A mock debate on time with British physicist and science writer Julian Barbour and NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, reposted from FQXi’s Setting Time Aright conference in Copenhagen.
Cosmic impacts that once bombed Mars might have sent temperatures skyrocketing on the Red Planet in ancient times, enough to set warming of the surface on a runaway course, researchers say. According to scientists, these findings could potentially help explain how this cold, dry world might have once sustained liquid water and conditions potentially friendly…
An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days. Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life’s progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn’t duplicate prehistoric transitions,…
European cave paintings are older than previously thought, raising the possibility that Neanderthals rather than Homo sapiens were the earliest painters. That’s not yet certain: The paintings may have been made by humans at an unexpectedly early date, which would itself raise intriguing questions, though none so tantalizing as Neanderthal painters. Researchers measured the ages…
Archaeologists have found a small room in Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago. The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Scientists already knew they must have been keeping such records at…
Rather than kicking off the expected cycles of extinction, periods of warming in Earth’s history were accompanied by increased biodiversity, according to a report. But this does not mean that the mass extinctions that are taking place today, with Earth warming at an unprecedented rate, will be reversed in future. Researchers examined the number of…
It’s called the transit of Venus. The planet will appear as little dark circle on the sun as it zips between us and that big yellow ball. About every 120 years or so, transits of Venus come in clusters – two in eight years. The last one was in 2004, and we won’t see another…