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PHIL TORRES AND GEOFF WHEAT Two miles below the waves off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, a team of geochemists in a subsea vehicle accidentally discovered hundreds of strange, beautiful purple octopus incubating their eggs. Deep sea biologists were stunned. "When I first saw the photos, I thought, 'They shouldn't be there! Not that deep and not that many of them!'"  said Janet Voight , a zoologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. Deep-sea octopuses usually live in far colder temperatures. Higher temperatures jump-start their metabolism, demanding more oxygen than the warm water provides. To brood eggs in warm water is usually suicide. The mysterious group of octopus mamas were ill fated indeed: of the 186 eggs attacked to the rocks underwater, none showed signs of a developing embryo. So what were the octopuses doing there? According to biologists, there are likely other groups of octopuses living nearby, in crevices where the water is cool and o...

Trapped between two jet streams, the Great Red Spot is an anticyclone swirling around a center of high atmospheric pressure that makes it rotate in the opposite sense of hurricanes on Earth. Scientists are performing laboratory studies to try to decipher what causes the giant storm’s swirl of reddish hues. The largest and most powerful hurricanes ever recorded on Earth spanned over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across with winds gusting up to around 200 mph (320 km/h). That’s wide enough to stretch across nearly all U.S. states east of Texas. But even that kind of storm is dwarfed by the Great Red Spot, a gigantic storm in Jupiter. There, gigantic means twice as wide as Earth. With tumultuous winds peaking at about 400 mph (640 km/h), the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for the past 150 years — maybe even longer. While people saw a big spot in Jupiter as early as they started stargazing through telescopes in the 1600s, it is still unclear...

The problem is that the way Facebook marketed itself to consumers back in 2008, is not how it is now. (Source: Getty) Three hours and 27 minutes into Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate, senator Dan Sullivan pressed him on the question – is  Facebook  too powerful? It’s a sentiment reflected by the House of Lords here in the UK, which has called on the Competition and Markets Authority to launch a study into  Google  and Facebook’s “dysfunctional and opaque” digital advertising market. Facebook can be an extraordinarily useful tool – it has connected people and ideas around the world like nothing before. But it is exactly this magnitude which is becoming a problem. A lack of understanding on the part of politicians and consumers alike about what Facebook is, what it does, and how it works means that it hasn’t been regulated like other behemoths in the communications world. This lack of regulation has allowed Facebook to become huge. Self-...

Josie Warden asks if the language we use to discuss materials and waste is compatible with moving to a circular economy. Any readers of  Robert Macfarlane’s recent work ‘Landmarks’  will recognise some of the sentiment in this blog. His book, which opens a window onto a lost lexicon which we once used to communicate our experiences of the landscape spoke to a frustration of mine, and something which has come up many times during the Great Recovery work: the discord between experiences of the material world and the language we use to describe it. I consider myself a maker, and derive a lot of pleasure from crafting materials, and learning to understand how they work.  Joy and wonder too, come in discovering the cultural stories behind the products, materials and systems that surround us. But far from expressing their characteristics and quirks, the common English language available to us to discuss these materials, their properties, origins and the way w...

Steve G Anderson/Millennium Images, UK By  Bob Holmes For decades now, and with ever-increasing sophistication, we have been searching the universe for signs that we are not alone. Rovers are probing the surface of Mars. Scientists are planning missions to other promising spots such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa, both of which may harbour liquid water. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, will let astronomers sample the atmospheres of exoplanets for chemical signatures of life. And radio astronomers have long been listening for transmissions from intelligent extraterrestrials. So far, we have found nothing. What if it stays that way? What if, by mid-century, we have visited every life-friendly place in the solar system, eavesdropped on radio transmissions from a hundred million stars and peered at millions of exoplanets without finding the slightest trace of life? When should we give up and decide we’re alone? Never, say...

Aaron Tilley/Getty By  Sally Adee It’s surprisingly hard to imagine a world without scarcity. When we think about the end of material needs, it’s usually our own, says John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. But what about everyone’s needs? “Scarcity is the basis of our fundamental economic system,” he says. This is the capitalist paradigm whose principles are, to most of us, as non-negotiable as the laws of physics. How would the economy work if everything was free? Who would make things if no one got paid? Isn’t this just communism? Trying to envision a world not organised around the market is a bit like a fish thinking about what’s outside the water. Jeremy Rifkin did it in his 2014 manifesto  The Zero Marginal Cost Society  . Capitalism, he contends, is almost done eating itself. “It’s the ultimate triumph of the market” – a final transition to a society in which automation has brought the cost of producing each a...

THE FUTURE OF GAMING: 20 YEARS INTO THE FUTURE Gaming grows every year, new innovation leads to new ways to play, and new ways to play lead to new games to play. If we look back at gaming over the past 20 years, it has received a substantial increase in hardware and software sales, making the gaming industry worth billions of dollars. This has all been led by an industry that strives itself on entertainment, creating experiences that even Hollywood fail to achieve. But in the end it all boils down technology, as without it, we would not be at the pinnacle of gaming as we are today, and it’s only going to get bigger and better in the future. Technology leads gaming, it is the driving force behind every aspect of the industry. From the moment a new video game is revealed, to the final moments in which the credits roll, technology is behind it all. We have gone from playing Super Mario Bros on our classic tube television sets, to streaming our PS4 games over LTE net...

The fully autonomous AI weapons now being developed could disastrously transform warfare. The UN must act fast Wed 11 Apr 2018  10.00 BST Last modified on Wed 11 Apr 2018  15.59 BST   Mock killer robot in central London. ‘Countries that recognise the dangers cannot wait another five years to prevent such weapons from becoming a reality.’ Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images I t’s five years this month since the launch of the  Campaign to Stop Killer Robots , a global coalition of non-governmental groups calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons. This month also marks the fifth time that countries  have convened at the United Nations in Geneva  to address the problems these weapons would pose if they were developed and put into use. The countries meeting in Geneva this week are party to a major disarmament treaty called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. While some diplomatic progress  has been made  u...

These movies had little to no plot and got really poor IMDb ratings but still managed to enter the 100 cr. club. 1. Race 3 (2018)    Box Office Collection: ₹106.47 cr.    IMDb Rating: 2.5/10 Race 3 , the  movie  gave us life lessons through its  songs  and dialogues, and a flying  bhai,  This masterpiece earned  106.47 cr.   (according to Trade analyst  Taran Adarsh ) in just 3 days, along with a spot in the lowest IMBb rating in the world list.  Source:   movienews360.com 2. Tubelight (2017)     Box Office Collection: ₹156 cr.     IMDb Rating: 4.2/10 The plot line was as absent as the hope of a clear sky in Delhi. But the box office collection stood at   156 cr . and proved us wrong even when the IMDb rating supported our belief. Source:   firstpost.com 3. Judwaa 2 (2017)     Box Office Collection:  ₹169 cr.     IMDb Rating: 4/10 ...