How easy is it to create life? It happened here at least once. Does that give scientists studying the creation of life from non-life (abiogenesis) much to work with?
A review of The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence by Michael J. Graetz and Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use, a report by the National Research Council’s Committee on Health, Environmental, and Other External Costs and Benefits of Energy Production and Consumption. Author Metanexus…
Physicists have taken a step forward in their efforts to understand why the Universe is dominated by matter, and not its shadowy opposite antimatter. Physicists think the intense heat of the Big Bang should have forged equal amounts of matter and its “mirror image” antimatter. Yet today we live in a Universe composed overwhelmingly of…
The massive amounts of heat produced by cities may be heating up rural areas 1,000 miles away, atmospheric researchers have found in a new modeling study. Scientists have long invoked the “urban island heat effect” to explain why cities are generally hotter than suburban and rural areas. More people, as well as more cars, houses,…
Ink from 160-million-year-old giant squid is essentially identical to today’s squid ink. The discovery suggests that the ink and the ink-screen escape mechanism of squid have not evolved much (if at all) since the Jurassic Period. The finding, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, might just prove that if it…
Many human geneticists have argued our present pattern of diversity originated in a wave of successive founder effects coming from a single recent African origin. They were wrong. Instead, we can turn to a complex model with successive dispersals and episodes of population mixture. This is not a static model of isolation-by-distance; it is a…
A U.S. federal court has found that a stem cell therapy offered by a Colorado clinic meets the definition of a regulated drug. The ruling could spur a U.S. Food and Drug Administration crackdown on other clinics offering untested adult stem cell treatments in the United States. The company, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, Colorado,…