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Shellfish respond to increasing acidification in seawater – such as that produced by climate change – by producing lighter, thinner shells. As more and more carbon dioxide is generated by human beings, it becomes dissolved in the oceans, making them more acidic. And according to British, Australian and Singaporean scientists, this is affecting the size…
The supply of children in U.S. foster care far exceeds the demand for their adoption. Indeed, only one in five children is adopted from foster care in the United States. Not only do the circumstances leading to the surrender of children to the state continue unabated (negligence, abuse, poverty, drug addiction of the parents), but…
Mixing it up helps birds ensure that their songs are heard no matter what the habitat, say researchers at Australian National University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. When the researchers combined acoustical data with temperature and precipitation records and other information such as habitat and latitude, they found a surprising pattern — males that…
Billions of times the mass of our own sun, so-called massive black holes present a baffling mystery with clues hidden at the very dawn of existence.
Two recent scholarly works on millennialism leave this reviewer with a new understanding of the perverse human yearning for apocalypse
Check out this high-rise in France’s Boulogne-Billancourt re-imagined as an urban eco-village, bursting with greenery. The Natural Evolution building proposal (which comes via eVolo) was developed in response for the increasing need for high-density housing in urban areas. In accordance with that vision, it was developed for Boulogne-Billancourt, the most populous suburb of Paris and…
Last year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole. This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic…
At 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5, after nearly nine months of travel, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission (with a rover named Curiosity) will arrive at the Red Planet. The $2.5 billion rover will begin a two-year quest to explore the interior of Mars’ Gale Crater and hunt for evidence of an ancient ocean there….
Even a multimillion-dollar donation does not ensure a spot in heaven. Or at least that’s what most religions believe. But a $5-million academic grant, to be centered at UC Riverside, may go a long way toward gaining insights into the possibility of an afterlife and delving into what science and culture say about immortality. The…
One of the primary forces behind climate change-driven sea level rise is the Greenland Ice Sheet. Covering 80% of Greenland, it’s the world’s second-largest chunk of ice (after the Antarctic Ice Sheet) and dumps 240 billion tons of fresh water into the oceans every year, accounting for a full fifth of annual sea level rise….