The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science.
Scientists have used DNA analysis to gain important new insights into how human beings repopulated Europe as the Ice Age relaxed its grip. Dr Maria Pala, who is based at the University of Huddersfield is the lead author of an article in the latest issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics which shows how…
Some Scandinavian trees survived the last Ice Age, challenging a widely held notion that they were killed off by the huge ice sheet that covered the region. Modern trees in Scandinavia were thought to descend from species that migrated north when the ice melted 9,000 years ago, but research suggests some conifers survived on mountain…
A new exhibition in London is putting the brain under a microscope — literally. “Brains: The Mind as Matter” asks not what brains have done for us but what, in the name of science, we have done to brains. The brain has fascinated and baffled scientists for centuries. The exhibition, which opens Thursday at the…
Both religion and conservative politicians are on the verge of losing the support of many of their constituents: women. That’s the conclusion Washington Post religion columnist Lisa Miller comes to after reading The Resignation of Eve by Jim Henderson and comparing it to the current election season. “Unless the strident, authoritarian social conservatives loosen their…
In 1981 physicist Nick Herbert leveraged strange features of quantum mechanics to design a superluminal communication system. The quest to uncover its subtle flaw led to a profound new understanding of the quantum world. This discovery became known as the “no-cloning theorem”: a powerful statement about the ultimate foundations of quantum theory. An arbitrary or…
Douglas McCauley and Paul DeSalles did not set out to discover one of the longest ecological interaction chains ever documented. But that’s exactly what they and a team of researchers – all current or former Stanford students and faculty – did in a new study published in Scientific Reports. Their findings shed light on how…