around_the_web
Species of snakes, spiders and butterflies have all evolved to look like other species to ward off predators. But one of the great mysteries in biology is that most of this copy-cat behavior is not very good, and bad impersonators seem just as abundant as the good ones. A simplistic interpretation of Darwin’s theory of…
A dread of malevolent spirits haunting forsaken areas could, along with environmental catastrophes, help to explain why some areas in the ancient Mayan world proved less resilient than others when their civilization disintegrated, researchers suggest. The ancient Maya once claimed an area about the size of Texas, with cities and fields that occupied what is…
While plenty of question marks still hang over the prospect of carbon capture and storage, MIT believes it’s ruled out one: the United States, it says, has enough capacity in its deep saline aquifers to store at least a century’s fossil fuel emissions. In the past, estimates of America’s capacity have ranged from enough to…
As much as we’re enjoying these halcyon early spring days of bare legs and light breezes, perfect al fresco weather, and walking jacketless through the park, we are also worried. Worried about what it means. Worried about what our perfect March will mean once we reach June. After all, we’ve still got three months, and…
Order and reason are a mathematician’s tools. In the hands of a very select few, however, those tools can transform an abstract discipline into art. That, in large part, is why the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced that Endre Szemerédi, a 71-year-old Rutgers professor, had won the 2012 Abel Prize, the unofficial Nobel…
A large research team from two major astronomy surveys reports in a paper submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters that scientists detected the movement of distant galaxy clusters via the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (kSZ) effect, which has never before been seen. Now that it has been detected, the kSZ effect could prove to be an…
The electric snail is here. There’s an electric cockroach too. Both are early experimental forays in a new line of research aimed at creating tiny, self-powered animal/machine hybrids as an alternative to tiny robots. Instead of starting from scratch and having to solve all those pesky movement problems that plague roboticists, some researchers have asked,…
M.I.T. scientist Sebastian Seung describes the audacious plan to find the connectome–a map of every single neuron in the brain. Here, he says, is the secret of human identity
As the seas rise, so will the costs associated with them. The impact of climate change on oceans alone could cost $2 trillion by the end of the century, according to a report by the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden. That figure comes from a scenario in which Earth’s temperature rises 4 °C by 2100,…
Facing an ever-increasing din of background noise from traffic and other human activities, many animals are adapting by changing their behavior or just moving to quitter locales. In turn, noise pollution is altering the landscape of plants and trees, which depend on noise-affected animals to pollinate them and spread their seeds. Some plants do worse…