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Can AI help NASA find aliens on starless rogue planets? Fermi’s Paradox may have finally met its match A paradox for everyone The pro-ET side tends to submit that there are, potentially, trillions of galaxies out there. And in each one there are trillions of stars that could be surrounded by planets. The sheer number of possibilities makes it obvious, to them, that alien life must exist. But Fermi’s query cut to the heart of this assertion....

Can art mobilize people to fight climate change? This artist thinks so Transforming cold hard data into climate art Transforming cold hard data into climate art “When I was growing up, I noticed that I stopped resonating with news headlines. We read for years about deforestation in the Amazon and the dangers of plastics in our oceans, but it didn’t change anything.This is really dangerous,” Biersteker said. He started to work with researchers from around the globe to see how he could use their rough data to create something that connects people to the numbers in a deeper way:...

Can art mobilize people to fight climate change? This artist thinks so Transforming cold hard data into climate art Transforming cold hard data into climate art “When I was growing up, I noticed that I stopped resonating with news headlines. We read for years about deforestation in the Amazon and the dangers of plastics in our oceans, but it didn’t change anything.This is really dangerous,” Biersteker said. He started to work with researchers from around the globe to see how he could use their rough data to create something that connects people to the numbers in a deeper way:...

Can black holes become white holes? Nope, sorry — time can’t run backwards What’s a black hole? When you drop a tennis ball, it falls to the ground due to what we call gravity. The Earth is very heavy, so it pulls the tennis ball down. If Earth had more material inside, making it even heavier, gravity would pull on the ball more strongly. The pull would also be stronger if we stood on the surface of a shrunken Earth, which remained as heavy as it is....

Can chatrooms replace courtrooms? Online dispute resolution systems have many problems, but supporters believe they are better than costly, slow courts How does it work? The Markup found more than 80 individual courts around the country that use or have used online dispute resolution since 2016. We identified the courts through internet searches, vendor customer lists, local media reports, and other public records. We also found seven state court systems—in Utah, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, Delaware, and New Mexico—that have statewide or multicourt online dispute resolution programs....