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.
Jumping spiders, which hunt by pouncing on their prey, gauge distances to their unsuspecting meals in a way that appears to be unique in the animal kingdom, a new study finds. The superability boils down to seeing green. Scientists in Japan discovered that the arachnids accurately sense distances by comparing a blurry version of an…
A new way of determining hair and eye from modern forensic samples can also be used to identify details from ancient human remains, European researchers say. Researchers in Poland and the Netherlands who developed the system dubbed HIrisPlex for forensic analysis said it is sufficiently robust to successfully work on older and more degraded samples…
Joel Primack is a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His wife, Nancy Abrams, is a specialist in the history and philosophy of science. Together they deliver this motivational TEDx talk, which calls for a cosmological, Big History perspective as a means to solving some of our most difficult…
By switching back to the more social, less active jobs of their youth, some honeybees regained the ability to learn quickly.
The false mouse memories made the ethicists uneasy. By stimulating certain neurons in the hippocampus, Susumu Tonegawa and his colleagues caused mice to recall receiving foot shocks in a setting in which none had occurred1. Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that he has no plans to ever implant…
The idea for an eternal clock that would continue to keep time even after the universe ceased to exist has intrigued physicists. However, no one has figured out how one might be built, until now. Researchers have now proposed an experimental design for a “space-time crystal” that would be able to keep time forever. This…