The mysterious common ancestor of all life on Earth may have been more complex than before thought—a sophisticated organism with an intricate structure, scientists now suggest.
Astronomers have come up with a livability index for alien planets and moons, and the winners are … Titan in our own solar system, and the Gliese 581 planets in the extrasolar league. Rating systems for Earthlike and habitable planets may not make much difference now, but the developers of the Earth Similarity Index and…
The drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world. The price surge, the third major international food price spike in the last five years, casts more doubt on the assumption that widespread economic development leads to corresponding gains in agriculture. The green revolution has…
Until this week climate change was sadly absent from the presidential election discourse, even though scientific reports have linked the increasingly extreme events experienced recently in the US and elsewhere – the drought and heatwaves, deluges and blizzards that some call “weather weirding” – to systemic change rather than coincidental natural fluctuations. Sandy has forced…
Geoengineering has been a hot topic of late and now comes a new study looking at the possibility of using solar geoengineering to counter the loss of Arctic sea ice by tailoring geoengineering by region and by need. A team of leading researchers developed a new computer model that promises to maximise the effectiveness of…
A neuroscience team has successfully translated signals in the brains of six healthy volunteers into letters to enable them to spell messages. Likened to a “typewriter for the brain,” the advance may help paralyzed people use their brains to communicate. Some of these paralyzed patients have been forced to rely on eye blinks or muscle…
At least four times in the last few years, astronomers have announced they have found planets orbiting other stars in the sweet spot known as the habitable zone — not too hot, not too cold — where water and thus perhaps life are possible. In short, a so-called Goldilocks planet fit to be inhabited by…