Atoms and the Miracle of Life
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Some 330 million years ago, a galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood scored a bullseye, shooting right through the heart of large neighboring galaxy. The rare collision restructured the bigger galaxy, NGC 922, giving it the unusual, lopsided ring of hot pink clouds seen in images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Galaxies like NGC 922 are…
Why Are We Still Talking About Darwin?
If someone in 2012 wants to criticize Henry Ford because he didn’t know everything about automobiles a century ago, it’s a little silly. He knew what he knew given the science and the technology of his day – he revolutionized his field. Freud got a lot wrong about psychology but he created the only unified…
DNA Offers Sharp Image of Ancient Humans
Scientists have produced a digital image of a genome tens of thousands of years old with the resolution of a typical living person’s, enabling them to describe the life and history of the ancient humans in great detail, they reported in Science magazine. Led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,…
An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change
In the clammy depths of a southern Illinois coal mine lies the largest fossil forest ever discovered, at least 50 times as extensive as the previous contender. Scientists are exploring dripping passages by the light of headlamps, mapping out an ecosystem from 307 million years ago, just before the world’s first great forests were wiped…
What the Amazon Looked Like Before Columbus
Ancient people had minimal, if any, impact on the outlying forests of South America’s Amazon Basin, and settlements near rivers were likely limited, indicates a new study of soil collected from the western and central Amazon. Previous research has suggested that, prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and Europeans, indigenous people built dense, complex…
Tyler Cowen’s TED Talk: Be Suspicious of Stories
Like all of us, economist Tyler Cowen loves a good story. But in this intriguing talk from TEDxMidAtlantic, he asks us to step away from thinking of our lives—and our messy, complicated irrational world—in terms of a simple narrative.