When he was 24, J. Doyne Farmer walked into a casino with a hidden computer he had built himself. It was a digital computer he could use while walking, which he intended to use to demonstrate that physics allowed one to predict the roulette wheel's movements. "It was an adventure, and I did it because I like doing things that people think are impossible," he says. However, there was a second reason: he was a very poor graduate student and wanted to make money. He only partially succeeded: he was able to prove that it's possible to predict which number will come up, but he didn't become rich. Born in 1952 in the United States, Farmer trained as a physicist and is one of the founders of the Complex Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the laboratory that brought together physicists, biologists, and economists to rethink how complex systems work, and the same center where atomic bombs were produced during World War II. An expert in chaos theory, he is a pioneer in computational prediction. He advocates applying to economics the same tools that physics uses to understand hurricanes, ecosystems, or turbulence. He was the founder of Prediction Company. He is currently the director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford. Farmer argues that, while he was able to predict roulette wheel movements and models can be created to try to understand the financial market and improve economic models, we cannot move through time, nor is it predictable or predetermined.

It couldn't be the year of quantum mechanics without the Nobel Prize in Physics also being awarded to the progress made in this field of physics over the last hundred years. Thus, the Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the prize to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis of the University of California, for their discovery of the macroscopic quantum tunneling effect and the quantization of energy in an electrical circuit. "It's fantastic to be able to celebrate that quantum mechanics has yielded many surprises in its hundred years of existence and is the basis of our technology," remarked Olle Eriksson, a member of the Nobel Prize Committee in Physics.

A physicist trying to develop a theory of everything straddling two antagonistic planets. This is the starting point ofThe dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin, a science fiction classic in its most humane, political, social, and vindictive aspects. Le Guin is one of the genre's greatest exponents, known for her feminist and environmentalist views, always seeking utopias in previously unexplored corners.

Following a technical problem, paraglider Peng Yujiang ended up sucked into an updraft that carried him to an altitude of 8,598 meters, according to Chinese media. Guangming DailyDespite that unprecedented journey, the freezing process he experienced, and the lack of oxygen he suffered for several minutes, he was able to land safely because he never lost consciousness. All this happened on Saturday in the mountainous region of Qilian, in northeast China, and the videos recorded by the 360-degree camera attached to the paraglider are capturing headlines in the international media and videos on social media. But how was it possible for him to reach so high and return alive?