The Future Pictured
Future worlds described by science fiction visionaries like Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Robert Heinlein often included wildly inventive methods of transportation to other planets, galaxies and dimensions.
These brief glimpses into the possible future of travel were left largely to the readers’ imaginations, but a flourishing group of dreamers, designers and illustrators are bringing those creations to life — at least online.
The conceptships.org website run by Igo Tkac showcases these artists’ renditions of spaceships and other fantastical creations. From retro-futuristic aerial attack machines to automated deep-sea treasure hunters, here are some of the coolest.
The Gabriel Tablets
The release of inscriptions from a three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing quiet a stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it appears to speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If this turns out to be an accurate rendering, and the date holds, this turns out to show that the idea of resurrection did not come from Christianity per se, but was part of a larger, Jewish world of anticipation and thought. The Jewishness of early Christianity is more positively confirmed by this extraordinary finding.
Did Toads Predict the China Quake?
For years the Chinese have used animal behavior as indicators of future earthquakes. Just before the most recent devastation in China toads swarmed across one of the bridges in the affected area. Two days before the quake thousands of toads suddenly decided to move across a bridge in Taizhou, a town in the Jiangsu province. Could the catastrophe that left tens of thousands of people dead in the earthquake in China have been avoided? Some Chinese are wondering why the local authorities didn’t relate the event to the imminence of an earthquake, and why scientists didn’t take notice of the bizarre disappearance of a lake in Enshi, in the Hubei province, on April 26.
Regional Nuclear War?
Think you might escape the aftereffects of a limited nuclear war that happens on the other side of the globe from you? Think again. Imagine that the long-simmering conflict between India and Pakistan broke out into a war in which each side deployed 50 nuclear weapons against the other country’s megacities. Karachi, Bombay, and dozens of other South Asian cities catch fire like Hiroshima and Nagasaki did at the end of World War II. Beyond the local human tragedy of such a situation, a new study looking at the atmospheric chemistry of regional nuclear war finds that the hot smoke from burning cities would tear holes in the ozone layer of the Earth. The increased UV radiation resulting from the ozone loss could more than double DNA damage, and increase cancer rates across North America and Eurasia.
A Dolphin Rescues Two Beached Whales
A dolphin has come to the rescue of two whales which had become stranded on a beach in New Zealand. Conservation officer Malcolm Smith told the BBC that he and a group of other people had tried in vain for an hour and a half to get the whales to sea.
The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said. But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety.
Strange New Cities
Using earth orbiting satellites, acclaimed researcher David Flynn has studied the high plateau of Bolivia and found previously undiscovered unnatural patterns stretching outward from Lake Titicaca for hundreds of square miles. The geoglyphic works range from arrow straight parallel lines, enormous over lapping perfect circles and rectangles to ‘labyrinth like’ systems of walls and mounds extending over every feature of the terrain.
an end to aging?
Old age has always been like the weather: Everybody talks about aging, but nobody does anything about it. Oh, they’ve tried. For millennia, charlatans have been offering remedies for aging that didn’t work any better than baldness cures and virility restorers. Now, however, with baldness cures and virility restorers that do work found as close as the nearest drugstore, researchers have started looking into ways to slow, stop or perhaps even reverse the changes that accompany aging. If these scientists succeed, their breakthroughs may lead to major changes in human society.
“Ether” is back again!
Once dismissed as an anachronism and of little value, the whole notion of an etherlike substance is back, but now is called “dark-liquid.” An interesting new theory unites the “dark forces” and suggests that the two biggest mysteries in cosmology may be one. Dark matter and dark energy could arise from a single dark fluid-like substace that permeates the whole universe. And this could mean Earth-based dark matter searches will come up empty handed.
In Cuneiform–The Oldest Dream of Dumuzi
In preparing for an upcoming dream workshop I came across this, the oldest recorded dream from the ancient culture of Mesopotamian Sumeria at around 3400 BCE. It was a nightmare.
In ancient times…the shepherd lay down, he lay down to dream. He woke up–it was a dream! He shivered–it was sleep! He rubbed his eyes, he was terrified.
“A dream, my sister! A dream! In my dream, rushes were rising up for me… Tall trees in the forest were rising up together over me. Water was poured over my holy coals for me, the cover of my holy churn was being removed, my holy drinking cup was torn down from the peg where it hung, my shepherd’s stick disappeared from me. … The churns were lying on their side, no milk was poured, the drinking cups were lying on their side, Dumuzi was dead, the sheepfold was haunted.
