Nature of Reality News Stories

Excerpts of Key Nature of Reality News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on the mysterious nature of reality from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars. What they believe to be a lake sits under the planet's south polar ice cap, and is about 20km (12 miles) across. Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day. Lake beds like those explored by Nasa's Curiosity rover show water was present on the surface of Mars in the past. However, the planet's climate has since cooled due to its thin atmosphere, leaving most of its water locked up in ice. The result is exciting because scientists have long searched for signs of present-day liquid water on Mars, but these have come up empty or yielded ambiguous findings. It will also interest those studying the possibilities for life beyond Earth. Following the water is key to astrobiology - the study of potential life beyond Earth.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the nature of reality and UFO phenomena.

Historically, Earth’s North and South magnetic poles have flipped every 200,000 or 300,000 years—except right now, they haven’t flipped successfully for about 780,000 years. But the planet’s magnetic field is at long last showing signs of shifting. Although there’s no way to know yet for sure, it could be gearing up to flip once more, according to Undark Magazine. And that possibility is raising new speculation about what that means for planetary life. Our planet’s magnetic field protects us from lethal levels of radiation from phenomena like solar rays. The Earth’s magnetic field extends out from electrical currents created by the metals in its core, generating invisible lines that touch back down at the planet’s opposing magnetic poles. Cosmic radiation expert Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that the next pole reversal could likely render some areas of the planet unlivable. Because we haven’t reached that point yet, scientists are using imagery from satellites to track the magnetic field’s movements. Since 2014, Swarm - a trio of satellites from the European Space Agency - has allowed researchers to study changes building at the Earth’s core, where the magnetic field is generated. Their observations ... could indicate that the field is preparing to flip. A weakened field might allow more radiation into our atmosphere than we’re used to, but it wouldn’t be deadly, according to NASA.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the mysterious nature of reality.

People tend to trust video evidence as an arbiter of truth. But that faith could soon become quaint, as machine learning is enabling ordinary users to create fabricated videos of just about anyone doing just about anything. Earlier this month, the popular online forum Reddit shut down r/deepfakes, a subreddit discussion board devoted to using open-source machine-learning tools to insert famous faces into pornographic videos. This episode represents just one of the many ways that the this technology could fuel social problems, particularly in an age of political polarization. Combating the negative effects of fabricated video will require a shift among both news outlets and news consumers. “When you see something, or when you believe that you’re seeing something and hearing something, it has a much more visceral impact ... than when it’s something that you’re just reading about,” says Henry Farrell, a professor of political science. Professor Farrell warned that this technology’s “implications for democracy are eye-opening,” in a Feb. 4 New York Times op-ed. “Democracy assumes that its citizens share the same reality,” the op-ed concluded. “We’re about to find out whether democracy can be preserved when this assumption no longer holds.” When mixed with confirmation bias – the tendency to process information in a way that conforms to one’s preexisting beliefs – [the technology] could become an increasingly destructive social influence, one that corrodes even good-faith efforts to tell the truth.

Note: Read more about producing fake video with machine learning programs. While governments have long been developing technologies to produce very convincing illusions, and it has become trivial to edit video footage of a person talking to change their words and facial expressions, this emerging technology makes it possible to manipulate mass media in previously impossible ways.

Clinically, we understand death to mean the state that takes hold after our hearts stop beating. Philosophically, though, our definition of death hinges on something else: the point past which we’re no longer able to return. Those two were more or less the same until about 50 years ago, when we saw the advent of CPR. Modern resuscitation ... blew apart our understanding of what it means to be dead. Without many people returning from the dead to show us otherwise, it was natural to assume, from a scientific perspective, that our consciousness dies at the same time as our bodies. Over the last few years, though, scientists have seen repeated evidence that once you die, your brain cells take days, potentially longer, to reach the point past which they’ve degraded too far to ever be viable again. People who survive medical death frequently report experiences that share similar themes: bright lights; benevolent guiding figures; relief from physical pain and a deeply felt sensation of peace. Because those experiences are subjective, it's possible to chalk them up to hallucinations. Where that explanation fails, though, is among the patients who have died on an operating table or crash cart and reported watching ... as doctors tried to save them, accounts subsequently verified by the (very perplexed) doctors themselves. How these patients were able to describe objective events that took place while they were dead, we're not exactly sure. But it does seem to suggest that when our brains and bodies die, our consciousness may not.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on near-death experiences. Then explore our near-death experience resource center for lots more fascinating, reliable information on this vital topic.

