Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is erecting a new Iron Curtain in Ukraine, deep in the heart of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine’s eastern border, 2,000 kilometers from Berlin, was on a longitude just east of Moscow. In 1943, Adolf Hitler’s army shifted it…

When the US confiscated Russia’s dollar reserves, the world got a wake-up call Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, has been dreaming of a “Great Reset” of the global system. He has argued that Covid-19 and the climate crisis showed that no country is an island and…

China is rolling out its central bank digital currency (CBDC), the most radical change in money since the Chinese introduced paper money 1,000 years ago. Some 270 million Chinese have already downloaded the CBDC digital wallet from banks and private payment providers. The back end of the system is provided…

I asked members of the FB group Cosmology & Astrophysics News whether the Big Bang refers to the emergence of the solar system, a galaxy, or the universe. Most mentioned the universe, arguing for an exploding singularity that produced an ever-expanding universe. This is the conventional Big Bang theory, but…

[Note: The day after I posted this spoof, a panel of scientists actually discussed this very some topic. The link is below.] Stockholm, January 9 — It has been the Holy Grail of quantum physics since Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr clashed over the nature of reality: the quest to…

Natural philosophers in ancient Greece, India, and China all assumed the existence of an aether. The Indians called it Akasha (primary substance), the Chinese spoke of Chi (a medium pervading the universe). They had different conceptions of the aether but all pointed at a similar invisible phenomenon. The…

In the 1990s, when the digital revolution gather steam, MIT’s Nicolas Negroponte published his book “Being Digital.” In response, media scholar Carol Wilder published her essay “Being Analog.” Scientist Freeman Dyson followed with his essay “Is Life Analog or Digital?” The analog-digital debate began during the legendary Macy Conference on…

Unravel the myths and legends of China’s rich history and it becomes apparent that the idea of the Middle Kingdom originated in its architecture, “civil engineering,” and its yin-yang-inspired cosmology. …