Professor of psychology Michael Gazzaniga is spelling out a cautionary tale about the uses of neuroscience in society.
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…
Reducing the risk of extinction for threatened species and establishing protected areas for nature will cost the world over $76 billion annually. Researchers say it is needed to meet globally agreed conservation targets by 2020. The scientists say the daunting number is just a fifth of what the world spends on soft drinks annually. And…
A colleague at my institution recently invited a scientist with a “foreign-sounding” name to deliver a seminar. Foreign, yes, but not to my ears – immediately I knew that this was an Israeli. As fate would have it, not only did I recognise the name as Israeli, but I recognised the name – and remembered…
Two international teams of physicists have found subtle hints of what could be the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would help explain why other particles have mass. The researchers today announced that they may have uncovered a whiff of the Higgs in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator outside…
The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the metaphorical doomsday clock is now at five minutes to midnight, putting humanity one figurative minute closer to catastrophic destruction than it was just two years ago. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in the 1940s by members of…
If architecture is ‘design for living’, one of its greatest challenges is how to live with the masses of waste we excrete. Four pioneers in green sanitation design outline solutions to a dilemma too often shunted down the pan.