Your houseplant salutes the sun each morning. At night, it returns to center. You probably don’t think much of it. But what about all the signs of plant intelligence that have been observed? Under poor soil conditions, the pea seems to be able to assess risk. The sensitive plant can make memories and learn. And plants can communicate with one another and with caterpillars. Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery. Insights gleaned from the study may help doctors better understand the variety of anesthetics used in surgeries. But the research also highlights that plants are ... perhaps less different from animals than is often assumed. “Plants are not just robotic, stimulus-response devices,” said [study co-author] Frantisek Baluska, a plant cell biologist. Plants ... take in information from their environment and produce their own anesthetics like menthol, ethanol and cocaine, similar to how humans release chemicals that dull pain during trauma. Our anesthetics work on plants too, the study confirmed, although what exactly they’re working on is unclear. The electrical activity that moves across neurons is thought by some scientists to contribute to human consciousness. If electrical activity is being disrupted by anesthetic in plants, too, causing them to “lose consciousness,” does that mean, in some way, that they are conscious?

Note: Don't miss a time-lapse video of a pea plant responding to an anesthetic at the link above. And check out a fascinating video of plants making music. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

Annie Jacobsen is back with a new tome that should entice anyone who doesn't mind thinking outside the box. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis [is] a well researched and fascinating tale. The story involves author Aldous Huxley, spoon-bender Uri Geller, the CIA, the lesser-known "Defense Intelligence Agency," Delta Force, Soviet Russia, President Ronald Reagan, as well as Ed Dames who was a character in the movie "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which starred George Clooney. The yarn really gets going after WWII and the advent of the Cold War when worries about what the Soviets were doing reached a peak. Believing that the Russians were involved in so-called psyops (a.k.a. psychological operations) the U.S. Military jumped into the fray with lots of money and resources. Specifically, massive and somewhat successful research was done into the area known as remote viewing. That's where trained and talented personnel try to see what is happening in a location elsewhere in the world using only their mind to do so. This work sometimes edged into precognition or receiving visions of events before they actually occur. Notably, via extrasensory perception, one person gained knowledge that a senior military officer would be kidnapped by European terrorists. When the abduction happened ... with the help of the psyops personnel, the hostage was found alive. That's just one successful episode in the story.

Note: Read more about US government experiments with remote viewing. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the nature of reality.

In her new "spiritual memoir" titled Finding Magic, veteran journalist Sally Quinn ... the widow of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee ... describes her lifelong belief in the occult and worries that hexes she once put on three people may have worked. "My family were Scots," [said Quinn]. "They all believed in Scottish myths and mysticism and the stones and psychic behavior and ghosts and astrology and palmistry and all that. And then of course we all went to church. So I had this kind of two-pronged religious upbringing. I would say my prayers to God and Jesus every night ... but I also believed in all this other stuff. When I was in my late 20s and early 30s, there were three people who hurt me in some way, or (hurt) somebody I loved, and so I decided to put a hex on them. I had never done it before. What I wanted to have happen was for them to feel what I had felt. I didn’t mean for them to die." One person died right away, another person got fired immediately and then died, and then the other one died. I’ve never done it again. And believe me, since (Donald) Trump was elected, and since the election, I can’t tell you how many friends have asked me to put a hex on Donald Trump, and I won’t do it. I just said no. I don’t do that anymore." The environment right now is more toxic and more poisonous than I’ve ever seen....(But I have) still been able to pull away and still find a sense of faith and joy and magic in the world."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the nature of reality from reliable major media sources.

