Month: February 2009
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Glider guns created in chemical Game of Life
If you’ve ever played Conway’s Game of Life, you’ll be familiar with cellular automata and, more importantly, glider guns. So get this: a team of British chemists and computer scientists have created a chemical cocktail that behaves like a cellular automata and which reproduces this behavior: chemical guns firing chemical gliders across a chemical grid.…
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Challenging the nature of black holes
The nature of black holes has puzzled physicists for decades. But while the debate has fizzled in recent years, some new thinking is about to set it alight again. Black holes are fundamentally a product of general relativity, which allows for a gravitational collapse so violent that no other force can oppose it. When that…
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Space Station simulator given emotions
Astronauts training to work on the International Space Station have to have mastered a mind-boggling amount of kit before they leave Earth. One of these devices is the Canadarm 2, a robotic arm used to manipulate experiments outside the station. On Earth, astronauts train on a Canadarm 2 simulator connected to a virtual assistant that…
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Fermi’s paradox solved?
We have little to guide us on the question of the existence intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But the physicist Enrico Fermi came up with the most obvious question: if the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations, where are they? The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the…