To learn more about life’s origins, scientists investigated some of the oldest remnants of crust on Earth—rocks 3.7 billion to 3.8 billion years old from Isua on the southwestern coast of Greenland.
Systems metaphysics provides a new way to understand scientific knowledge, reveals the deep connection between fact and value, and formulates scientific knowledge that can be personally appropriated.
As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, however, the experience of being moved by art seems universal. A new neurological study offers some insight into this aesthetic paradox. The results indicate that connecting deeply to a work of art activates the same part of everyone’s brain. However, part of the brain…
Among its more dubious claims to fame, Tennessee was the site of the 1925 “Monkey Trial,” in which John Scopes was convicted of violating a state law against teaching that “man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Eighty-seven years later, the Tennessee Legislature is itching for an encore. It has sent to Gov….
With each day, the so-called fiscal cliff looms larger as Congress and President Obama work to come to agreement on a federal-deficit compromise, which so far has proven elusive. Absent such an agreement by year’s end, far-reaching spending cuts will be triggered as result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, through a mechanism called…
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,…
A small study raises more concern about the long-term consequences of brain injuries suffered by thousands of soldiers — suggesting they may be at risk of developing the same degenerative brain disease as some retired football players. Autopsies of four young veterans found the earliest signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in their brain…