I think it is a slightly better place to look than Earth for the reason I mentioned, but I agree it's a huge long shot so we shouldn't spend much money on something like this. But as the article says, they're not proposing a new probe, just looking carefully at all the pictures from an existing mission that took…

If aliens (or their self-replicating interstellar probes) visited both the Earth and Moon but it was millions of years ago, then any traces they left on the Earth might get wiped out by all the weathering and geological processes that happen here (same reason the Earth has hardly any visible craters). So in that sense…

It's not that simple, see my response to gtomkins1 below.

This sounds backwards. The faster-than-light neutrinos were already theoretically impossible.

On that fall day in 2009, Kirsten did not know that someone as intelligent and articulate as Jack might be unable to read the feelings of others, or gauge the impact of his words. And only later would she recognize that her own lifelong troubles - bullying by students, anger from teachers and emotional meltdowns that…

Conservation of energy is not in danger here, only the precise formulation of lifetimes and mass under the rules of special relativity.

Actually we know conservation of energy isn't a rock solid rule, it's more a statistical rule.

Essentially, the article suggests that because theory states a certain observation is impossible, then the observation must be wrong. Traditionally, you come up with a theory, then try to use observation as a means of supporting or disproving a theory.

Patients who have a hemisphere removed generally act pretty different from before the operation unless the operation happened in childhood so the plasticity is much greater, from what I understand. And the idea of a patient functioning normally despite having only a "tiny lump of brain matter" is an urban legend I…

This guy's book, The Master and His Emissary, also has quite a lot of fascinating info on the differences between the left and right hemisphere.

For the most part the article doesn't make broad claims about the general differences between the two hemispheres, it just talks about differences seen in specific patients. But these lines are kind of dubious:

From what I remember (also backed up by this for example), with modern commercial planes the initial takeoff is done with the pilot steering, but during the ascent, flight and the descent and landing it's all done completely by autopilot, with the pilots just there as insurance in case something goes wrong, and also…

I don't think there's any real resemblance between the architecture of a computer and a biological brain (for example the "memories" of a computer are nothing like the way memories work in a brain), but I do think that computers will eventually (if civilization doesn't collapse) be able to simulate brains or some…

Gotcha, I misunderstood what you meant by "never". Though if "manlike reactions" means passing the Turing test, I don't think that'll happen any time soon, and the third one depends a lot on how in-depth the "understanding" is supposed to be. For air traffic, Heinlein's comment about "multiple electronic brain" would…

Why not? I imagine the autopilots are incorporating radar information, does it make a difference whether the computers flying the planes are on the ground or onboard the planes?

And I can think of at least three in the "never" column that are well on their way to becoming viable realities. (Hint: they follow each other consecutively.)

Whoops, I also missed #15, which is close to true since China is really more authoritarian that communist per se, and that only leaves North Korea as far as I know (which has also somewhat strayed from "communism" with the weird god-cult surrounding the leader)

I'd say #2 is half-right...contraception yes (relative to 1952), "control of disease" not so much. #8 is also half-right, more so if designer drugs counts as "operational psychology" (and cognitive behavioral therapy is also sort of close). #11 is totally right. For #17, aren't pretty much all commercial aircraft…

I think the bar for what counts as an ethical experiment with insects is way lower than for animals with more complex brains...scientists do a lot of experiments with selecting fruit flies for particular traits, like desiccation tolerance (where presumably all the less "fit" individuals would have died of thirst…

The difference is that Star Trek had already been expanded into lots of different sequels and prequels and books and video games and such, so you can't really say making a parallel-universe version of the TOS is somehow compromising the unique standalone nature of the original series, or that it's a new kind of…