Author Archives: Charles Brass

The human brain is only the latest chapter in the ancient story of thinking on Earth. Rocks do not think. Rocks do not feel. Rocks do not share their experiences with fellow rocks in the hope that their hard-won knowledge … Continued

Arts and Industries Building 900 Jefferson Drive, SW Washington, DC Part exhibition, part festival, FUTURES presents nearly 32,000 square feet of new immersive site-specific art installations, interactives, working experiments, inventions, speculative designs, and “artifacts of the future,” as well as historic objects … Continued

Last summer, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went on a backpacking trip with some friends. They headed into the High Sierra, hiking toward Deadman Canyon—a fifty-mile walk through challenging terrain. Now sixty-nine, Robinson has been hiking and camping in … Continued

Swedish engineering firm Minesto has designed special gliders that look a lot like airborne drones — except that they’re meant to capture power from underwater currents and use it to generate electricity, down near the ocean floor. The company is … Continued

Technology has advanced at a blinding pace in the past 150 years. That won’t always happen. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That little aphorism is called Clark’s third law, and it haunts all our efforts to find alien … Continued

Combining a vertical farm and office space into a single 51-storey concept out of Chinese mythology, an Italian architect is completing the Shenzhen skyline with a stunning “farmscraper.” With a façade that features a vertical hydroponic farm extending the entire … Continued

Nissan has launched its most advanced production line to date as it works toward creating an emissions-free manufacturing process for its next-generation vehicles. Using the very latest robotic technology, the Nissan Intelligent Factory started operating this week in Tochigi, Japan, … Continued

Intr Government introduces Bill to formally recognise animals as sentient beings Animal Sentience Committee will put animal sentience at heart of government policy Bill introduced as part of government’s first of a kind Action Plan for Animal Welfare Vertebrate animals will … Continued

The brain’s neurons tend to get most of the scientific attention, but a set of cells around them called astrocytes – literally, star-shaped cells – are increasingly being viewed as crucial players in guiding a brain to become properly organized. … Continued

Gardens persist for 150 years after those who planted them were removed.   –Chelsey Armstrong In the 1930s, an archeologist from the Smithsonian wrote a short paper remarking on the exquisite vegetation around First Nation villages in Alaska. The villages’ … Continued

Google Earth is already a powerful tool for observing our planet, but today it’s getting a major upgrade with the introduction of a new 3D time-lapse feature. Described by Google Earth director Rebecca Moore as the biggest update to Google … Continued

In a new first for genetic engineering, scientists have developed a single-celled synthetic organism that grows and divides much like a normal cell, mimicking aspects of the cell division cycle that underlies and generates healthy living cellular life. The achievement, … Continued

When faced with a problem, people tend to use solutions that involve adding new elements rather than considering subtracting existing components. In other words, people tend to choose complicated solutions even when removing things is ideal. For instance, removing stoplights … Continued

A protoplanet in the early solar system spawned a unique type of meteorite. A lonely meteorite that landed in the Sahara Desert in 2020 is older than Earth. The primeval space rock is about 4.6 billion years old, and is the … Continued