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This year has been a spectacular one for exoplanets. New discoveries and new insights have truly pushed the gateway to other worlds even further open. In the past 12 months we’ve gained increasingly good statistics on the incredible abundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity. We also finally seem to have evidence that…
From Mattew Yglesias and the Slate MoneyBox blog: There’s more to life than just this, but I’ve come to think that directly transfering cash money to people in need is the most underrated tool around for fighting poverty. So I was incredibly excited to read Dana Goldstein’s profile of GiveDirectly. They take advantage of the fact that Kenya…
At Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment. Scientists had long thought Africa went…
Scientists have found that deforestation not only affects the diversity of plants and animals, but is bad news for the forest’s microbes too. While it has long been known that deforestation in the Amazon leads to a net loss in the biodiversity of plants and animals, until now very little has been known about how…
The next time you think about having sex without birth control, The Center for Biological Diversity wants to make sure that you consider how it might affect the greater world around you. Since 2009, the non-profit has handed out 450,000 condoms with endangered species awareness messages on their wrappers. How would your next passionate evening…
A Southern California-based space company has successfully tested a reusable rocket it hopes will make it cheaper to go into space. The Torrance Daily Breeze says Hawthorne-based SpaceX released a video showing the test of its Grasshopper rocket. During a 29-second flight on Dec. 17, Grasshopper blasted 131 feet into the air from a pad in…
From Mayanmar to Lithuania, and Jerusalem to Vatican City, the faithful gathered on Christmas 2012 in churches around the world to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Click through these slides to see Christmas celebrations across the globe:
As darkness falls on Christmas night, check out the east-southeast sky. Shining brilliantly to the upper left of the bright, nearly full moon will be a silvery “star” with a steady glow. But that’s not a star, or Santa returning to the North Pole. Rather, it’s the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, serving…
Some economists dislike Christmas. They allege that it “destroys value,” which is, in Econoland, the first and only sin. The economist Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics, goes so far as to contend that the winter holiday season is “an orgy of value destruction.” Waldfogel’s main concern is that the value of gifts to their recipients…
When you gather around the Christmas tree or stuff goodies into a stocking, you’re taking part in traditions that stretch back thousands of years — long before Christianity entered the mix. Pagan, or non-Christian, traditions show up in this beloved winter holiday, a consequence of early church leaders melding Jesus’ nativity celebration with pre-existing midwinter…