Astronomers may have, for the first time, directly imaged a planet still in the process of formation, gathering material from a debris disk surrounding its parent star.
From a sufferer’s perspective, anxiety is not epochal. It is always and absolutely personal. “The Age of Anxiety” is a phrase that has been used to characterize the consciousness of our era, the awareness of everything perilous about the modern world: the degradation of the environment, nuclear energy, religious fundamentalism, threats to privacy and the…
The relationship between humans and chimpanzees, thought to be pretty close in evolutionary terms, now comes down to a number: 510. Those are the genetic elements, in key areas of the genome, that differ between the two species. Surprisingly they aren’t 510 pieces of DNA that we have and chimps don’t. It’s actually the other…
Within the next five years, it may be possible to charge a cellphone without knowing where it is and destroy tumors no matter how deep they are within the body, using research conducted at the University of Maryland. Through an age-old technique called time reversal, a team of professors discovered how to communicate — by…
Just as NASA’s latest rover prepares to land on the surface of Mars, one Dutch company is looking to up the ante, with plans to send humans to the distant red planet. But before you sign up for travels to faraway lands, you may want to take note that the trip is a one-way deal,…
Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country. American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal, announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that…
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…