A newly discovered galactic structure is so large that it means one of our basic assumptions about the nature of the universe could be wrong.
Georgia Tech researchers say they’ve resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The resurrected bacterium has been growing for more than 1,000 generations, providing scientists a chance to observe evolution in action, the university announced. “This is as close as we can get to rewinding and…
A study from the Netherlands finds allowing ideas to incubate in the back of the mind is, in a narrow sense, overrated. People who let their unconscious minds take a crack at a problem were no more adept at coming up with innovative solutions than those who consciously deliberated over the dilemma. But they did…
Disgust is the subject of numerous recent works in widely different areas of philosophy, including moral and legal philosophy, aesthetics, and the new iteration of what is being called “experimental philosophy.” Perhaps because disgust is a focused passion, the most fruitful recent work on it has come from the sort of research that is of…
The spade-toothed beaked whale is so rare that nobody has seen one alive, but scientists have proof the species still exists. Two skeletons were identified as belonging to the species after a 17-foot whale and her calf beached themselves in New Zealand in 2010. Scientists hope the discovery will provide insights into the species and…
Several recent thought-provoking papers from the Future Visions group have inspired me to offer some thoughts from a "female perspective". As an observational astronomer and a Christian, I found myself in consonance with many views expressed in Bernard Haisch’s contribution "Freeing the Scientific Imagination from Fundamentalist Scientism" (although I disagree that strident debunking is exclusively…
Physicists in Europe will present evidence of an entirely new particle on July 4, Nature has learned. But more data will be needed to officially confirm whether it is indeed the long-awaited Higgs boson — the particle thought to be behind the mass of all the others. Even as rumours fly in the popular media,…