believe that this should comfort people. Perhaps some comfort should be taken in the fact that one’s information will be conserved [...]

However, people would probably be more comforted by a reason to believe in an afterlife. Fortunately, the conservation of information does provide at least a shot at an afterlife. If information is conserved and all there is to a person can be conserved as information, then a person could presumably be reconstructed after his death....

https://plus.maths.org/content/future-proof

EXCERPT: Are mathematicians ever going to be replaced by computers? If maths was all about routine calculations, then the answer would most definitely be yes. But if you've ever tried to come up with a mathematical proof, or even played with a logic puzzle, you know this involves intuition and leaps of imagination you'd think are beyond any computer. Even just deciding which kind of questions are mathematically interesting, and which are boring or beyond reach, seems to be something that needs human input.

Yet, humanity's role in the future of mathematical proof was being discussed at the British (Applied) Mathematics Colloquium last week, by a panel of people who know the territory very well: the mathematician (and Fields medallist) Tim Gowers, the historian of mathematics June Barrow-Green, computer scientists Andrew Pitts and Ursula Martin, and David Tranah representing Cambridge University Press, an important publisher of mathematics research....

http://www.jetsongreen.com/2015/05/earth...d-men.html

EXCERPT: Earth sheltered homes are a prime example of sustainable living and this is one of the best I’ve seen. As seen on Living Big In A Tiny House, the so-called Underhill, is an impressive and unique earth-sheltered home that was constructed by Graham Hannah in Waikato, New Zealand. Underhill is built into a hillside, hence the name (which is also a reference to Lord of the Rings and the fake name Frodo uses on his travels), and overlooks a pond.... [8 images]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...164234.htm

RELEASE: The ways in which parents work together in their roles has been shown to be an important factor in relation to the behaviour of their children. However, few studies have distinguished between mothers' and fathers' perceptions of the support they receive from their partners.

Supportive co-parenting is evidenced by parents' sharing child rearing values, expressing positive emotion with each other during interactions with their child and supporting their partner's parenting efforts.

The study examined the contribution of both parents' perceptions of co-parent support and undermining in association with preschool children's behaviour.

Mothers and fathers from 106 families completed questionnaires about parenting practices and telephone interviews relating to their relationship quality and co-parenting techniques. All families consisted of both biological parents who were married or living together.

Rachel Latham's analyses showed that for fathers, perceptions of poor support from their partner were negatively associated with their children's behaviour. This related to more reported incidents of a child acting defiantly or deliberately breaking toys.

For mothers, feeling unsupported by their partners did not relate to their child's behaviour.

The findings of this study highlight the importance of involving fathers as well as mothers in the study of family and children's wellbeing.

Although the study has only established a link rather than a cause, Rachel suggests that a number of reasons may account for the findings, such as maternal gatekeeping by which the mother limits the father's child rearing input.

They may also be connected to the societal expectations of fathers.

Rachel Latham said: "Compared to mothering, the fathering role may be less clearly socially defined and fathers may withdraw from it. Whereas mothers -- and fathers -- may see the mother's role as less discretionary than fathers. Or it could be simply that fathers don't feel as confident or competent in their role because, although it is changing, commonly they are still less likely to be the primary child carer."

She adds: "My results suggest that in the long term, family therapeutic interventions that aim to improve the co-parent relationship may be informed by paying particular attention to how much fathers feel supported by their co-parent."

SpaceX tests astronaut eject button on Dragon spacecraft
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/SpaceX...t_999.html

EXCERPT: SpaceX on Wednesday launched the first flight test of the emergency astronaut escape feature on its Dragon spaceship, which aims to carry astronauts to low-Earth orbit as early as 2017. No astronauts were on board for the brief launch pad abort test, which blasted off at 9 am (1300 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.


Eerie 'X-Files' Sounds Recorded From the Edge of Space: http://news.discovery.com/space/erie-x-f...gn=rssnws1


Astronomers Measure Distance to Farthest Galaxy Yet
www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/science/astronomers-measure-distance-to-farthest-galaxy-yet.html

EXCERPT: Leapfrogging backward in time to when the universe was apparently feeling its oats, a group of astronomers reported Tuesday that they had measured a bona fide distance to one of the farthest and thus earliest galaxies known. The galaxy, more than a few billion light-years on the other side of the northern constellation Boötes, is one of the most massive and brightest in the early universe and goes by the name of EGS-zs8-1. It flowered into stardom only 670 million years after the Big Bang. The light from that galaxy has taken 13 billion years to reach telescopes on Earth. By now, however, since the universe has continued to expand during that time, the galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away, according to standard cosmological calculations....

Procaryotic cells are small simple cells that don't contain cell organelles or have their genetic material enclosed in cell nuclei. Procaryotic cells include bacteria and archaea.

Eucaryotic cells are larger cells that have organelles inside them as well as nuclei that contain genetic material organized into chromosomes. They include the cells found in single celled protozoa, fungi, plants and animals.

Procaryotic cells are believed to be older and for much of the history of life on earth procaryotic cells were all there were. Bacteria were as complicated as life on Earth got, and evolution seems to have revolved around cell chemistry. (Bacteria and archaea have very diverse chemistries.)

Archaea are members of a group of procaryotic organisms that look and behave like bacteria and once were considered to be bacteria, but now are assigned to their own group due to fundamental chemical differences.

A big mystery concerns how eucaryotic cells first appeared. How did cells make the leap from one kind of cell to the other?

The news in this post is that microbiologists are reporting the discovery of a peculiar kind of archaea, discovered in undersea hydrothermal vents off the coast of Norway, that seems to contain some of the same genes found in later Eucaryotic organisms, but not in other Procaryotes. It isn't clear what those genes are doing in these more primitive cells.

These cells do not contain mitochondria or chloroplasts, eucaryotic organelles believed to have once been free-living procaryotic cells that took up a new life as symbiotes inside the eucaryotic ancestor cells. (Mitochondria and chloroplasts still have scraps of their own DNA.)

But one of the seemingly eucaryotic genes in these archaea codes for actin, a chemical with all kinds of uses in eucaryotic cells, including phagocytosis, the ingestion of food and materials into cells. So maybe these genes tell us something about how it is that the eucaryotes' procaryotic ancestor cells originally ingested the ancestors of todays's mitochondria and chloroplasts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32610177