Only four articles this month and they’re more on the speculative side than the solid science side than the norm:

• This Ars Technica article needs to be thoroughly and carefully read to be fully understood. It summarizes recent work by physicists that pushes towards the view that the wave function of quantum physics really does represent the observed system itself rather than represent we know about the system. In other words, it is yet another nail in the coffin that reality is classical, deterministic and local.
• This article from CityLab was apparently inspired by a blog post by Charles Stross. It discusses the feasibility of building a human colony on Venus, specifically a floating city about 50 kilometers above the surface of the planet. At that altitude, atmospheric pressure and temperatures would be roughly equivalent to those on Earth even if the air is poisonous. The best thing about Venus compared to the most popular candidate is that its gravity is very close to that of Earth while Mars would have only a third of our gravity.
• I’m not sure how the researchers covered in this article from The Washington Post thought up this experiment but I guess the results are interesting. The test subjects were led into an area free of any distractions and invited to let their mind wander. The only thing that they could interact with was a device that would administer a mild electric shock when a button was pressed. Surprisingly most of the men chose to use the device, repeatedly even, rather than be bored. The authors frame it as people hating having nothing to do except think but personally I’m sceptical.
• The last one is a post on a blog called The Mitrailleuse. It argues that first conscious machines will probably be created as a result of financial firms creating ever more sophisticated algorithms to parse various information from the real world and use the results to perform financial transactions. Since the rewards of getting it right are huge, the firms routinely spend large amounts of money into perfecting their algorithms, in the process making ever closer to thinking beings.