The report at the arXiv blog (read here), compares brains to computer chips.  There is a limit to the size of most computer chips because the larger the chip, the more cooling it requires.  The same can be said for our brains.  We encounter a size limit when the amount of energy required for cooling becomes unsustainable and inefficient.  Some computer chip makers say we are fools to produce faster and faster chips because of these inevitable cooling problems (once again, good news for anyone who fears a robot apocalypse).

But, calculations by theoritical neurobiologists show that our brains could be much larger.

Are our brains growing?  How can we tell?

If there is alien life on Everest, do we really want to find it? Anything tough enough to survive in the harsh environment of Mt. Everest could be a serious threat to mankind. To illustrate this point, here are two stories that clearly portray the dangers of searching for alien life in the frozen and hostile climates of Earth.

Story #1 is H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, the terrifying story of a scientific expedition to the arctic that discovers the ruins of a vast alien civilization and the preserved remains of highly evolved creatures that aren’t as dead as they appear.

Story #2 is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which recounts another arctic expedition’s encounter with a deadly alien organism that’d been frozen under the ice for hundreds of thousands of years.

If you don’t knkow these stories, we highly recommend you familiarize yourself with them. They are a clear warning against the current exploration for alien life on Mt. Everest.

Here’s the trailer for The Thing.

The image below compares a photo of the UFO and Buddha. We think group analysis is the best way to come to some conclusion. Do you think the UFO is alien or Buddha?

Here is a close up of the UFO.  Can you make out any Buddha like features?

Maybe it’s an alien Buddha.

Washington news organizations are reporting that a white mystery substance has been falling on the area for sometime now, and people are starting to worry.  Local officials say they’ve traced the source of the material to a nearby construction site, but not everyone believes this answer.

Bethesda is home to NIH’s main campus (The National Institute of Health).  NIH is home to some of the most cutting edge medical research in the world.  Chemtrail conspiracy theorists think they could be conducting a new experiment on the people right outside their gates.  Chemtrail theorists say government agencies have been dumping chemicals into our atmosphere for years as part of a massive covert operation.  The purpose of the operation is said to be everything from population control to atmospheric modification for an alien race that has infiltrated the power elite.

Chemtrail sightings and evidence are rare in the Washington, D.C. area, and rarely is there evidence as visible as the substance currently raining down on Bethesda, MD.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab manager John Callas said in a statement to the press that “Spirit is in a very difficult situation.”

The problem started after SPIRIT rolled into some loose dirt while driving in reverse.  Besides being stuck in the soil, SPIRIT has lived longer than NASA ever imagined, and its age is starting to show as its gone through a series of malfunctions.  However, the robot community is holding onto hope that the tough Martian rover will pull another trick out of it’s hat and push on with its exploration of the Red Planet.

Read more about SPIRIT’s dangerous predicament here.

When we hear the word Vulcan, our thoughts wander to the Star Trek character Spock, his home planet, and his people.  The VULCAN Engine Program is appropriately named since it is a “propulsion system demonstration effort to design, build, and ground-test an engine capable of accelerating a full-scale hypersonic vehicle from rest to Mach 4+.”

This could be our first steps towards a “warp drive” propulsion system like the one that propels the Enterprise across vast distances in space.

Read the DARPA News Release here (via DARPA’s news room.)

Recipe verbatim from the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility website:

• Take a hollow, spherical plastic capsule about two millimeters in diameter (about the size of a small pea)
• Fill it with 150 micrograms (less than one-millionth of a pound) of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
• Take a laser that for about 20 billionths of a second can generate 500 trillion watts – the equivalent of five million million 100-watt light bulbs.
• Focus all that laser power onto the surface of the capsule.
• Wait ten billionths of a second.
• Result: one miniature star.

In this process the capsule and its deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel will be compressed to a density 100 times that of solid lead, and heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius – hotter than the center of the sun. These conditions are just those required to initiate thermonuclear fusion, the energy source of stars.

By following our recipe, we would make a miniature star that lasts for a tiny fraction of a second. During its brief lifetime, it will produce energy the way the stars and the sun do, by nuclear fusion. Our little star will produce ten to 100 times more energy than we used to ignite it.

That ought to do it.  Please don’t use your homemade star for any destructive purposes.

The project at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility plans to ignite a miniture star in a controlled lab environment using lasers.  This tiny nuclear reactor could produce tremendous amounts of energy.  For example, our sun blasts about 386 BILLION gigawatts of energy into space.  A large nuclear reactor generates 1 gigawatt.  Do the math.  Even if we could create a star hundreds of billions times smaller than our sun, the energy output would still be massive.  This could solve all of our energy problems as long as we can control the nuclear fusion and harness to power of a star.  Worst case scenario = the destruction of earth if the star we build powers out of control.

This building could soon be home to a man-made baby star.

Robot twitterati could be next.

Social media users worry they will not be able to discern between their “human” and “robot” friends.  Jackie Topovowitz from the organization Anti-Android Research & Development Team (AARDT) said, “We cannot blur the line any more between man and machine.  The simple fact is, robots should be taught to be subservient to humans.  Allowing them to interact with people on social networks puts us on equal footing, and we cannot let that happen.”

Members of the group Robots Deserve Rights 2, (RDR2), say the comments made be AARDT are robo-racist.  Jeffrey Gottchalk said, “we welcome robots to online social networks with open arms.  This is a positive step forward in robot rights.”

What do you think?  Do robots have a fundamental right to social media?

As we continue to wonder what might cause the 2012 apocalypse infamously predicted by the Mayans, this report has caused a stir because of the following quote from the article in the Times Online: “From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an ‘unreliable toy’”.

Could a frustratingly slow internet cause the infamous 2012 apocalypse?  This is a possibility according to an internet researcher who wishes to remain nameless.  The reseacher said, “We’ve become so dependent on the internet that a reduction in its performance could lead to global chaos.  Banking systems, transportation, utility grids could all come crashing down.  I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to think the ensuing mayhem could snowball into the end of the world.”

While these points are relevant to this theory, psychologist Dr. Eddie Eddington Jr. says he is more concerned about the psychological damage a slow and evaporating internet would have on the world.

Dr. Eddington said the following when reached for comment: “The instant gratification we’ve become used to with the internet and the immediacy with which we can connect to a world of information has made us extremely ADD.  Take for instance the Twitter phenomena.  Our attention spans and patience are dwindling at exponential rates.  If reports that the internet will start slowing to a sudden halt around 2012 are true, then we could very well see our collective psychology short circuit.  The results of such a short circuit could be widespread insanity, which would snowball into chaos, riots, and general anarchy.  It very well could trigger a sort of ‘social apocalypse’.  Perhaps this is what the Mayans predicted.”

What do you think?  Could a slow internet in 2012 be the spark that lights the fire of an apocalypse?