around_the_web
When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog–but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might…
The Fermi Paradox asks the simple question “where are they?” Our Milky Way galaxy is so big and so old — and we are estimated to be accompanied by at least 100 billion planets — that aliens should have visited us by now. Instead, when we peruse the heavens, we are faced with the Great…
A group of forward-thinking military scientists want to plug soldiers’ weapons directly into their brains, and this time DARPA is nowhere to be found. The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of scientific thought, issued a report on the applications of neuroscience in the military and law enforcement contexts. Discussed therein: new performance-enhancing designer drugs,…
Ships’ propellers emit sound in the same frequency range that some whales use for communicating, and previous studies have shown the whales change their calling patterns in noisy places. Now, researchers have measured stress hormones in the faeces of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, and found they rose with the density of shipping. Ocean…
A cricket song last heard 165 million years ago has been played again. To reconstruct the sound, paleontologists compared microscopic wing structures of fossil Archaboilus musicus, a Jurassic ancestor of modern crickets, to contemporary wings. Crickets sing — or, technically, “stridulate” — by rubbing together the ridged edges of their wings. From noises generated by…
A swathe of seagrass in the Mediterranean could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Carlos Duarte of the University of Western Australia in Perth sequenced the DNA of Posidonia oceanica at 40 sites spanning 3500 kilometres of seafloor, from Spain to Cyprus. One patch off the island of Formentera was identical over 15…
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 brought an influx of Soviet mathematicians to U.S. institutions, and those scholars’ differing areas of specialization have changed the way math is studied and taught in this country, according to new research by University of Notre Dame Economist Kirk Doran and George Borjas from Harvard University. Results…
Politicians change their minds like everyone else. And accusations of flip-flopping are often thought to be a boon for opposing candidates during heated debates. Depending on certain factors, changing stances can actually help a candidate. But it also depends on what political party both voter and politician belong to.
It used to be sex ed that got science teachers into challenging situations once in awhile. Evolution, too, of course. Increasingly, the “C” word, climate, is creating challenges for educators trying to explore the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide and the implications for climate as concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases rise. Teachers are…
Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other…