SPTNK

Whose interests do prisons serve? SPTNK speaks with artist Trevor Paglen who spent over 10 years investigating the prison system.

Cells in space are "happy." According to Dr. Thomas Goodwin, NASA Project Scientist, human cells exposed to the electromagnetic field of microgravity grow in 3D, as if they were remembering the natural state of the "womb." In the future, science may be able to find the right signals to "turn on" specific genes to get cells to express forms or behaviors it hasn't shown in millions of years.

If you begin to think of everything as networking, then everything is communication. Wade Davis, anthropologist, ethnobotanist and NGS Explorer-in-Residence, speaks to SPTNK about Amazonian shaman, Ayahuasca and how different societal beliefs illicit alternative perceptions.

COINCIDENCES. Jacques Vallee
A number of people have been fascinated with coincidences, starting with Arthur Koestler, of course, Carl Jung. Coincidences give a major insight into the way consciousness works, the way we become aware of things, about sometimes the illusion of coincidence that has to do with the process of thinking at the time, and also the possibility that there are, in fact, physical coincidences that have to do with the structure of the universe. If you believe that the world is a world of information, if you were to present the universe as a universe of information, then you should expect coincidences. You should expect that since we are information machines, I mean that's what our brain is, it's primarily an information machine, then consciousness gives us the illusion of a physical world because we are traversing the database. The universe is a big database where there is no time. And time could be generated just by the process of our own consciousness. If that's the case, then you would expect coincidences. You would expect that it would be like if you put a search into Google or into Yahoo, you're going to find thousands of things that match the particular key word you've given. And that doesn't seem strange to you because that's a way that information has been organized or that's the way it organizes itself in response to your search. It was not pre-organized for that particular search but it happens to work when you come in and you give a key word. Well, maybe the universe is the same way. And if it is the same way then coincidences are nothing strange: they are just an indication that that's the way the universe functions.