The Greek poet Hesiod described the Five Ages of Man in mythology.

They progress from the Golden Age, when people lived among the gods, through the warlike Bronze Age and on to the Heroic Age. His narrative ends with the Iron Age, a period of toil and misery for mankind.

Science has now replaced these mythologies. We are at the point where we look at the entire universe as a grand series of game-changing leaps toward our emergence as an intelligent species. It is an epic story more compelling than anything from creation mythology.

In a recent paper, Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth College describes the universe's first three ages as the physical age, chemical age, and biological age. He says that we are now entering the cognitive age, the emergence of intelligence life on Earth and presumably across the universe.

This leaves us with an enticing question: what will be the fifth age of the universe? Will this be a period of decline toward the burnout of the last star, as our extrapolations from current astrophysics predict? Or could it be something more existential and unpredictable given the potential influence of "thinking matter" on the arrow of time? Are we entering a cosmological Age of Aquarius?

Update (below): Microsoft says it has "long" been censoring users

Tech giant Microsoft is actively intercepting and censoring conversations in its Windows Live Messenger program, utilizing a block list to prevent users from trading links to a popular peer-to-peer media sharing website known as The Pirate Bay.

While it's not surprising that a corporate block list would include The Pirate Bay, one of the Internet's most notorious havens for media sharing in violation of copyright laws around the world, at least one branch of the website devoted to legal peer-to-peer sharing is also being blocked.

In a trial-run Monday morning, Raw Story discovered that Microsoft is also blocking "The Promo Bay," where artists submit their materials to be discovered by a mass audience.

Artists the world over use The Promo Bay to help develop a global fanbase, utilizing the very technologies that have caused such consternation among the entertainment industry's largest players.

Microsoft, it would seem, does not like that.

Microsoft on Monday said that cyber crime "command" servers in two US states were seized in an ongoing campaign to sever online crooks from infected computers used as virtual henchmen.

A team headed by the software colossus capitalized on laws crafted to fight organized crime groups to obtain court orders to seize servers in Pennsylvania and Illinois being used to control computers corrupted by malicious code.

Viruses slipped into people's machines stole online banking account and password information and relayed it to crooks who have looted more than $100 million in the past five years, according to court documents.

The "worldwide, illegal" computer networks were an amalgam of more than 13 million infected machines referred to as "Zeus botnets" due to the type of malicious code involved.

NASA will try again early Tuesday (March 27) in an effort to launch five suborbital sounding rockets on a mission to study high-level jet stream winds by creating artificial glowing clouds near the edge of space. After several delays, the rockets are scheduled to blast off from launch pads in Virginia between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. EDT (0600 and 0900 GMT).

If all goes well, each of the five unmanned rockets will release a chemical tracer into the jet stream winds more than 60 miles up that should create brilliant milky white trails in the nighttime sky to enable scientists and people on the United States East Coast to actually "see" these high-altitude winds at the edge of space, NASA officials have said. The glowing clouds created in the experiment may also be visible to skywatchers along the U.S. East Coast, local weather permitting.

But while the latest weather forecasts appear to be favorable with clear weather forecast along the Atlantic Seaboard, another meteorological condition - gusty winds - could ground the rockets for yet another night. The mission, which is called the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment, or ATREX for short, has been on hold since the night of the first launch attempt on March 15.

The moon, that giant lump of rock that has fascinated poets and scientists alike, may be about to get even more interesting. A new analysis of isotopes found in lunar minerals challenges the prevailing view of how Earth's nearest neighbor formed.

Most scientists believe Earth collided with a hypothetical, Mars-sized planet called Theia early in its existence, and the resulting smash-up produced a disc of magma orbiting our planet that later coalesced to form the moon. This is called the giant impact hypothesis. Computer models indicate that, for the collision to remain consistent with the laws of physics, at least 40% of the magma would have had to come from Theia.

One way to test the hypothesis is to look at the isotopes of particular elements in rocks returned from the moon. Atoms of most elements can occur in slightly different forms, called isotopes, with slightly different masses. Oxygen, for example, has three isotopes: ¹⁶O, ¹⁷O and ¹⁸O, indicating differences in the number of neutrons each nucleus contains. Compare any two samples of oxygen found on Earth and you'll find the proportions of ¹⁶O, ¹⁷O and ¹⁸O isotopes are almost identical in the two samples. The proportions found in samples from meteorites and other planets like Mars, however, are usually different. So if you find that a sample has the same oxygen isotope composition as one from Earth, then it's very likely the sample came from our world.