The U.S. government conducted experiments with Bay Area researchers to determine whether extrasensory perception, telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition could be used as "psychic spy tools" against the Soviet Union and other countries, according to a newly released study of the project. Psychic spies were used to try to pinpoint the location of Moammar Gadhafi before the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986 ... University of Oregon psychology Professor Ray Hyman, one of the authors of the study, said. Dale Graff, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's ESP program, told ABC's "Nightline" that psychics had provided the name of the city and the building where the Red Brigades terrorist group was holding kidnapped Brig. Gen. James Dozier in Italy in 1981. Dozier was freed by Italian police after 42 days. News reports at the time said the police were assisted by an undisclosed number of U.S. State and Defense Department specialists. Hyman and UC-Davis statistician Jessica Utts were commissioned by the CIA to evaluate the psychic spying project, code-named "Stargate." The government spent $20 million over two decades on the project. Several of the psychics' powers were tested in the Bay Area before the spies were put to work ... Hyman said. Experiments here focused largely on "remote viewing," which involved psychic communication between a "sender" and a "viewer". The government psychics were accurate about 15 percent of the time in their remote viewing experiments.

Note: Explore an excellent compilation of reliable material suggesting that remote viewing is very real.

For 20 years, US intelligence agencies have been experimenting with ESP. It may have helped locate American hostages in Iran [and] mapped a secret Soviet nuclear facility. At the height of the Cold War, everyone was worried about keeping up with the Soviets. Reports that the Soviets were using psychics to spy on us prompted us to do the same to them. Now that the Cold War is over ... Congress has asked the CIA to review the 20-year $20 million program to see what we got out of it. ABC News has obtained a copy of that report which is critical of psychic spying, saying that, "continued use in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted". That negative conclusion has the caused psychic spies ... to speak publicly for the first time. Joe McMoneagle was an Army officer and for the past 17 years one of the intelligence community's most successful psychic spies. McMoneagle claims to be able to describe ... people, places, and things he's never seen before, hundreds, even thousands of miles away. ABC news was told that psychic spying was used in about 500 cases. One case where psychic spies say they played a critical role was in 1989. Charles Jordan was a US Customs agent gone bad, a dangerous fugitive who had eluded police for 2 years. The collective wisdom at the time was that he was probably in the Caribbean. [One psychic spy] started describing him in North Wyoming ... at a campground. Using this and other information, Jordan was finally caught.

Note: The original CIA link above now takes you back to the CIA Reading Room homepage. Here is an Internet Archive link that provides access to the declassified CIA document. Explore an excellent compilation of reliable material suggesting that remote viewing is very real.

Matthew Fraser is an Internationally renowned psychic/medium and author of “The Secrets to Unlocking Your Psychic Ability”. He has conducted thousands of readings around the world, reconnecting friends & family with the spirits of those who are no longer with us. His messages of hope, comfort and reassurance have touched the lives of all who meet him, making Matt one of the most gifted and genuine psychics living today. He was no different than any other child although he was born with “The Sight”. As a child this extraordinary gift frightened him. He had kept his gift a secret for years, fearing that he would not be accepted. It wasn’t until Matt looked deeper into his abilities, that he understood being a medium was his calling and life’s mission. In the years that followed, Matt would become one of the world’s most respected Psychics. Now, as an adult, Matt is doing just that. Through his sold out live events, to the his one-on-one sessions and books, Matt is on a personal mission to reconnect as many people as possible with their loved ones in Heaven. He has answered questions for thousands of people with his incredible psychic gift and has been a highly sought after guest appearing on major media outlets across the nation ... due to his uncanny abilities. Today Matt continues his mission not only to share his gift with others, but also to provide assistance within the community through various fundraisers and benefits.

Note: Don't miss the incredibly touching video at the link above of Matt convincing two CBS News anchors that what he is doing is quite real.

