The Big Picture: The History of the Universe Is Our History
Examining human creativity within the context of natural history and cultural evolution.
In his new book, The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, Oxford physicist Frank Close reviews decades’ worth of brain-teasing theories and looks ahead to puzzles yet to be solved. Author Metanexus Editors
In this brief TED talk, Saul Griffith unveils the invention his new company Makani Power has been working on: giant kite turbines that create surprising amounts of clean, renewable energy.
Earth should be a “snowball planet,” according to common theories of stellar evolution that predict that the sun was only 70 percent of its current brightness when it first lit its fusion engine 4.5 billion years ago. The sun has been steadily growing brighter since then and will continue so into the future, eventually evaporating…
Alain de Botton suggests a “religion for atheists”—call it Atheism 2.0—that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual, and transcendence.
The common ancestor of sharks and humans — and all jawed animals with a backbone for that matter — possessed a sixth sense: the ability to detect electrical fields under water. The anatomical tools for this ability, called electroreceptors and electrosensory ampullary organs, arose from the same cell population in both cartilaginous fishes (such as…