Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?
Diplomats and activists from around the world are meeting in Rio de Janeiro to talk about how the planet’s growing population can live better lives without damaging the environment. The Rio+20 meeting marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio, a watershed meeting to address topics as diverse as climate change…
After a short spell on the rocks, a mathematically elegant view of the universe is back in vogue. Recent hints of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider help explain why we have not seen evidence for the beautiful theory of supersymmetry yet—and point to fresh ways to focus the search. Author Metanexus Editors
A new way to find a star’s age can give clues to how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies, a U.S. astronomer says. Using a new technique, Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore has examined the burned-out relics of sun-like stars, called white…
Oceans’ rising acid levels have emerged as one of the biggest threats to coral reefs, acting as the “osteoporosis of the sea” and threatening everything from food security to tourism to livelihoods, the head of a U.S. scientific agency said. The speed by which the oceans’ acid levels has risen caught scientists off-guard, with the…
Up to 22 percent of the surfaces of Shackleton Crater, located near the moon’s south pole, may be water ice, new findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show. That may sound like a lot, but it adds up to only about 100 gallons of water inside the 12-mile wide, two-mile deep crater. “It’s not a…
The idea that a cosmic impact ended the age of dinosaurs in what is now Mexico now has fresh new support, researchers say. The most recent and most familiar mass extinction is the one that finished the reign of the dinosaurs — the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, often known as K-T. The only survivors…