In 2014, the Office of Naval Research embarked on a four-year, $3.85 million research program to explore the phenomena it calls premonition and intuition. We have to understand what gives rise to this so-called sixth sense, says Peter Squire, a program officer in ONRs Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism department. Todays Navy scientists place less emphasis on trying to understand the phenomena theoretically and more on using technology to examine the mysterious process, which Navy scientists assure the public is not based on superstition. If the researchers understand the process, there may be ways to accelerate it and possibly spread the powers of intuition throughout military units, says Dr. Squire. Because of the stigma of ESP and PK, the nomenclature has changed, allowing the Defense Department to distance itself from its remote-viewing past. Under the Perceptual Training Systems and Tools banner, extrasensory perception has a new name in the modern era: sensemaking. Since 1972, CIA and DoD research indicates that premonition, or precognition, appears to be weak in some, strong in others, and extraordinary in a rare few. Will the Navys contemporary work on sensemaking, the continuous effort to understand the connections among people, places, and events, finally unlock the mystery of ESP? Might technology available to todays defense scientists reveal hypotheses not available to scientists in an earlier age?

Note: The above was written by Annie Jacobson, journalist and author of the bestselling book, "Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis." Learn more about government-sponsored research and work with ESP and remote viewing on this excellent web page.

It was one of the very first motion pictures ever made: a galloping mare filmed in 1878 by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge. More than a century later, that clip ... is now the first movie ever to be encoded in the DNA of a living cell, where it can be retrieved at will and multiplied indefinitely as the host divides and grows. The advance, reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature ... is the latest and perhaps most astonishing example of the genome’s potential as a vast storage device. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard and one of the authors of the new study, recently encoded his own book, “Regenesis,” into bacterial DNA and made 90 billion copies of it. With the new research, he and other scientists have begun to wonder if it may be possible one day to do something even stranger: to program bacteria to snuggle up to cells in the human body and to record what they are doing, in essence making a “movie” of each cell’s life. When something goes wrong, when a person gets ill, doctors might extract the bacteria and play back the record. It would be, said Dr. Church, analogous to the black boxes carried by airplanes whose data is used in the event of a crash. In 1994, [mathematician Leonard Adleman] Adleman reported that he had stored data in DNA and used it as a computer to solve a math problem. He determined that DNA can store a million million times more data than a compact disc in the same space.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and the mysterious nature of reality.

In 2006, researchers at Duke unveiled the world's first "invisibility cloak," which used metamaterials to hide a small object from microwaves. While it didn't hide things from human view, keeping it hidden from microwaves was an important first step to pushing the technology of cloaking forward. But while it worked, it wasn't perfect. It left small reflections, which prevented it from completely hiding an object. Fast forward to six years later to Duke grad student Nathan Landy, and it looks like that problem has been solved. Landy worked with David R. Smith, one of the researchers on the original Duke cloaking device, to create a "perfect" cloaking device. “We built the cloak, and it worked,” he said in a press release. “It split light into two waves which traveled around an object in the center and re-emerged as the single wave minimal loss due to reflections.” The next step is working to build a clocking device that can hide bigger objects in three-dimensions. The Duke researchers aren't the only team pursuing cloaking devices, either. Last year, an international team of researchers used a "carpet cloak" to hide an object from the visible spectrum, and another team from Cornell dispersed light to hide an event in time. One constant so far, though, is that all of the objects being hidden are stationary and very, very small. [Don't] count on having your own invisibility cloak anytime soon.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the mysterious nature of reality from reliable major media sources.

