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.
Brace yourself for a tidal wave of Facebook campaigning before November’s U.S. presidential election. A study of 61 million Facebook users finds that using online social networks to urge people to vote has a much stronger effect on their voting behavior than spamming them with information via television ads or phone calls. The study comes…
The history of the Universe from the Big Bang to its possible ends en Español from a conference in Bilbao on the 25th of May.
Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of a possible catastrophic course for human civilization in the 21st century – a collapse of socioeconomic order and massive drop in human population. In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global…
Charles Darwin recognized that natural selection can make eyes sharper, muscles stronger, and fur thicker. But evolution does more than just improve what’s already there. It also gives rise to entirely new things—like eyes and muscles and fur. To study how new things evolve, biologists usually have to rely on ancient clues left behind for…
Worrying is a beneficial trait that evolved in association with intelligence, according to a new study published in a recent edition of Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. “While excessive worry is generally seen as a negative trait and high intelligence as a positive one, worry may cause our species to avoid dangerous situations, regardless of how…
The old saying that where there’s muck, there’s brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, received wisdom was that most of the human genome—perhaps as much as 99% of it—was “junk”. If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1%, the…