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.
Over the next few months, chlorine will ensure that countless swimming pools don’t turn into microbe-choked petri dishes. That’s only one of many uses we’ve found for the element. We sprinkle it on our food as table salt — a k a sodium chloride. We pump water through pipes made of polyvinyl chloride. Perchlorate, a…
An area in the Amazon twice the size of California is experiencing what scientists call a “megadrought.” The prolonged drought, which began in 2005, has caused widespread damage to the area and may possibly be a sign that the rainforest is showing the first signs of large-scale degradation due to climate change. A research team,…
“I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that has lost none of its power to inspire. And some of that dream has come true. When King spoke in the summer of 1963, America was a nation that denied basic rights to millions of its citizens, simply because their skin was the…
As it turns out, Mars and Earth may be more similar than previously thought in one momentous way: Mars appears to have plate tectonics —giant pieces of the planet’s crust that move, break apart and smash into each other, forming such features as mountains, canyons and volcanoes — and experiences earthquakes, according to a new…
International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline when it comes to scientific discovery
Widely accepted theories of dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts, expect the solar neighborhood to be filled with the stuff – but it isn’t, at least as far as can be detected. This extra ingredient in the cosmos was originally suggested to explain…