Titan might seem an unlikely place to for humans to build settlements, and maybe eventually colonize. After all, it is so far from the sun, and extraordinarily cold, and it's a long journey to get there (at present). But actually, if you set aside the difficulty of getting there, which we should overcome as our technology improves - it's got more going for it than you might think. This is an idea originally developed in some detail by Charles Wohlforth and Amanda Hendrix, authors of Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets

I’ve had several PM’s and we’ve had comments by scared people in our Doomsday Debunked Facebook group who have read alarmist stories suggesting that Putin threatens to attack the US. If you have read these stories, it is worth listening to his actual speech to get the Russian perspective on it. It could hardly be more different. He presents it as, in his view, the only way to preserve peace.

Statistical hypothesis testing is quite boring if you apply it to cases where you know the answer, or where the data speak loud and clear about one hypothesis being true or false. Life at the interface between testability and untestability is much more fun.

I think we should build our first offworld backup on the Moon. We can start by storing seeds there, similar to the Svalbard seed vault in Norway. Within a few years we should have easy access to the Moon, and then it will be easy to do. The lunar caves are naturally at the right temperature. Add a vacuum sealed packet of dried seeds to a rover that explores a suitable lunar cave, and leave it there at the end of the mission, inside the rover, and that's it.That's the start of a future seed vault. From small beginnings ... 

Elon Musk says there are two futures, to stay on Earth and eventually go extinct, or to become a "multi-planetary species". He says Mars is our "plan B". But there is a third possibility. 

A virtual reality system for men who committed a domestic violence crime allows them to 'get into the victim’s shoes' - not by beating them, that likely caused the cycle of violence, according to sociologists. Instead, the belief is that violent people have a lack of emotional recognition and that virtual experience improves the participant’s perception of emotions.

Sociologists contend that violence is related to a lack of empathy or the abuser’s difficulty to put him/herself on the victim’s shoes. Although there are surveys which contend that violent people have difficulties in identifying emotions like fear or rage, there are some discrepancies due the used methodology to determine empathy and ethical problems these studies present.

Mindfulness is big business, worth in excess of US$1.0 billion in the US alone and linked – somewhat paradoxically – to an expanding range of must have products. These include downloadable apps (1300 at the last count), books to read or color in, and online courses. Mindfulness practice and training is now part of a global wellness industry worth trillions of dollars.

This is just a short note - a record-keeping, if you like - to report that my long review on "Collider Searches for Diboson Resonances" has now appeared on the online Elsevier site of the journal "Progress of Particle and Nuclear Physics". 
I had previously pointed to the preprint version of the same article on this blog, with the aim of getting feedback from experts in the field, and I am happy that this has indeed happened: I was able to integrate some corrections from Robert Shrock, a theorist at SUNY, as well as some integrations to the references list by a couple of other colleagues.

SpaceX have a striking video showing Mars spinning faster and faster, transforming from the current red Mars to a planet with a small ocean and with the deserts tinged with green in seven revolutions.

Of course that is poetic exaggeration - it wouldn't terraform in a week. So how long would it take? Science fiction enthusiasts who have read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy" may remember that in his book, it is terraformed in a couple of centuries. But that's science fiction, not a terraforming blue print.