The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel

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Phoenix Lander and the 'Canals' of Mars

On May 25 the Phoenix Lander will arrive at its destination near the Martian North Pole.  It's hunting for that most precious of materials, water.  So it's a pity that it went during the one era in time when we don't believe there are any canals.

The Universe -The 1st 10 Billion Years

Science has analyzed the motion of galaxies around us, and found that they were expanding as a result of reactions set off at the time of the Big Bang. Science has added those findings with studies of radiation and found that our current universe was born 13.7 billion years ago; that’s give-or-take 200 million years or so.

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Is Mathematics Discovered or Invented?

For centuries people have debated whether – like scientific truths – mathematics is discoverable, or if it is simply invented by the minds of our great mathematicians. But two questions are raised, one for each side of the coin. For those who believe these mathematical truths are purely discoverable, where, exactly, are you looking? And for those on the other side of the court, why cannot a mathematician simply announce to the world that he has invented 2 + 2 to equal 5.

Blazars -Supermassive Galactic-core Black Holes

An international team of researchers have stared down the barrel of one of the most violently energetic objects in the universe - and they didn't blink.  Instead, they've figured out the physics behind one of the most impressive astrophysical events in existence.

SuperBots! vs. Evil BotNets

The news wires are abuzz with stories of hackers attacking U.S. military sites, CNN, and anti-China sites. The tech wires are filled with warnings against opening unsolicited emails, and protecting against spam. All of this has a common theme, and that theme is botnets.

A Botnet is a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously and automatically on groups of zombie computers controlled remotely.

Piotr Wozniak's 'Memory Engine' -Predictions About Ourselves Encoded in Machines

Software whiz Piotr Wozniak's latest invention is channeling the story historian Jonathan Spence turned into a bestseller about the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci who wrote A Treatise on Mnemonics, in Chinese in 1596, for the governor of Jiangxi Province. Ricci recreated the medieval European idea of a memory palace -- an edifice you build in your mind and furnish with mnemonic devices. Recollection is a process of walking through the rooms and associating information with their contents.

Unlike Ricci's world and era, we have our computers -our replacement brains, which take us further and further from the old discipline of memory. Why memorize what we can look up? And so our inner life is gradually impoverished.

Planetary Pinball To Threaten Earth

Don't make any plans for the next five billion years.  We know that's about how long we have before Sun goes kablooey and converts the Earth into an attractively charred cinder, but there's a chance an interplanetary collision could put paid to us before then.  And by "interplanetary" here, we don't mean something traveling between planets - we mean two vast orbital bodies getting up close and cataclysmically personal.

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