To learn more about life’s origins, scientists investigated some of the oldest remnants of crust on Earth—rocks 3.7 billion to 3.8 billion years old from Isua on the southwestern coast of Greenland.
Sally Hurd Smith, a veteran teacher, held up her brand-new tablet computer and shook it as she said, “I don’t want this thing to take over my classroom.” It was late June, a month before the first day of school. In a sixth-grade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen middle-school social-studies teachers were getting their…
Arguing for a “balanced theory of contingent-necessity in evolution.”
On May 2, after nightfall shut down photosynthesis for the day in Hawaii, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere touched 400 parts-per-million there for the first time in at least 800,000 years. Near the summit of volcanic Mauna Loa—where a member of the Keeling family has kept watch since 1958—sensors measured this record through sunrise…
Most people learn to count when they are children. Yet surprisingly, not all languages have words for numbers. A recent study shows that a few tongues lack number words and as a result, people in these cultures have a difficult time performing common quantitative tasks. The findings add new insight to the way people acquire…
V.V. Raman says the most important thing the world can learn from India’s religious visions is the doctrine of polyodosism: There are multiple paths for individuals and for groups to attain spiritual fulfillment. Author Metanexus Editors
The savannah habitat that sustains African lions has shrunk by 75 percent over the past half-century, according to a study published in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, a dramatic loss that could threaten the species’ survival. The new analysis by American, African and British researchers — which suggests the continent’s lion population has declined from…