No Death, No Taxes
The libertarian futurism of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
No Death, No Taxes
The libertarian futurism of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
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How Infectious Disease May Have Shaped Human Origins
Roughly 100,000 years ago, human evolution reached a mysterious bottleneck: Our ancestors had been reduced to perhaps five to ten thousand individuals living in Africa. In time, “behaviorally modern” humans would emerge from this population, expanding dramatically in both number and range, and replacing all other co-existing evolutionary cousins, such as the Neanderthals. The cause…
Triple-Bonded Boron Opens New Chemical World
In a vacuum-sealed flask on a lab bench in Germany sits an emerald-green crystal that will cause some jaws to drop. The crystal is the first stable compound containing a triple chemical bond between two boron atoms, a feat that had previously been limited to only two other non-metal elements – carbon and nitrogen. Boron…
Small-Scale Fuel Cell Designed for Residential Use
Individual homes could soon be powered with their own solid oxide fuel cell systems, thanks to a breakthrough in performance. The new system, from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), achieves up to 57% efficiency – half as good again as previous versions of the same size. It uses methane as fuel,…
Did Lucy Walk, Climb, or Both?
Much has been made of our ancestors “coming down out of the trees,” and many researchers view terrestrial bipedalism as the hallmark of “humanness.” After all, most of our living primate relatives—the great apes, specifically—still spend their time in the trees. Humans are the only member of the family devoted to the ground, living terrestrial…
Babies Begin Learning Language in the Womb
Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought. Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new…
How Order Arises From the Random Motion of Particles in the Cosmos
One of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science is how highly organized structures can emerge from the random motion of particles. This applies to many situations ranging from astrophysical objects that extend over millions of light years to the birth of life on Earth. The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases…