Celestial Impasto: sh2–239 by Adam Block (USA), winner of the Deep Space Astronomy Photographer of the Year. Click image for more info and other dazzling top entries.
Everyone wants to live a long time, preferably forever. Some of the best art and a big chunk of religion is based directly or indirectly around that anxiety. Good news, Google is on
the case!
Google still earns most of its money from the ads that pop up with search results, but it’s also working on driverless cars, Internet-connected glasses, and stratospheric balloons that could help get more of the developing world online.
“Illness and aging affect all our families,” Page said in a statement. “With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives.”
Slowing the aging process promises considerable bang for the buck, because many illnesses appear to be the effect, not cause, of getting older, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s and various forms of cancer.
Not to be too cynical, but that looks like a moonshot—then again we
made the moon shot! Okay, well, not to be too self-absorbed, but speaking for many baby boomers and a few gen-Xers, I sure hope they get results, say, in the next 25 years or so ...
- If you're thinking about applying for a job at Google or any other large firm, you might want to read this first.
- The Denver Museum of Natural History has a new photo page on Facebook.
- This is probably too good to last, but if it does, a medium-term slight cooling of the sun, say along the lines of the hypothetical Maunder Minimum, would be about the best thing that could happen to a warming Earth right now.
- ZOMG! Aliens found in upper atmosphere!?
- Yes, of course the usual suspects will seize on any news about the sun and distort it beyond recognition in a game of Fox News/tea party phone tag. But as the Bad Astronomer notes, it's not like they were holding off until now.
- Curiosity reports Mars may be lifeless today. Other astronomers have long predicted Earth will one day follow but for different reasons. Due to the peculiarities of astrophysics, the long term trend—and I do mean long—is for a growing, warming sun. Astrophysicists estimate it's about 5 percent to 10 percent hotter every billion years or so. A new study suggests without big climate-forcing events, like a massive comet hit or an alien holocaust that fortunately uses Windows compatible computers vulnerable to viruses, we have between a billion and two billion years before we turn into an uninhabitable, perhaps slightly cooler version of Venus.