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.
Polar bears have been chilling on the ice far longer than is generally thought, new research suggests, and they probably interbred with brown bears at one point after the two species separated. The new German study contradicts data from a study published last July in the journal Current Biology that suggested polar bears separated from…
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, some of the most brilliant minds in the world work to build the spacecraft that humans use to explore their universe. But where space scientists now roam, dinosaurs used to call home, according to dino-hunter Ray Stanford. Stanford has discovered the footprint of a lumbering, spiny dinosaur…
Languages are like species. They evolve in mostly predictable ways, splitting into new species or dying out over time. Now, a group of linguists and computer scientists in the US and Canada have created a piece of software that can analyze enormous groups of languages to reconstruct what the earliest human languages might have sounded…
Blasting over two million lights years from the centre of a distant galaxy is a supersonic jet of material that looks strikingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet, except in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is moving at nearly the speed of light….
The Universe’s highest-energy light could finally yield clues to the nature of the “dark matter” that makes up some 85% of the Universe’s mass. The Fermi space telescope, designed to catch gamma rays, has seen hints of evidence for dark matter in high-energy gamma rays seen at the galaxy’s centre. The Fermi team is now…
The United States is currently in the throes of a spiritual awakening, says Diana Butler Bass. In her new book, Christianity After Religion, Bass argues that we are at a crossroads in history—we can choose to move forward into new emerging spiritualities, or we can heed the siren sound of the traditionalists calling us back…