Another year, another set of climate records. Here are the top ten signs you are living in a warming world, 2012 edition:
University of Alberta researchers have uncovered physical proof that animals existed 585 million years ago, 30 million years earlier than all previous established records show. The researchers found fossilized tracks of a centimeter-long, slug-like animal left behind 585 million years ago in a silty sediment. The research team determined that the tracks were made by…
Scientists are not robots recording events using mechanically objective methods. Like all human beings, scientists have biases. Indeed, the inherent bias in science has spurred debates over climate change, evolution, and other topics. Nonetheless, the reliability and validity of data used to draw conclusions are the linchpin for scientific progress. We can and must do…
If there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something pleasurable, it’s forever linked to salacious stories of sex, drugs and wild partying in the popular press. The Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters, it gives instant appeal to listless reporting and gives editors an excuse to drop some…
Our earliest invertebrate ancestors did not have brains. Yet, over hundreds of millions of years, we and other vertebrates have developed amazingly complicated mental machinery. “It must have evolutionary roots somewhere, but where?” wrote Henry Gee, an editor at Nature, in an essay published in the journal’s March 15 issue. Years of study of common…
Researchers have trapped a rainbow – slowing light to a near-stop – in an array of 25,000 “invisibility cloaks”, each smaller than a hair’s breadth. A report in the New Journal of Physics shows how the quest for an invisibility cloak is leading to cleverer ways to use and manipulate light. The trick could aid…
While we have a supremely accurate theory of what happened after our universe started in its super-hot, super-dense childhood, we are still in the dark about its birth. But after more than a half century of work scientists are, perhaps, finally ready to go before and beyond the big bang. Author Metanexus Editors