This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
The future isn’t what it used to be, at least according to the Canadian science-fiction novelist William Gibson. In an interview with the BBC, Gibson said people seemed to be losing interest in the future. “All through the 20th century we constantly saw the 21st century invoked,” he said. “How often do you hear anyone invoke the 22nd century? Even saying it is unfamiliar to us. We’ve come to not have a future”.
Dozens of space-based telescopes operate near-Earth and provide incredible images of the universe. But imagine a telescope far away in the outer solar system, 10 or even 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth. The ability to look back at our solar system or peer into the darkness of the distant cosmos would make this a uniquely powerful scientific tool.
Dune, the epic series of sci-fi books by Frank Herbert, now turned into a movie of the same name, is set in the far future on the desert planet of Arrakis. Herbert outlined a richly-detailed world that, at first glance, seems so real we could imagine ourselves within it.
Alex Farnsworth, University of Bristol; Michael Farnsworth, University of Sheffield, and Sebastian Steinig, University of Bristol
Earth is the only planet we know contains life. Is our planet special? Scientists over the years have mulled over what factors are essential for, or beneficial to, life. The answers will help us identify other potentially inhabited planets elsewhere in the galaxy.
Antony Burnham, Australian National University and Hugh O’Neill, Australian National University
As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).
Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis.
It is all around us. Every day in our lives we are in contact with it. In fact, we are made from it: ancient stardust.
All the atoms around us have witnessed the most violent explosions in the universe. Their journeys through space are the longest, roughest and loneliest voyages imaginable.
For decades, the exploration of our solar system left one of our neighbouring planets, Venus, largely unexplored. Now, things are about to change.
In 2019, Burger King Sweden released a plant-based burger, the Rebel Whopper, and the reaction was underwhelming. So, the company challenged its customers to taste the difference.
Burger King Sweden created a menu item where customers would have a 50-50 chance of getting a meat burger or a plant-based one. To find out, they had to scan the burger box in Burger King’s app. The results: 44 percent guessed wrong – customers couldn’t tell the difference.
Tyrannosaurus rex (rex meaning “king” in Latin) lived throughout what is now western North America 68 to 66 million years ago, during the Upper Cretaceous period. Back then, there was a big island (an island continent) called “Laramidia” there. But, how many Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth? At the same time, and in total?
Ashley Poust, University of California, Berkeley and Daniel Varajão de Latorre, University of California, Berkeley
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.