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It’s fashionable to be pessimistic about our prospects, yet our species may very well endure for at least 100,000 years. So what’s in store for us? We now have the perspective to identify the forces and trends that have shaped humanity and the Earth to date. With this knowledge, we can make intelligent predictions about…
Astronomers have spotted what appears to be a core of dark matter left behind from a wreck between massive clusters of galaxies. The result could challenge current theories about dark matter and how it behaves.
Scientists have long gotten used to the idea that bodies are just genes’ ways of making more genes, survival machines that carry genes to the next generation. Think of a salmon struggling upstream just to expend its body (now expendable) in spawning. Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel’s idea is that cultures are an extension of this:…
Every decision you make is essentially a committee act. Members chime in, options are weighed, and eventually a single proposal for action is approved by consensus. The committee, of course, is the densely knit society of neurons in your head. And approved by consensus is really just a delicate way of saying that the opposition…
Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but uncovering the past can be just as tricky. Now researchers have developed a method that looks backward and may reveal where a widespread phenomenon originated, be it the outbreak of a disease or a new technology. The new method relies on distance, but is not constrained by geography….
Loneliness can send a person down a path toward bad health, and even more intense loneliness, studies have shown. But while some have assumed the culprit was a dearth of others to remind a person to take care of himself or herself, new research suggests there’s a direct biological link between being lonely and ill…
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is asking the public to join in its hunt for signals from intelligent civilizations out there in the universe. Anyone can register on the new website, SETI Live, to help analyze data from SETI’s radio telescope devoted to scanning the heavens for signals from E.T. The public will…
Some Scandinavian trees survived the last Ice Age, challenging a widely held notion that they were killed off by the huge ice sheet that covered the region. Modern trees in Scandinavia were thought to descend from species that migrated north when the ice melted 9,000 years ago, but research suggests some conifers survived on mountain…
How does war affect the planet? Research on this issue is pretty thin. The human and financial costs of armed conflict are so vast that few people have stopped to consider what war does to rivers, trees, and elephants. In recent years, academics have been much more interested in how environmental degradation contributes to war…
Could sad music be perpetuating our sullen views and upbeat tunes optimizing our optimistic outlook?