Toggle light / dark theme

B oeing, one of the world’s biggest aircraft manufacturers, is poised to unveil a “robust” new plane that will be “changing the future of air power”, the company claims.

The secret aircraft has a ‘Batmobile’ style, according to a teaser video posted on Twitter of the plane by Phantom Works, Boeing’s advanced design division, which has focussed on several highly classified projects.

Read more

Researchers have made a shocking discovery under the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica — an active volcanic heat source, which they say has played a “critical role” in the movement and melting of the glacier.

The scientists were looking at the role the ocean plays in causing glaciers to weaken when the discovery was made.

“We were looking to better understand the role of the ocean in melting the ice shelf,” Assistant Professor Brice Loose of Newport, R.I., a chemical oceanographer and lead author of the paper, said in a statement.

Read more

In the longer term, our descendants may face even more existential decisions (provided the machines allow them to make them). How might they organise society in a world in which few people can do anything that is obviously economically productive? The world might become techno-feudal, with an owning elite hiring great numbers of cheap human servants not for their value, but for the pleasure of domination. People might instead share the abundance more equally, with all enjoying the civilised leisure that was once the province of the very few. Ours is the first civilisation to view work as the highest calling. Maybe that strange prejudice will need to be discarded.


How do you organise a society in which few people do anything economically productive?

Read more