A team of astronomers has found the strongest evidence yet that some planets outside our solar system may be magnetic. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) and the GeminiNorth telescope, the researchers measured wind speeds on seven very hot, Jupiter-like exoplanets.
The observations reveal that the winds on these planets are most likely governed by magnetic fields, providing the first robust measurement of magnetism on planets outside the solar system.
“This breakthrough opens a completely new window on exoplanet research. It’s the first time we can compare the magnetic environments of other worlds—a key step toward ultimately understanding which planets can stay alive, keep their water, and perhaps even, one day, host life as we know it,” says Julia Seidel, an astronomer at the Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, France and lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy.
Each one of us have made the remarkable journey from matter to mind. The destination is our existence, one whole conscious being. The marvellous nature of our intelligence can be traced to the aptitude of every individual cell in our body. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What if we could rewire the code that separates self from world? Tadpoles with eyes growing from their tails, worms with two heads-is the manifestation of biology governed entirely by chance?
Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. Levin is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. He is also co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms with Josh Bongard.
00:00 — Collective Intelligence 03:38 — Cognitive Light Cones 09:32 — Scaling of the light cone 12:07-Definition of Intelligent Life 13:53 — Free Energy Principle 15:02 — Cognitive Glue 17:56 — Bioelectricity vs Genetics 23:23 — Limb Regeneration in Humans 24:24 — Solving Cancer 28:02 — Length of Effects 29:09 — Alien Life 31:31 — Communicating with our body organs 35:13 — Tic Tac Toe with an Alien 38:41 — Training our body organs 40:06 — Non-Cellular intelligence 41:03 — Is everything intelligent in the universe? 45:11 — Collective vs Parts 47:10 — Mike’s message to extraterrestrials.
The search for “alien” intelligences isn’t only looking to outer space: some biologists are convinced that weird and wonderful forms of intelligence already exist right here on earth, and that they hold the key to understanding intelligence itself. In the first of a two part series, Michael Levin tries to shake us out of any assumption that intelligent beings must be embodied in a conventional way. Instead, he suggests, patterns in a medium might be intelligent, and any distinction between thinkers and thoughts is in the eye of the beholder. Read part two of our series here.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific endeavor with two key things going for it. First, it would have obvious and enormous impacts on our world if it were to succeed. And second, regardless of whether any extraterrestrial intelligence is found, it’s fascinating in and of itself because it forces us to ask fundamental questions in science and philosophy:
What exactly are we looking for, and how do we know if we’ve found it?
We’ve been looking for messages from the stars ever since Frank Drake pointed the Green Bank radio telescope at Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridany 65 years ago. He saw nothing that couldn’t be explained by natural causes. Nor have the much more extensive SETI surveys conducted since. So, maybe there are no alien signals to see. Or maybe we need to update how we search for them. We have, after all, learned an awful lot since 1960—both about the galaxy and about observing the galaxy.
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! / pbsspacetime.
Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In today’s episode, Tom Bilyeu dives deep into one of the most provocative questions facing science and philosophy: Do we really have free will, or are we all just highly sophisticated NPCs—non-player characters—running a program inside a vast, resource-efficient simulation? Drawing on groundbreaking neuroscience experiments, the story of Phineas Gage, quantum mechanics, and the work of leading thinkers like Robert Sapolsky, Tom Bilyeu challenges everything we think we know about choice, consciousness, and the true nature of reality.
But this isn’t an episode about nihilism. Instead, Tom Bilyeu reveals why embracing the truth of a stochastically deterministic universe can actually make life feel more meaningful, freeing us from the weight of the past and inspiring us to make the most of every moment—programmed or not. Get ready to question your assumptions and see the world from a whole new perspective.
00:00 — Intro. 01:38 — Part 1: It’s Biology All The Way Down. 14:22 — Part 2: Quantum Mechanics Bury the Notion of Free Will. 19:53 — Part 3: The Last Hiding Places of Free Will. 27:51 — Part 4: Why Being An NPC Is The Best News You’ll Ever Get.
What if advanced alien civilizations achieved infinite knowledge not through space travel, but by harnessing the power of stars? This video explores how a type 2 civilization could repurpose a star into a giant computer, a concept tied to the kardashev scale and the theoretical dyson sphere. It’s a fascinating look into advanced future technology and the potential of artificial intelligence in the cosmos.
