Belief in Evolution Boils Down to a Gut Feeling
Intuitive reasoning may help explain why some people are more accepting of evolution than others.
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Comet’s Fiery Plunge May Tell Us How Planets Form
For the first time, scientists have caught a glimpse of a comet’s final minutes before it was vaporized by the sun. The comet was flying at about 1.4 million miles an hour.
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Birth Control Ruling Upsets Religious Groups
In a long-anticipated decision that will affect millions of women’s ability to pay for contraception, the Obama administration announced that it would not allow religiously affiliated employers such as universities and hospitals to deny full birth control coverage to the women they employ. Under the new rule, set forth by the Affordable Care Act, most…
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Controversial Killer Flu Research Paused
Researchers developing extra-contagious strains of H5N1 avian influenza have agreed to pause their work for 60 days. The moratorium is a response to public fear and alarm in the scientific community, which has split over whether the research could inadvertently lead to release of a nightmare disease. Depending on perspective, the moratorium is either a…
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New Definition of Autism Will Exclude Many
Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services. The results of a new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic…
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Fracking Would Emit Large Quantities of Greenhouse Gases
Add methane emissions to the growing list of environmental risks posed by fracking. Opposition to the hydraulic fracturing of deep shales to release natural gas rose sharply last year over worries that the large volumes of chemical-laden water used in the operations could contaminate drinking water. Then, in early January, earthquakes in Ohio were blamed…
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Leap Second Receives Last-Minute Reprieve
The leap second may live on for at least another three years. Once or twice a year, the leap second can be tacked on to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with the Earth’s rotational cycle, which does not run quite like clockwork. Without the leap second, atomic clocks would diverge about…
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Quantum Computing Could Head to ‘the Cloud’
The search for the perfect alliance between science and technology has married quantum computing to the future of IT – the cloud. Researchers have used quantum mechanics to encrypt heavy-duty number-crunching computing, thereby removing a major obstacle in the adoption of the cloud for many enterprises – how safe is my data when it’s hosted…
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Seaweed May Be Our Energy Future
Scientists in a cluttered Berkeley laboratory are working a bit of biochemical wizardry to transform ordinary seaweed into biofuels that promise a new source of energy for this oil-dependent nation. The lab’s research has already fueled a start-up company whose workers at a coastal site in southern Chile are farming nearly 200 acres of kelp…
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Why Does Our Universe Have Three Dimensions?
Why does our universe look the way it does? In particular, why do we only experience three spatial dimensions in our universe, when superstring theory, for instance, claims that there are ten dimensions — nine spatial dimensions and a tenth dimension of time? Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged…