The empty set may seem a bit feeble, but appearances deceive; it provides a vital building block for the whole of mathematics.
Limited access to clean sources of energy, known as energy poverty, makes nearly half the world’s population reliant on burning wood, animal waste, coal or charcoal to cook. This leads to severe respiratory diseases that kill roughly two million people worldwide each year. It is often women and children who suffer the most from indoor…
Scientists at Europe’s CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering…
Disgust – it’s an emotion we experience when we encounter things that are dirty, impure, or otherwise contaminated. From an evolutionary standpoint, experiencing the intense, visceral sense of revulsion that comes with disgust presumably helps us to avoid contaminants that can make us sick or even kill us. But new research suggests that disgust not…
Neutrinos are most definitely not faster than light after all, says CERN. The laws of physics got the good news at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, in a talk titled “The neutrino velocity measurement by OPERA experiment.” Slides accompanying the talk say the faster-than-light results generated in 2011 were…
Research by a Danish physicist suggests that the explosion of massive stars – supernovae – near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. Professor Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark sets out his novel work in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When the…
The persistent economic problems facing higher education these days make it evident that the financial models of most institutions are not sustainable. That challenge alone would be bad enough, but traditional educational models are also in trouble, as online learning upends the nature of higher education itself. But more serious than either the economic or…