Previous research has established that the oxygen isotope composition of lunar samples is indistinguishable from that of Earth. Since 40% of the moon is supposed to have come from Theia (which presumably would have had a different isotope composition), this might spell trouble for the giant impact hypothesis. But it's possible that Earth may have exchanged oxygen gas with the magma disk that later formed the Moon shortly after the collision, explaining why the results are the same.

One of the most famous experiments in quantum physics, which first showed how particles can bizarrely behave like waves, has now been carried out on the largest molecules ever.

Researchers have sent molecules containing either 58 or 114 atoms through the so-called "double-slit experiment," showing that they cause an interference pattern that can only be explained if the particles act like waves of water, rather than tiny marbles.

Researchers said it wasn't a foregone conclusion that such large particles would act this way.

"In a way it's a little bit surprising, because these are highly complex and also flexible molecules; they change their shape while they're flying through the apparatus," said Markus Arndt of the University of Vienna in Austria, a co-leader of the project. "If you talk to the community, maybe 50 percent would say this is normal because it's quantum physics, and the other 50 percent would really scratch their heads because it's quantum physics."

Indeed, the double-slit experiment, one of the foundations of quantum physics, was voted the "most beautiful experiment" ever in a 2002 poll of Physics World readers.

An amateur astronomer has managed to capture recent images of Mars which appear to show cloud like formations on Mars.

Wayne Jaeschke, from West Chester, Pennsylvania, noticed the formations which can be seen rising up from the edge of the Martian disk after he took the pictures on March 20.

Some observers have suggested the so-called clouds are at least 150 miles away from the surface while others have suggested it could be debris which was disturbed after the Red Planet was hit by a meteor.

A sunset skyshow again? A month ago, Venus, Jupiter and the crescent Moon aligned beautifully for evening sky watchers around the world. Tonight it's happening again. On March 25th and 26th, the three will form a bright triangle in the western sky at sunset. Marek Nikodem photographed the early stages of the convergence over Szubin, Poland, on March 24th:
Observing tip: Try catching them before the sky fades completely black. Bright planets are extra-beautiful when they are framed by twilight blue. Sky maps: March 25, March 26.

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Cen (TOCP Designation: PNV J13410800-5815470) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD of "Faulkes Telescope South" (MPC Code - E10).

On our images taken on March 24.5, 2012 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with filtered R-Bessel CCD magnitude 9.3 (USNO-B1.0 Catalogue reference stars) at coordinates:

R.A. = 13 41 09.36, Decl.= -58 15 16.9

(equinox 2000.0; USNO-B1.0 catalogue reference stars).

Our confirmation image:

You can see an animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1994).

It's hard enough for kids to remember all the known oceans and seas -- Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Norwegian, Barents -- and now they can add one more to the list: the Enceladan Ocean. The name is lovely, and the place is nifty, but there's not much chance of visiting it soon. It's located on Enceladus, one of Saturn's 66 known moons. While Enceladus has been familiar to us since it was first spotted in 1789, the discovery of its ocean, courtesy of the venerable Cassini spacecraft, is a whole new and possibly game-changing thing.

Enceladus has always been thought of as one of the more remarkable members of Saturn's marble bag of satellites. For one thing, it's dazzlingly bright. The percentage of sunlight that a body in the solar system reflects back is known as its albedo, and it's determined mostly by the color of the body's ground cover. For all the silvery brilliance of a full moon on a cloudless night, the albedo of our own drab satellite is a muddy 12%, owing mostly to the gray dust that covers it. The albedo of Enceladus, on the other hand, approaches a mirror-like 100%.

Such a high percentage likely means the surface is covered with ice crystals -- and, what's more, that those crystals get regularly replenished. Consider how grubby and gray a fresh snowfall becomes after just a couple of days of splashing road slush and tromping people. Now imagine how a moon would look after a few billion years of cosmic bombardment by incoming meteors.