The Big Picture: The History of the Universe Is Our History
The Big Picture: The History of the Universe Is Our History
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Would You Kill One Person to Save Five?
This dilemma is a famous philosophical conundrum that was originally called the “trolley problem.” Now a team from Michigan State University’s psychology department has used virtual-reality technology to test how we respond psychologically and physiologically when faced with this problem. Author Metanexus Editors
Superbug Bred on Farms
It’s long been suspected that administering large amounts of antibiotics to livestock promotes antibiotic resistance. Now a new study describes how a particularly nasty strain of MRSA—the CC398 strain found primarily in pigs but also in cattle and poultry—likely did that. Sequencing the genomes of 88 closely-related strains of S. aureus, the researchers found the…
Is a Global Climate Treaty Still Worth Fighting For?
Governments, businesses and civil society have much to gain from a spirit of determination within the international community
Private Company to Offer Rides to Moon By 2020
A new private venture aims to sell manned trips to the moon by 2020, its founders announced. The company, called Golden Spike (after the final spike built into the First Transcontinental Railroad), plans to sell each moon mission for about $1.5 billion — a relative bargain, said the company’s president and CEO Alan Stern, a…
Humans Hunted Australia’s Giant Beasts to Extinction
Humans hunted Australia’s giant vertebrates to extinction about 40,000 years ago, the latest research published in Science has concluded. The cause of the widespread extinction has provoked much debate, with climate change being one theory. However, scientists studied dung samples from 130,000 and 41,000 years ago, when humans arrived, and concluded hunting and fire were…
History That’s Written in Beads as Well as in Words
A small cadre of diverse collaborators in anthropology, archaeology, primatology, genetics, and linguistics have spent the last two and half years working on a forthcoming book, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press) that serves as a kind of manifesto for their cause. As the authors explain, deep history emphasizes…