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This week American philosopher Daniel Dennett, a long-time stalwart of Darwin@LSE, shared his wisdom with a lunchtime crowd in the London School of Economics’ Old Theatre. Since fellow philosopher Helena Cronin’s 1995 launch of the LSE hub (which is devoted to evolution’s maxims) Dennett has been a regular guest. His mission this week to persuade…
ESA’s Planck satellite has delivered its first all-sky image of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), bringing with it new challenges about our understanding of the origin and evolution of the cosmos. The image has provided the most precise picture of the early Universe so far. For the most part, the data agree extremely well with…
New results from a look into the split second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought but the core concepts of the cosmos — how it began, what it’s made of and where it’s going — seem to be on the right track. The findings released Thursday…
A long, long time ago, massive, super-bright galaxies known as starburst galaxies were churning out new stars at a frantic pace. Astronomers would like to study their frenetic star-formation physics and compare them to the relatively slow star factories of the modern era, but this is very hard to do. Starburst galaxies are shrouded from…
In 1992, Martin Chalfie made a spectacularly useful discovery, which I like to think of as perhaps the greatest use of cut-and-paste. Chalfie began with the fact that every gene has two parts: an encoding sequence that, using RNA as an intermediate, specifies a set of amino acids from which a cell can synthesize a…
Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter. —The Editors The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion…
A group of Tier 1 research universities — the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world – will join the White House-led effort to train 100,000 new math and science teachers by the year 2022. A $22.5 million gift from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), announced by the White House Monday morning, will make…
Earthquakes have the Midas touch, a new study claims. Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing gold, according to a model published in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The model provides a quantitative mechanism for the link between gold and quartz seen in many of the world’s gold deposits, said…
THE heavens do not lend themselves to poking and prodding. Astronomers therefore have no choice but to rely on whatever data the cosmos deigns to throw at them. And they have learnt a lot this way. Thus you can even (see article) study chemistry in space that would be impossible in a laboratory. Some astronomers,…
Perhaps you’ve always been curious: What is it like on top of the world? But as for going yourself, well, you’ll leave that to the adventurers. Fortunately for you, one of those adventurers is Dan Fredinburg. And he’s not just your regular run-of-the-mill adventurer, but a professional one at Google. In fact, Fredinburg’s official title…