The search for life in the Universe takes many paths. There's SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is searching for signals from a distant ancient civilization. There's the exploration of our own Solar System, on Mars, or underneath the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus, to see if life can be anywhere there's liquid water and a source of energy. And upcoming space telescopes like James Webb will attempt to directly image the atmospheres of distant extrasolar planets, to see if they contain the distinct chemical signatures of life.

But according to Jason Wright, an astronomer at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, we could consider searching for evidence of ancient civilizations right here on Earth, or across the Solar System. Don't get excited, though, so far "there is zero evidence for prior indigenous species in the Solar System."
In a paper, recently submitted to the arXiv electronic preprint archive entitled Prior Indigenous Technological Species, Dr. Wright describes how we might go about searching for the technological artifacts left behind by ancient civilizations that have evolved in the Solar System. Perhaps on an ancient, cooler Venus, or on Mars in a time when it was wetter and had a thicker atmosphere. Those civilizations could have arisen millions or even billions of years ago, destroyed themselves or left the Solar System, and only ancient traces of their culture and technology would still be around.

If a civilization had reached a high level of technology, where did it go? Wright suggests a variety of catastrophes, like a swarm of comets, self destruction, or even a nearby supernova explosion that irradiated the whole Solar System with high energy gamma rays. Even without a specific event, a civilization might have simply just died out, or became permanently non-technological. Of course, these possibilities face our own human civilization. It's hard to read the paper and not consider the fate of humanity. Will future aliens search for scraps to learn about us?

Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula has long been touted by supporters of the theory man is destroying the planet by using fossil fuels as proof of the dangers of global warming. Al Gore, the face of the world-is-going-to-end climate movement, has visited Antarctica on at least two occasions to highlight the alleged problem.

"This prediction has proven true," Gore wrote about the claim Antarctica would warm faster than the global average. "Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average."

Alarmists say the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica will cause massive problems for the rest of the world. For example, left-wing website ThinkProgress wrote in 2012, "Although the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent are remote from almost all of human civilization, their warming has drastic implications for billions of people. With the melting of those almost inconceivable reserves of ice, the planet's sea levels are rising. Scientists now expect 21st-century sea level rise — on the scale of three to six feet or more — will be dominated by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps."

Climate realists have rightfully pointed out the evidence shows total ice accumulation on Antarctica has outweighed losses, a claim bolstered by a 2015 NASA study, which found, "An increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers." But even many climate change skeptics have accepted some significant parts of Antarctica are warming.

Though it's not big enough or strong enough to destroy a planet, scientists have developed an amplified laser reminiscent of the Death Star from "Star Wars," according to a new study.

The futuristic superweapon combines multiple laser beams into one destructive blast, the researchers said. The idea of merging laser beams is not new, nor has it been limited to science fiction before now. A decades-old Russian missile defense project looked to use liquid as a beam combiner, but that project was abandoned after it was deemed not practical. A similar project in the U.S. investigated laser fusion, but using different materials. Now, a team of Australian scientists has combined the principles of these two research projects and applied them to a new material: diamond.

An ultrapure diamond crystal is the key to a new proof-of-concept amplified laser. By placing a diamond at the point of convergence of the different laser beams, the power of each individual beam is transferred into one potent laser beam, the researchers said. This power transfer occurs due to Raman scattering — when particles are dispersed and excited to higher energy levels — which is especially strong in diamond, according to the scientists.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft dove between Saturn and its rings yesterday (April 26), snapping the closest-ever views of Saturn's atmosphere. The raw images, which began to stream back early this morning, indicating the probe had survived its journey, show intricate structures and a dark, swirling storm-like feature (which NASA called a "giant hurricane").

SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket in the fifth of 20 scheduled launches in 2017. This was a landmark event for the company, as it was the first launch of a military satellite in its 15-year history.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:15am local time near the famous NASA launch site. Just nine minutes later, the rocket's main section touched back down on the launch pad.

Today's launch was the first time the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has entrusted anyone other than the United Launch Alliance (ULA) with one of its top-secret payloads.

