Dies Irae

Fui convidado a produzir um especial de fim de ano para a seção brasileira do Discovery Channel, talvez com participação do Rei Roberto, que versará sobre a vida em nosso planeta daqui a cem anos (isto é: em 2100). Após duas semanas de pesquisa e entrevistas, chegamos a algumas conclusões:

(i) global warming

(ii) o ser humano será substituído por uma cadeira-de-balanço

(iii) o Japão vai morrer devido a um erro de cálculo na Megapirâmide

(iv) o Brasil será governado pela companhia de engenharia de tráfego do estado de São Paulo.

Como tornar-se aquilo que se é

Ciência é Poder

Dr Paul Rothemund at the California Institute of Technology can make 50 billion smileys, each a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, with his technique. In a potent demonstration of his so-called DNA origami technique, Rothemund has created half a dozen shapes, including a five-pointed star, a snowflake, a picture of the double helix and a map of the Americas in which one nanometre represents 120 kilometres.

Teologia

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.