Your perceptions of the outside world arise through brain activity. Scientists in China have managed to reverse-engineer this process, using brain activity to guess what people are looking at. Their algorithm, which analyses functional MRI brain scans collected while volunteers gaze at digits and letters, is able to furnish uncannily clear depictions of the original images. It has been termed a mind-reading algorithm; a more accurate, though less catchy, description would be a “reconstruction of visual field” algorithm. The algorithm, called the Deep Generative Multiview Model, was highlighted this month by MIT Technology Review as an emerging technology to watch. What is true for the visual cortex is also true for our auditory systems: if you hear a song, the auditory part of your brain whirrs into action. Scientists in the US have developed a programme that can turn the associated firing of neurons back into real sounds. These technologies are turning thoughts into pictures and sounds. In short, science is coming remarkably close to being able to access what is inside our heads. If such algorithms were to find their way into advertising, we may find ourselves digitally stalked not only by images of hotels and consumer goods that we once clicked on, but also by pictures we glanced at or by songs that we streamed. This requires access to brain signals, but who would bet against such a future? Millions of people, by wearing fitness bands, sign up to having their physiological signals charted round the clock.

Note: Software breakthroughs like this have many potential benefits. But these new technologies may also be used for electronic harassment or mind control. And a 2008 US Defense Intelligence Agency report described the brain as the "battlefield of future".

Derek Amato is one of just 30 “acquired savants” worldwide. Each discovered an inexplicable ability that was unleashed after an incident. Amato was 40 years old [when he hit his head hard after diving into the shallow end of a pool]. “I remember the impact being really loud. I knew I was hurt badly,” he described in a Science Channel documentary. He was taken to the hospital with a serious concussion, and suffered some memory loss and hearing loss. After the accident, Amato visited a friend who had a keyboard and felt inexplicably drawn to the instrument. He sat down to play and beautiful, fully structured, original music flowed from his hands. He played until 2 a.m. “I could not only play and compose, but I would later discover that I could recall a prior played piece of music as if it had been etched in my minds eye,” [Amato said]. Though he had dabbled in the guitar before, he’d never touched a piano. Rare cases like this open up a whole new realm of scientific exploration, as scientists investigate how this can happen. The big question is: do we all have this superhuman ability built in, if we could just tap into it and release it? Amato [reported] that though he still gets painful migraines and has lost 35% of his hearing, it’s well worth it. Amato left his corporate job and became a professional musician.

Note: Watch a fascinating video of Derek's story.

The dozens of American diplomats taken hostage by revolutionary students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979 might have had some secret company during their 15-month captivity: U.S. intelligence agencies had a squad of military-trained psychics using ESP to watch them, according to declassified documents in a newly available CIA database. In an operation code-named Grill Flame, half a dozen psychics ... on more than 200 occasions tried to peer through the ether to see where the hostages were being held, how closely they were guarded and the state of their health. Whether the psychics provided any useful intelligence was the subject of a debate among intelligence officials as heated as it was secret. The debate continues today. “The stuff that the CIA has declassified is garbage,” one of the Grill Flame psychics, Joseph McMoneagle, told the Miami Herald. “They haven’t declassified any of the stuff that worked.” Agreed Edwin May, a physicist who oversaw parapsychology research for government intelligence agencies for 20 years: “The psychics were able to tell, in some cases, where the hostages were moved to. They were able to see the degree of their health.” Operation Grill Flame was just one part of a broader U.S. intelligence project involving psychics and ESP that continued for 20 years. It went through as many as 10 different code names as its management shifted from agency to agency ... and carried out 26,000 telepathic forays by 227 psychics before the government shut it down in 1995.

Note: Read more on McMoneagle's work as a psychic for the US military. For more excellent, well resourced material on remote viewing and why the intelligence community continues to deny its successes, see this webpage.

About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online. Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973. Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying - but sometimes precise - accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner". Other unusual records include a collection of reports on flying saucers. While much of the information has been technically publicly available since the mid-1990s, it has been very difficult to access. The records were only available on four physical computers ... at the National Archives in Maryland. A non-profit freedom of information group, MuckRock, sued the CIA to force it to upload the collection. At the same time, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $15,000 to visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records, one by one. "By printing out and scanning the documents at CIA expense, I was able to begin making them freely available to the public and to give the agency a financial incentive to simply put the database online," Best wrote.

