Category: Science, Nature, & Technology

Do you like electricity, computers, TV, radio, smartphones, and GPS? How about your health and your extraordinary life span? Thank basic research.

Rather than attempting to demarcate the nebulous and artificial distinction between “useful” and “useless” knowledge, we may follow the example of the British chemist and Nobel laureate George Porter, who spoke instead of applied and “not-yet-applied” research.

Supporting applied and not-yet-applied research is not just smart but a social imperative. In order to enable and encourage the full cycle of scientific innovation, which feeds into society in numerous important ways, it is more productive to think of developing a solid portfolio of research in much the same way as we approach well-managed financial resources. Such a balanced portfolio would contain predictable and stable short-term investments, as well as long-term bets that are intrinsically more risky but can potentially earn off-the-scale rewards. A healthy and balanced ecosystem would support the full spectrum of scholarship, nourishing a complex web of interdependencies and feedback loops.

A broad-ranging dialogue between science and society is not only necessary for laying the foundation for future financial support. It is crucial for attracting young minds to join the research effort. Well-informed, science-literate citizens are better able to make responsible choices when confronted with difficult problems like climate change, nuclear power, vaccinations, and genetically modified foods. Similarly, scientists need the dialogue with society to act responsibly in developing potentially harmful technologies. And there is an even higher goal for the public engagement of science: Society fundamentally benefits from embracing the scientific culture of accuracy, truth seeking, critical questioning, healthy skepticism, respect for facts and uncertainties, and wonder at the richness of nature and the human spirit.

Source: We Need More ‘Useless’ Knowledge – The Chronicle of Higher Education

More: “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” in Harpers, issue 179, June/November 1939, by Abraham Flexner (1866-1959)

Technology has its own purposes.

Once decoupled from their economic motivations, devices … acclimate their users to apparatuses that don’t serve users well in order that they might serve other actors, among them corporations and the sphere of technology itself.

Source: Why Nothing Works Anymore – The Atlantic

You’re watching planets orbiting a star that’s 129 light years away, as captured by an observatory in Hawaii. Let that sink in.

The star in question is HR 8799, found in the Pegasus constellation.

Source: An astronomy student made a mesmerizing video of four exoplanets orbiting its host star 129 light years away — Quartz

Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison to soil loss. So why don’t we talk about it?

according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world, on average, has just 60 more years of growing crops. Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical downpours that so quickly strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers’ Weekly reports that we have “only 100 harvests left”.

To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6 million hectares of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12 million hectares a year are lost through soil degradation.

A paper just published in the journal Anthropocene analyses the undisturbed sediments in an 11th century French lake. It shows that the intensification of farming over the last century has increased the rate of soil erosion 60-fold.

This is what topples civilisations. War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything else goes with it.

Source: Ploughing On Regardless | George Monbiot

Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.

Once we start proposing that life could be part of the solution to cosmic mysteries, there’s no end to the fun possibilities.

Source: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?