Status Updates From Blockbuster Science: The Re...

The general rise in entropy gives us a sequence of events physicists call the arrow of time. The arrow does not tell us that the past leads to the future. It only tells us that it goes from order to disorder. This is an important distinction. When entropy reaches its maximum value, the arrow of time will break.

I'm going to use the definition of reality to mean that something can exist without us needing to believe in it.

eality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

—Philip K. Dick

Remember that light is also a wave, and the term coherent is a fancy way to say that all the peaks and valleys of light waves are lined up.

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

—Roy Amara, researcher and futurist

At the Tsinghua University in China, researchers discovered that spiking the mulberry leaves they feed silkworms with a graphene solution makes the little critters spin silk that is 50 percent stronger. This super silk also has the ability to conduct electricity. This new material could someday be used to make wearable electronics.

Graphene is the thinnest of carbon materials, the width of a single carbon atom, and it is flexible. That's not all. Additional benefits are that it's stronger than steel, flexible, transparent, and unreactive. Although it might not be a superconductor, it is the most conductive of the current materials. Due to its slenderness and flexibility, it is the material of choice for nanotechnology.

A different answer to dark matter might be sterile neutrinos. Sterile neutrinos are large hypothetical versions. They are predicted to have no electric charge, so they wouldn't be able to interact with normal matter, but they would be able to interact with gravity. Their effect on gravity would make it appear as if extra unseen matter existed in the universe.

This hypothetical particle (graviton) puts us squarely back in the world of quantum mechanics. The particle is also a wave, and, if we go “all in” on string theory, the wave might be vibrating in extra dimensions. This extradimensional access might explain why gravity appears so weak compared to the strengths of the other universal forces. It dilutes its strength by spreading across dimensions.

Theoretically (the bare minimum required for quality hard science fiction),

The point of runaway technological growth is called the technological singularity.

the sound waves from a dog barking while light waves project images to your eyes of a scrappy beagle. This input might activate memories of beagles you've known. All these processes occur in dif ferent regions of the brain, but they are synced to provide you with a unified experience of time and space. This is consciousness, or at least one of the definitions of consciousness.

An emergent property is when the sum of something's parts has a unique property that is not present in any of the individual parts. It triggers when there is enough of something to make something different.

The moral issue[of terraforming where life already exists] goes past intelligent or even sentient life; it reaches all the way down to microbial life that might someday evolve into intelligent life. The cost of terraforming won't be paid only by us. The cost will also be paid by the planet we homestead

The universe offers many more ways to die than to survive.

The geologic timeline is divided into major divisions of geological time called eons. Eons are made up of eras, and eras are made up of periods, and periods are made up of epochs. We are currently in the Phanerozoic eon, Cenozoic era, Quaternary period, Holocene epoch.