Note: The entire declassified archive of the Stargate Project is now available on the CIA Library website. Explore a treasure trove of excellent resources on remote viewing. For decades, officials denied the existence of remote viewing programs and UFO investigations. What other intelligence agency lies will be exposed as more information like this comes to light?

Last week Russia’s president Vladimir Putin unexpectedly removed one of his closest associates as chief-of-staff. The man who was appointed as the replacement to the post [is] Anton Vaino, a former diplomat and deputy chief of staff. Since then Vaino has become [a subject of interest] for his apparent authorship of several very peculiar academic articles, including one describing the invention of a mysterious device called the "Nooscope," ... entitled, "Capitalization of the Future." by a Russian academic journal. According to the paper: "The Nooscope is a device for recording changes in the Noosphere.” Reading further, it consists of "spatial sensors" and can "make the invisible visible." One characteristic sentence reads: "The sensory network of the Nooscope, beginning from new-generation bank cards and finishing with ‘smart dust,’ straightforwardly identifies co-Being in time and space." Most grandly, the paper apparently written by Putin's new top aide states: "The Nooscope is the first device that allows the study of humanity’s collective consciousness." In fact, the idea of "Noo" is not Vaino’s invention but [was] developed as a theory in the early 20th-Century. The "Noosphere" generally means the sphere of human thought, that is the collective consciousness of mankind. The Noosphere has been studied elsewhere, including ... in the United States by scientists formerly part of Princeton University’ controversial PEAR parapsychology lab. One of [Vaino's] co-authors, Viktor Saraev ... told [BBC’s Russian-language service] the Nooscope was an "Internet of Things" device, working from Big Data.

Note: There is much more here than this article suggests. The Russians may be leagues ahead of their Western counterparts in consciousness studies. See this article for more. And because the Internet of Things is a "train wreck in privacy and security" reportedly used to spy on people in their homes, the mysterious "Nooscope" raises questions about privacy as well as the nature of reality.

Life's been full of uncertainties for Reuben Nsemoh lately. Ever since he suffered a concussion in a soccer game, the suburban Atlanta teen's worried about why it's so hard for him to concentrate. He's fretted over whether he'll ever get to play his favorite sport. But the biggest stumper of all: how is it that he's suddenly speaking fluent Spanish? Nsemoh, a 16-year-old high school sophomore, ended up in [a] coma last month after another player kicked him in the head during a game. When he woke up, he did something he'd never done before: speak Spanish like a native. His parents said he could already speak some Spanish, but he was never fluent in it until his concussion. Slowly, his English is coming back, and he's starting to lose his Spanish fluency. Foreign accent syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which brain injuries change a person's speech patterns, giving them a different accent. The first known case was reported in 1941. Since then there have been a few dozen reported cases. Three years ago, police found a Navy vet unconscious in a Southern California motel. When he woke up, he had no memory of his previous life, and spoke only Swedish. In Australia, a former bus driver got in a serious car crash that left her with a broken back and jaw. When she woke up, she was left with something completely unexpected: a French accent. And earlier this year, a Texas woman who had surgery on her jaw, has sported a British accent ever since.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

Some of the world’s richest and most powerful people are convinced that we are living in a computer simulation. And now they’re trying to do something about it. At least two of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires are pouring money into efforts to break humans out of the simulation that they believe that [we are] living in, according to a new report. Philosophers have long been concerned about how we can know that our world isn’t just a very believable simulation of a real one. But concern about that has become ever more active in recent years, as computers and artificial intelligence have advanced. “Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer,” writes The New Yorker’s Tad Friend. “Two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.” The detail came from a New Yorker profile of Sam Altman, who runs Y Combinator which helps develop tech companies. A number of prominent tech billionaires have discussed the idea of the simulation – including Elon Musk, who has used his fortune to fund potentially odd efforts in the past. If we aren’t actually living through a simulation, Mr Musk said, then all human life is probably about to come to an end and so we should hope that we are living in one. “Otherwise, if civilisation stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that stops civilisation,” he said.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the mysterious nature of reality.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.