around_the_web
British scientist Stephen Hawking has decoded some of the most puzzling mysteries of the universe but he has left one mystery unsolved: How he has managed to survive so long with such a crippling disease. The physicist and cosmologist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease when he was a 21-year-old student at Cambridge University. Most…
As climate change progresses, the planet may lose more plant and animal species than predicted, a new modeling study suggests. This is because current predictions overlook two important factors: the differences in how quickly species relocate and competition among species, according to the researchers, led by Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut….
After a short spell on the rocks, a mathematically elegant view of the universe is back in vogue. Recent hints of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider help explain why we have not seen evidence for the beautiful theory of supersymmetry yet—and point to fresh ways to focus the search.
The most extraordinary aspect of biodiversity is the way in which every living thing on earth, everything that has ever lived on earth, is directly connected through time by an utterly unbroken sequence of reproductive events. It is possible to trace one’s ancestry back through one’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, generation after generation…
Over the past decade, as news on the looming threat from global warming has continued unabated and become increasingly dire, public opinion has stayed static or become more indifferent to the need to take drastic action. Most polls paint a worrying picture for scientists, environmentalists and activists: that attitudes have not just remained static over…
God references slipped into tests decreased student’s belief that they controlled their own destiny, researchers report, but made them more resistant to junk food temptation. In the current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study, six experiments on engineering students, researchers led by Kristin Laurin of Canada’s University of Waterloo reported that just mentioning the…
How’s it all going to end? Being a cosmologist, I’m not talking about our new year, but about our universe, billions of years from now. This question has gotten me worrying about what I call the Big Snap. The usual suspects for our upcoming “cosmochalypse” are the Big Chill, the Big Crunch, and the Big…
An adenovirus isolated from chimpanzee feces is proving more effective than human adenoviruses as a vaccine vector for hepatitis C. Collecting stool samples from zoos and animal facilities, Alfredo Nicosia of Okairos in Rome, Italy and his team isolated and characterized almost 30 different chimp adenovirus serotypes from some 1,000 stool samples. They made safe…
Scientists at Cornell University hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature. We see events happening as light from them reaches our eyes. Usually it’s a continuous flow of light. In the new research, however, scientists were able to interrupt that flow…
Psychologist Daniel Casasanto and his team have shown that for left-handers, the left side of any space connotes positive qualities such as goodness, niceness, and smartness. For right-handers, the right side of any space connotes these same virtues.