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 message from Rio+20 is for practical action to deliver existing targets. Scientists must identify and overcome barriers to change. This is a meeting born out of gloom that so little has been achieved, as shown by the UN Environment Programme’s GEO-5 report launched recently. The question is, can the science, technology and innovation (ST&I)…
The massive amounts of heat produced by cities may be heating up rural areas 1,000 miles away, atmospheric researchers have found in a new modeling study. Scientists have long invoked the “urban island heat effect” to explain why cities are generally hotter than suburban and rural areas. More people, as well as more cars, houses,…
Beneath the icy surface of a buried Antarctic lake, in super-salty water devoid of light and oxygen that is also cold enough to freeze seawater, researchers have now discovered that a diverse community of bacteria has survived for millennia. The findings, detailed online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shed light…
What has more consciousness: a puppy or a baby? An iPhone 5 or an octopus? For a long time, the question seemed impossible to address. But recently, Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, argued that consciousness can be measured—captured in a single value that he calls Φ, the Greek letter phi. The…
Researchers have identified what they say are the oldest musical instruments in the world. The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, were found in a cave in southern Germany. Carbon dating revealed the flutes to be between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. Scientists think the musical instruments may have been used for religious…
A number of the largest black holes in the universe may be even bigger than previously thought, researchers say. “Ultramassive black holes — that is, black holes with masses exceeding 10 billion solar masses — are probably not rare; several and even dozens of these colossal black holes may exist,” said Stanford astrophysicist Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo….