Are viruses life forms or not? Scientists have been fighting about it for years, and Anthony has more on the latest wrinkle in this seemingly simple yet age-old debate.
More than half of our nation’s waterways are in “poor condition.” So said the “National Rivers and Streams Assessment”, a recent report from the EnvironmentalProtection Agency (EPA). As the weather warms and minds turn to spring and summer recreation, waterways in poor condition affect you directly if you are planning to swim, fish, or boat…
A New York Medical College developmental biologist whose life’s work has supported the theory of evolution has developed a concept that dramatically alters one of its basic assumptions—that survival is based on a change’s functional advantage if it is to persist. Stuart A. Newman, Ph.D., professor of cell biology and anatomy, offers an alternative model…
To learn about the Internet, we tend to turn to … the Internet. Blogs comment on blogs commenting on blogs. Tweets build on Tweets. It can be one hell of a beautiful snow globe. Yet perhaps the most vital investigation in years of our complex, befuddling, empowering, discouraging relationship with technology comes courtesy of Cara…
Forget clumsy nuclear fission: researchers have now split an atom into two halves, pulled them apart and put them back together again. The University of Bonn team used quantum mechanics, which allow objects to exist in several states simultaneously, to perform the feat. Their experiment involved keeping a single atom simultaneously in two places that…
Physicists have created a quantum gas capable of reaching temperatures below absolute zero and paving the way for future quantum inventions. The chilly substance was composed of potassium atoms which were held in a lattice arrangement using a combination of lasers and magnetic fields. According to a news report in the journal Nature, by tweaking…
U.S. astronomers say they’ve observed a young star with a rotating dust disk considered the youngest still-forming planetary system ever found. The infant star surrounded by a swirling disk of dust and gas is more than 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory reported. While just one-fifth the mass…