The title of this news summary is a direct quote from Johann Hari, a man who grew up in a family of addicts. Hari undertook a 3-½ year, 30,000-mile journey to understand the causes of addiction and the failures of the war on drugs. He summarizes some of the findings that went into his new book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, in an article on the Huffington Post.
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Since March of 2009, the Kepler Space Observatory has been exploring our region of the Milky Way so that scientists at NASA can discover more Earth-like planets orbiting stars and estimate how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy actually have such planets. Data from Kepler is analyzed using a supercomputer running algorithms at NASA’s Ames facility.
Now computations from K2, the extended Kepler space telescope mission, indicate the existence of three new Earth-size planets. The one in the CHZ of its star was given the evocative name, EPIC 201367075. The CHZ – or circumstellar habitable zone – is where planets with sufficient atmospheric pressure can support liquid water on their surface.
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The second half of our conversation with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, author of Why Materialism Is Balony, takes a turn to the experiential as he reveals for the first time ever the single driving force behind his work and, indeed, his life’s mission. Then we learn of how he truly feels about the importance of CERN’s large hadron collider, which he worked on, and the blind spots of scientists where paranormal and transcendental phenomena are concerned.
In 1920 Czech writer Karel Kapek wrote a science-fiction play whose title translated into English as Rossum’s Universal Robots or R.U.R. When it premiered in 1921, it introduced the word ‘Robot’ to the English language and to the science fiction genre. By 1923, it had been translated into 30 languages.
The robots in R.U.R. are closer in nature to cyborgs or androids. Manufactured from synthetic organic materials and capable of independent thought, they are at first content to serve the humans they so closely resemble – but ultimately rebel and wipe them out as useless impediments to their own existence.
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