Your wireless router may be giving you away in manner you never dreamed of. For the first time, physicists have used radio waves from a Wi-Fi transmitter to encode a 3D image of a real object in a hologram similar to the image of Princess Leia projected by R2D2 in the movie Star Wars. In principle, the technique could enable outsiders "see" the inside of a room using only the Wi-Fi signals leaking out of it, although some researchers say such spying may be easier said than done.

The idea came about a few years ago, says Friedemann Reinhard, an expert on quantum sensors at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany. "At lunch we had a discussion about what the world would look through Wi-Fi eyes," he says, "and it became clear that if you want to see the world through Wi-Fi, you could make a hologram."

A camera makes an image by collecting light reflected from an object and focusing it onto a screen to create a 2D pattern of greater or lesser intensity: the image. In contrast, a hologram more fully exploits the wave nature of light. Typically, lasers are used. The laser beam is split, and half of it reflects off the object and onto a photographic plate. The other half—the reference beam—shines directly on the plate. Like evenly spaced water waves lapping on a beach, the light waves in the reference beam arrive in flat wave fronts. In contrast, those reflected by the object are modified by it, and so some parts of the wave front arrive at the plate earlier and others later, depending on where they bounced off the object. The interference of the two sets of waves creates a pattern of bright and dark spots—the hologram.

A new study examining the muscular system of bonobos provides firsthand evidence that the rare great ape species may be more closely linked, anatomically, to human ancestors than common chimpanzees. Previous research suggested this theory at the molecular level, but this is the first study to compare in detail the anatomy of the three species.

"Bonobo muscles have changed least, which means they are the closest we can get to having a 'living' ancestor," said Bernard Wood, professor of human origins at the GW Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.

Scientists believe that modern human and common chimpanzee/bonobo lineages split about 8 million years ago with the two great ape species splitting about 2 million years ago. As common chimpanzees and bonobos evolved after their split, they developed different traits and physical characteristics, even though they remained geographically relatively close, with their main division being the Congo River. Because of this, researchers have been curious as to what those differences are and how they compare to humans. By studying the muscles of bonobos (which indicates how they physically function), the team was able to discover that they are more closely related to human anatomy than common chimpanzees, in the sense that their muscles have changed less than they have in common chimpanzees.

If the brain is just a bunch of wires and circuits, it stands to reason that those components can simply be re-wired in order to create a better, smarter us. At least, that's the theory behind a new project from the military's secretive DARPA research branch announced on Wednesday, which aims to enhance human cognitive ability by activating what's known as "synaptic plasticity."

Recent research has suggested that stimulating certain peripheral nerves—those that relay signals between the brain, the spinal cord and the rest of the body—can enhance a person's ability to learn, by triggering the release of neurochemicals that reorganize connections in the brain. Through its new Targeted Neuroplasticity Training program, DARPA is is funding eight different research efforts that seek to enhance learning by targeting those nerves with electrical stimulation. The end goal is to translate those findings into real-world applications that boost military training regimens—allowing a soldier, to say, soak up a new language in months instead of years. Should DARPA figure out a way to do that, its efforts will likely go on to impact all of us.

Propaganda: "a message designed to persuade its intended audience to think and behave in a certain manner. Thus advertising is commercial propaganda. Or institutionalized and systematic spreading of information and/or disinformation, usually to promote a narrow political or religious (or commercial) viewpoint."

Mercenary: "a person primary concerned with making money at the expense of ethics."

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of...It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind." — Edward L. Bernays, the Father of Propaganda in America and Sigmund Freud's nephew, from his seminal book Propaganda (1928).

"Entire populations, which were undisciplined or lacking in intellectual or definite moral principles, were vulnerable to unconscious influence and thus susceptible to wanting things that they do not need. This is achieved by manipulating desires on an unconscious level." - Edward Bernays, From the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March 1947)

Most of the world wide web is invisible. Beyond the "surface web"—the parts accessible to search engines—there is a "deep web" containing (by one estimate) 500 times the content, secured in databases and hidden behind login screens. And within this deep web is a tiny corner known as the "dark web," which requires special, anonymizing software such as the Tor Browser to access and contains everything from black markets selling drugs and counterfeit IDs to whistleblowing forums.