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.
Drilling of the seabed off Antarctica has revealed that rainforest grew on the frozen continent 52 million years ago, scientists said, warning it could be ice-free again within decades. The study of sediment cores drilled from the ocean floor off Antarctica’s east coast revealed fossil pollens that had come from a “near-tropical” forest covering the…
Astronomers have detected an alien planet that may be capable of supporting life as we know it — and it’s just a stone’s throw from Earth in the cosmic scheme of things. The newfound exoplanet, a so-called “super-Earth” called HD 40307g, is located inside its host star’s habitable zone, a just-right range of distances where…
“Titan provides an extraordinary environment to better understand some of the chemical processes that led to the appearance of life on Earth,” said Josep M. Trigo-Rodriguez, of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. “Titan’s atmosphere is a natural laboratory that, in many aspects, seems to have a strong similitude with our current picture…
A pulsar that randomly and without warning dramatically changes its pattern of radio wave and X-ray emissions has surprised a team of astronomers, who wrote that it “challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories.” Pulsars are spinning stars the size of a small city, with a mass roughly comparable to our Sun. They have a strong…
An entirely new type of particle has been discovered by scientists using the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland. The discovery of the new particle, called “neutral Xi_b^star baryon,” was made by the CMS experiment, one of six separate particle physics experiments running at the LHC….
Archaeologists date relic, found in dig near Jerusalem, to the 12th century B.C.