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SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE COULD HAVE INFLUENCE EARLY EART EVOLUTION. “Traditionally, the Sun was thought to be the only astronomical source of light that affected life on Earth. But it is also possible that the black hole, SgrA played an important role in shaping the history of terrestrial life. A surprising realization of this sort is similar to figuring out that a stranger might have impacted your family history before you were born. If a link between SgrA* and terrestrial life can be established, then this supermassive black hole might trigger a second Nobel Prize.” (By Harvard Astronomy Chair, Abraham Loeb). https://lnkd.in/d3h297W View in LinkedIn

ALICE IN WONDERLAND. “If the SQM hypothesis is correct, then all observed pulsars may actually be SSs but not neutron stars, due to the contamination process by strange nuggets in the universe. SSs can exist in various forms, such as bare SSs or SSs with a normal baryonic crust.” (SQM = Strange-quark matter). (SS = strange stars). https://lnkd.in/ddQpCwa View in LinkedIn

MAGNETIC FIELDS. Planet Magnetic Field Strength Relative to Earth: Earth =1; Saturn = 600; Uranus = 50; Neptune = 25. https://lnkd.in/dEgBkgy View in LinkedIn

NEUTRON STAR CORES. “Ordinary nuclei, made up of up and down quarks, may dissolve their boundaries and transit to an SQM phase (consisting of up, down, and strange quarks) if the nuclei experience high-enough pressure. Strange matter in bulk is stable. Even small chunks of strange matter with baryon number lower than 10(7), called "strangelets," can be stable due to surface tension.” (SQM = Strange-quark matter). https://lnkd.in/ddQpCwa View in LinkedIn

PLASMA LAB. “The magnetospheres of planets in our solar system can therefore be considered as big plasma laboratories with conditions which are not attainable at Earth.” https://lnkd.in/dVhpP9H View in LinkedIn

THE NEW AND THE OLD. “Whereas traditional forms of memory developed from ideas of the crowd, the social and the collective, as non-archival entities, and traditional audience relations with media similarly so, in contrast, the multitude is inherently archival -- entangled and distributed through uncertain times and spaces, forms of times and decay and emergences.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

THE SINGULARITY OF MAN AND MACHINE. “The broader revolutionary change here is the ‘connective turn’: a heady cocktail of immediacy, volume and pervasiveness of the digital, which shape a new knowledge base -- ‘the information infrastructure’ -- that brings people and machines into new relations with one another.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

SHATTERING NEW MEMORY. “Twentieth century media forged new types of mass imaginaries, collectives championed or feared for their capacity to consume and act and think in concert. And this new mass media was also said to remember, to hold a vision of a shared past, to make and remake collective memory...digital technologies and media have transformed remembering and forgetting to such an extent that it should have shattered the cannon.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE this weekend features excerpts from ‘Memory of the Multitude, the End of Collective Memory’, by Professor Andrew Hoskins at the University of Glasgow UK, Chair in Global Security (Sociology). This is a remarkable 40,000 foot view of our culture’s immersion into social media, ultimately, a biological phenomenon, since we are part of biology. While it is tightly written, it is really worth the work. Humans, it seems are on the cusp of a significant transformation. https://lnkd.in/dEytMV7 View in LinkedIn

Girona wall showing volcanic basal with bubbles from the mountains and dramatic Rosa Gerona limestone, lying together in state far from home. View in LinkedIn