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.
What if you had a “Wayback Television Set” and could watch an entire month of ancient prehistory unfold before your eyes in real time? David Rubin of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presented just such a scenario to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting when he announced the discovery of a…
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…
In the 1600s, Europeans exploring the American southeast wrote of a purification ritual practiced by the native people, involving dancing, vomiting, and large amounts of what the travelers called black drink. Served from shell cups, the highly caffeinated tea was brewed from the shrub Ilex vomitoria, a species of holly. In a new study, researchers…
A new study suggests you can keep dementia at bay by developing a firm purpose in life. The findings don’t prove that having a purpose will make a difference, and it’s possible that the researchers missed another important factor that’s at play. Still, the study, published in the May issue of the Archives of General…
“Prometheus,” the new movie from the director Ridley Scott, is a scientific and spiritual quest. The scientists in the movie think somebody or something else created us. Creationism? Yes, in a way, but creationism for geeks, of the sort that science fiction writers and scientists have long indulged in. It does not run counter to…
Climate change is widely expected to disrupt future fire patterns around the world, with some regions, such as the western United States, seeing more frequent fires within the next 30 years, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with an international team of scientists. By the…