Actually, It Gets Worse.

“Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”

The New Yorker‘s Adam Alter surveys the recent data suggesting something that accords well with my overall worldview: Positive thinking is for suckers. “In a provocative new analysis, Oettingen and her colleagues have suggested that public displays of positive thinking may even predict downturns in major macroeconomic outcomes…the staggering results in this most recent paper are consistent with more than a decade’s worth of studies in Oettingen’s lab.”

Better Living Through Nanotech.

“A team of chemists and engineers accomplished the feat by inserting tiny synthetic motors inside living cells, moving them around with ultrasonic waves and steering them magnetically. Clearly, it’s not as elegant as the self-propelled, self-guided nanobots envisaged by futurists and scifi, but it’s an important first step. These same basic principles could conceivably be refined and upgraded.”

A glimpse of the future: A Penn State team manage to insert synthetic nanomotors into living cells for the first time. “We might be able to use nanomotors to treat cancer and other diseases by mechanically manipulating cells from the inside. Nanomotors could perform intracellular surgery and deliver drugs noninvasively to living tissues.”

The End of All Things (Pt. 6).

“The worst mass extinction of all time came about 250 million years ago [the Permian-Triassic extinction event]. There’s a pretty good consensus there that this was caused by a huge volcanic event that went on for a long time and released a lot of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere. That is pretty ominous considering that we are releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and people increasingly are drawing parallels between the two events.”

The WP’s Brad Plumer talks with Elizabeth Kolber about her new book, The Sixth Extinction, and the many grim portents for life on our planet these days. “I think many scientists would say that what we’re doing to the chemistry of the oceans is the most significant. One-third of the carbon-dioxide that we pump into the air ends up in the oceans almost right away, and when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid, that’s just an unfortunate fact.”

Pouring Down All Over Mars.

“So, how does water flow in the frigid Martian temperatures that are present, even in the summer months? Researchers think that there may be a naturally-occurring anti-freeze in the water, caused by the high-iron content…the water and ferric iron flowed together as part of a brine.”

Via io9, Scientists at NASA’s JPL find the strongest evidence of currently extant water on Mars yet. “We still don’t have a smoking gun for existence of water…Although we’re not sure how this process would take place without water.”

Only One Absolute…Everything Freezes.

“‘We’re going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally,’ says Rob Thompson of JPL…’We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin.’ 100 pico-Kelvin is just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero, where all the thermal activity of atoms theoretically stops. At such low temperatures, ordinary concepts of solid, liquid and gas are no longer relevant. Atoms interacting just above the threshold of zero energy create new forms of matter that are essentially…quantum.”

In the nearest reaches of space (a.k.a. the ISS), NASA scientists plan to create the coldest spot in the universe, in order to toy with the fabric of reality. “No one knows where this fundamental research will lead. Even the ‘practical’ applications listed by Thompson — quantum sensors, matter wave interferometers, and atomic lasers, just to name a few — sound like science fiction. ‘We’re entering the unknown,’ he says.’

This is Your Film on Drugs.

“What do those substances, when they’re not altering minds, actually look like? To find out…Schoenfeld turned to a logical source: photographs. She converted her photo studio into a lab, then set to work exposing drugs (legal and illegal) to film negatives. She took the images that emerged from the reactions and magnified them—to gorgeous, and sometimes fairly creepy, results.” The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber points the way to All You Can Feel, an often-beautiful gallery of drugs on film on drugs.

Nova Close, Water Closer.

Water, water everywhere: ESA’s Herschel space observatory discovers that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is emitting plumes of water. “The discovery of Ceres’ plumes comes at a fortuitous time. NASA currently has a probe, the Dawn spacecraft, speeding toward the object. Dawn will arrive and enter orbit around Ceres in 2015, giving researchers a front-row view of the activity.” (Ceres image via here.)

Also in recent discoveries among the stars: A supernova erupts in the relatively nearby galaxy M82, 11.5 million light years away (meaning it blew 11.5 million years ago.) “It is one of the closest and brightest supernovae seen from Earth since the 1987 observation of a supernova just 168,000 light years away…[B]ecause these supernovae are used to calibrate distances in space, understanding them better may help clarify the shape of the Universe.” (M82 image via Earl Foster, here.)

As A Matter of Fact, It’s All Dark.

“‘There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,’ Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, ‘enables energy and information to escape from a black hole’…[The paper] does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign ‘apparent horizon’, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.”

Also in potentially earth-shattering space news, Stephen Hawking — “one of the creators of modern black-hole theory” — has released a new paper (not-yet-peer-reviewed) arguing that there are no black holes, really: Quantum theory suggests that matter eventually escapes from them. “A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century.”

Step Aside, Human.

“It is an invisible force that goes by many names. Computerization. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Technology. Innovation. And, everyone’s favorite, ROBOTS. Whatever name you prefer, some form of it has been stoking progress and killing jobs — from seamstresses to paralegals — for centuries. But this time is different: Nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in ‘a decade or two,’ according to a new paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, discussed recently in The Economist. The question is: Which half?”

A Prelude to WALL-E: In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson looks at the coming robotic takeover of the job market, whereby 47% of jobs could soon be automated. I for one welcome our new robot overlords — all the more reason why we need to start rethinking a social contract founded primarily on having full-time, two-income employment. We’re entering a new phase of human existence — we’d best start preparing for it. (Bionic man image via here.)

River of Song.

“The Music Timeline shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates). Each stripe on the graph represents a genre; the thickness of the stripe tells you roughly the popularity of music released in a given year in that genre.” Some click-bait fun for a slow day: Google Research’s Music Timeline.