Are viruses life forms or not? Scientists have been fighting about it for years, and Anthony has more on the latest wrinkle in this seemingly simple yet age-old debate.
The modern meltdown of the Antarctic Ice Sheet mirrors the frozen continent’s big thaw after the last ice age ended 20,000 years ago, a new study finds. New ice core records from West Antarctica show the huge ice sheet started heating up about 20,000 to 22,000 years ago, 2,000 to 4,000 years earlier than previously…
The leap second may live on for at least another three years. Once or twice a year, the leap second can be tacked on to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with the Earth’s rotational cycle, which does not run quite like clockwork. Without the leap second, atomic clocks would diverge about…
Most people barely notice lichens, but Dr. Anne Pringle, a mycologist at Harvard, believes they may help answer one of science’s greatest questions: Is immortality biologically possible? For eight years, Dr. Pringle has been measuring, sketching and scrutinizing lichens, which belong to the genus Xanthoparmelia. She wants to know whether they deteriorate with the passage…
Since its launch in 2008, the Fermi space telescope has recorded hundreds of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), flashes of light that, for just a few seconds or minutes, are the brightest objects in the Universe. And now the telescope is yielding data that is starting to explain the mechanisms that unleash these beam-like jets of light,…
Climate adaptation: reconfiguring our world’s economies and policies to work under a more extreme climate. While that might seem like an old conversation, it’s not; mitigation—reducing greenhouse gases—has been the main topic of climate discussion in the past 20 years. But attention is shifting to the once taboo topic of adaptation. Author Metanexus Editors
More scientists are getting closer in the search for the “God particle” of physics that would help explain the fundamentals of the universe, but they haven’t found it yet. In the hunt for the Higgs boson, which is key to understanding why matter has mass, two teams of physicists using results from a now-closed American…