The world population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year, according to a guesstimate from the United Nations. So, should you be scared?
At the Huffington Post, Lawrence M. Krauss ponders the place of a candidate’s religious views in the public sphere: Candidates should have the right to keep their religious views private, but in the current climate essentially none of them actually do so. Rick Santorum has gone so far as to argue that John Kennedy’s strict…
The early universe was a vastly different place from the one we see today. No stars burned in faraway galaxies — there weren’t any galaxies. Instead, photons were trapped in a dance with the hot plasma of protons and electrons that suffused the universe. Sound waves rang out across this primordial soup, sloshing gas and…
Big defense budgets during the aughts financed the deployment of thousands of robots, including unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s fascination with robots hasn’t slackened even in these more austere times. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is funding Boston Dynamics’ development of a prototype robot called the Cheetah….
Obama wants to invest in science and technology, but a divided Congress and looming budget cuts could make it difficult to keep his promises.
In an unlikely marriage of quantum physics and neuroscience, tiny particles called quantum dots have been used to control brain cells for the first time. Having such control over the brain could one day provide a non-invasive treatment for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression and epilepsy. In the nearer term, quantum dots could be…
Near the crowded center of a mysteriously dense galactic cloud, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun — a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second — one…