Advocates of free will can rest easy, for now. A 30-year-old classic experiment that is often used to argue against free will might have been misinterpreted.
How does literary style evolve? Surprisingly, clues lie in words with seemingly little meaning, such as “to” and “that”. By analyzing how writers use such “content-free” words, mathematician Daniel Rockmore and colleagues at Dartmouth College were able to conduct the first, large-scale “stylometric” analysis of literature. Content-free words are indicative of writing style, Rockmore says….
Forget beef or even milk. If you’re looking for a sustainable and substantial source of protein, mealworms may be the way to go. Compared to a kilogram of edible protein in meat from cows, chickens or pigs, production of the same amount of mealworm protein emits fewer greenhouse gases and requires much less land to…
Katrina Lantos Swett contributes a post for On Faith’s Guest Voices: Across the globe, religion and belief continue to matter deeply in the lives of people and their cultures. From worship to prayer, births to funerals, weddings to holy days, almsgiving to thanksgiving, religion is a central source of identity, meaning, and purpose for billions…
The most common measure of intelligence in animals, brain size relative to body size, may not be as dependent on evolutionary selection on the brain as previously thought, according to a new analysis by scientists. Brain size relative to body size has been used by generations of scientists to predict an animal’s intelligence. For example,…
The equivalent of an MRI of the sun was created by scientists, who studied high-resolution images of the sun’s surface taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory showing motions on the sun’s surface caused by convection. The findings challenge our existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation. Author Metanexus Editors
The Gruber Foundation, a Type 1 supporting organization operated and supervised by Yale University, has announced the recipients of the 2013 Gruber Cosmology Prize, which recognizes theoretical, analytical, conceptual, or observational discoveries leading to fundamental advances in our understanding of the universe.
The $500,000 prize was awarded to Viatcheslav Mukhanov, professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and Alexei Starobinsky of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow for their formative contributions to inflationary theory, an essential component for understanding the evolution and structure of the universe. Mukhanov’s and Starobinsky’s contributions to inflationary cosmology have provided compelling answers to essential cosmological questions and validated a key prediction of Big Bang theory.