YouTube Video

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4763750

How do you know you’re a person who has lived your life, rather than a just-formed brain full of artificial memories, momentarily hallucinating a reality that doesn’t actually exist? That may sound absurd, but it’s kept several generations of top cosmologists up at night. They call it: the Boltzmann brain paradox. Fabio Pacucci explores this mind-numbing thought experiment.

https://bsky.app/profile/lindseyslatertv.bsky.social/post/3lnv2b355m226

Linked from sci-hub.se when I searched for an unavailable DOI

Sci-Net will ask for a minimum amount of 1000 Sci-Hub tokens to register. The tokens will appear on your account after registration and will be used to reward uploaders. That is the most controversial part: some people argue that Sci-Net introduces paywall similar to publisher.

Even though both might appear similar at a first glance, the differences are profound. Compared to insane publisher paywalls, the entry tax on Sci-Net is symbolic and is not higher than an equivalent of a cup of coffee in most countries. The next difference is that in traditional approach, profits are made by publisher, and ordinary researcher has no control on how the money are used. On Sci-Net, you're using tokens directly to reward uploaders. Payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform.

But the most important is that publishers will charge for access to the same paper again and again. Sci-Net will only do that once when paper

A much needed addendum to the previous post on this subject from 8 days ago: https://hexbear.net/post/4615155

::: spoiler spoiler Scientists have found new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.

A Cambridge team studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b has detected signs of molecules which on Earth are only produced by simple organisms.

This is the second, and more promising, time chemicals associated with life have been detected in the planet's atmosphere by Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

But the team and independent astronomers stress that more data is needed to confirm these results.

The lead researcher, Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, told me at his lab at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy that he hopes to obtain the clinching evidence soon.

"This is the strongest evidence yet there is possibly life out there. I can realistically say that we can confirm this signal within one to two years."

K2-18b is two-and-a-half times the size of Earth and is 700 trillion miles, or 124 light years, away from us - a distance

China has unveiled the design of a new reusable shuttle to take cargo to and from the country's space station.

The Haolong space shuttle is being developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute under the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). It is one of two winning projects stemming from a call for proposals from China's human spaceflight agency, CMSA, to develop low-cost cargo spacecraft.

China currently uses its robotic Tianzhou spacecraft to send cargo to the Tiangong space station. But, taking a leaf out of NASA's book to encourage commercial resupply options for the International Space Station, CMSA wanted new, low-cost ideas that can also return experiments and other cargo to Earth, unlike the Tianzhou, which burns up on reentry.

Haolong will launch atop of a rocket and land horizontally on Earth on a runway. The space shuttle measures 32.8 feet (10 meters) long and 26.2 feet (8 m) wide, and weighs less than half of the Tianzhou capsule,