Intriguing Mars
Images coming from Mars never fail to excite the imagination. We often forget that this is a strange planet, in so many ways, unlike our own. Recently images taken by Nasa’s Mars explorer Spirit some four years ago have become available. Initial inspections revealed nothing unusual, but amateur astronomers kept exploring and were excited to find this intriguing image. As one individual said, “These pictures are amazing. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what appears to be a naked alien running around on Mars.”
Most observers believe, of course, that is a trick of photography, an optical illusion. Something natural appears “unnatural” when it is only a sliver of rock seen at an odd angle. That’s the likeliest explanation, and I tend to agree, but you can’t help but be amazed at what images do appear, whatever their origin.
The Taste of Wine
Wine, we know, gets better with age - but now it appears it tastes better the more it costs.
Parasite Theory Stirs A Revolution
“What if I told you,” Joel Weinstock said, “there were countries where the doctors had never seen hay fever?” It is another piece of evidence, another “aha” moment in the global medical mystery that Weinstock - the chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts-New England Medical Center - has narrowed down to one chief suspect: the worms.
Polynesian Chickens
Scholars have long assumed the Spaniards first introduced chickens to the New World along with horses, pigs, and cattle. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in oceangoing canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe’s “Age of Discovery.”
Snorting A Brain Chemical Replaces Sleep
In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness. A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery’s first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy.
Strange Shapes On Mars
Russian viewers have been given an interesting series of photos of strange shapes found by recent Mars photography. Click through the whole set of five.
Picture-Sorting Dogs
Next time you sort through your holiday photos, maybe your dog could lend a hand. It seems dogs can place photographs into categories the same way humans do, an ability previously identified only in birds and primates. Friederike Range at the University of Vienna, Austria, and colleagues trained dogs to distinguish photographs that depicted dogs from those that did not. “We know they can categorise ‘food’ or ‘enemies’ from experience,” says Range, “but this is the first time we’ve taught them an abstract concept - ‘a dog’ - and shown they can transfer this knowledge to a new situation.”
Dakota the Dino “Mummy”
A newly un veiled “dinosaur mummy” is one of the best-preserved of the ancient reptiles found to date, accord ing to researchers—who say this one may have had stripes and the ability to out run fearsome T. rex. Scientists on Monday announced a preliminary analysis of the 67-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur, with muscles and bones preserved in large, intact segments of skin.
Chimp’s Photographic Memory
Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests. Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists. The research, published in Current Biology, suggests we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives.
Sliding Rocks of Racetrack Playa
One of the most interesting mysteries of Death Valley National Park is the sliding rocks at Racetrack Playa (a playa is a dry lake bed). These rocks can be found on the floor of the playa with long trails behind them. Somehow these rocks slide across the playa, cutting a furrow in the sediment as they move. Some of these rocks weigh several hundred pounds. That makes the question: “How do they move?” a very challenging one. The truth: No one knows for sure exactly how these rocks move - although a few people have come up with some pretty good explanations. The reason why their movement remains a mystery: No one has ever seen them in motion!
Incredible Abilities
With so many superhero movies around, such as Spiderman or Hulk, we are used to see people with special abilities in fiction. But people with amazing abilities actually do exist in real life; here’s a list of 10 of the most amazing of these people!
Humanity “Shortening the Life of the Universe”
This startling claim, made by a pair of American cosmologists, has to do with observing dark matter. This is a “must read” article for those interested in the weirdnesses of quantum physics.
Natural Disasters Quadruple in Two Decades
More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study Sunday that largely blamed global warming. “Oxfam… says that rising green house gas emissions are the major cause of weather-related disasters and must be tackled,” the organisation said, adding that the world’s poorest people were being hit the hardest. The world suffered about 120 natural disasters per year in the early 1980s, which compared with the current figure of about 500 per year, according to the report. “This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people,” noted Oxfam director Barbara Stocking. “This is no freak year. It follows a pattern of more frequent, more erratic, more unpredictable and more extreme weather events that are affecting more people.”
Goldilocks Universe
Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue. The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
“Slovenia’s Gandhi”
Slovenia’s President is a recluse. Told he had cancer, Janez Drnovsek moved alone to the woods and embraced his inner spirituality. His Government despises him but he is a hero to his people. It is not often that you ask a European head of state whether he has gone loopy, but in the case of Janez Drnovsek, Slovenia’s reclusive President, the question seems almost unavoidable.
Six Ideas That Can Change the World
They are making orange peel plastic and robots that can heal themselves. They are six researchers with six ideas that will one day change the world.