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Wonder and amazement at the natural world inspire many blog posts, projects, and even careers in science, but it’s rare that you’ll see wonder break through the soul-crushing passive voice of the scientific literature. It wasn’t always this way, of course. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, historians of science Lorraine Daston and…
Most villages along the Baram River in Malaysia cannot count on round-the-clock electricity. Diesel generators hum at night near longhouses in the northwestern corner of the island of Borneo. Mobile and Internet coverage are almost nonexistent. A plan to dam the Baram River would generate power far in excess of current demand in the rainforest…
Just before any predictable disaster hits, it’s almost impossible to take even a medium term view. With the sequester bearing down on us in a couple of days, identifying the immediate consequences is terrifying enough. Just check out the Obama administration’s state-by-state list of the grim weeks ahead. The picture derived from that tally is…
Lack of sleep has been blamed for everything from poor driving to memory problems. Now, researchers think they’ve started to pinpoint why: week-long sleep studies of people resting for 10 hours a night vs. six hours showed significant changes in gene activity. When sleep was restricted to under six hours a night, researchers noted that…
In a new study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mouse brain cells implanted into rats survived as long as the rats did, double the average mouse lifespan. This runs contrary to one theory of aging that holds that our life spans are genetically determined, and cells in our body will die…
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to give patients control over their own depression and anxiety levels and levels of chronic pain, according to a paper published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Previous studies have found that mindfulness meditation can cut the recurrence of depression by 50%, and neuroimaging scans have…
Any kind of underwater diving involves process for that very reason. There’s the early-morning wake-up, the weather check, the gear check (masks, fins, regulators … check). And then there’s the dive site approach – whether you’re walking in from the shore or taking a boat to some far forgotten reef. Diving Lake Untersee is just…
The so-called shale revolution is re-drawing the energy landscape in the United States and beyond. While the Obama administration is still trying to craft a strategy to manage this energy windfall, more than twenty liquefied natural gas (LNG) export applications are awaiting approval to ship U.S. gas abroad. If all were to be given the…
Geological detectives are piecing together an intriguing seafloor puzzle. The Indian Ocean and some of its islands, scientists say, may lie on top of the remains of an ancient continent pulled apart by plate tectonics between 50 million and 100 million years ago. Painstaking detective work involving gravity mapping, rock analysis, and plate movement reconstruction…
When it comes to data crunching, quantum computers will leave today’s fastest processors in the dust. For starters, a quantum computer would be able to store more bits of information in its memory than there are particles in the universe. And where a conventional silicon-based computer handles one computation at a time in sequence, a…