From Colin Sage’s Environment and Food to Michael Carolan’s The Real Cost of Cheap Food, here are a handful of new food books from the fall season that are worth checking out.
The first direct signs of cheesemaking now seen in potsherds from Poland may help reveal how animal milk dramatically shaped the genetics of Europe, scientists reported. Although cheese may just seem to be a topping on pizza or a companion to wine, it may have shaped the evolution of Europeans, researchers say. Cheese evolved after…
In a feat of technical mastery, condensed-matter physicists have managed to detect the elusive third constituent of an electron — its ‘orbiton’. The achievement could help to resolve a long-standing mystery about the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, and aid in the construction of quantum computers. Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them…
Some scientists advocate pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to counter global warming by reflecting solar energy away. But according to Carnegie Institution scientists, the price we’d have to pay is the loss of the Earth’s blue skies. Blocking 2% of the sun’s light, they say, would make the sky three to five times brighter, and…
More scientists are getting closer in the search for the “God particle” of physics that would help explain the fundamentals of the universe, but they haven’t found it yet. In the hunt for the Higgs boson, which is key to understanding why matter has mass, two teams of physicists using results from a now-closed American…
A rift in the Antarctic rock as deep as the Grand Canyon is increasing ice melt from the continent, researchers say. A U.K. team found the Ferrigno rift using ice-penetrating radar, and showed it to be about 1 mile deep. Antarctica is home to a geological rift system where new crust is being formed, meaning…
One day, sometime around the middle of this century, during the lifetime of people now alive, the population of the planet will be smaller than it was the day before. Global population growth is slowing, will level off, and one remarkable day, decline. This day will mark the dividing line – the definitive transition –…