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If humanity’s earthly tenure isn’t fated to end with the Mayan calendar, it is certain to end someday. It’s the sort of thing artist and author, Trevor Paglen, thinks about a lot. He knows, for example, that we homo sapiens have occupied the earth a mere .004 percent of its 4.5 billion-year history. He knows…
Egypt is at the crossroads. Its emerging constitution, however, betrays the brightest hopes of the so-called Arab Spring. A draft approved by Egypt’s Constituent Assembly includes blasphemy laws and ignores the rights of women; it even permits child labor. Pray it’s just a rough draft. Citizens have taken to the streets in protest. We can…
One of the many reasons why people fail to acknowledge the seriousness of greenhouse gas emissions is that they’re invisible. You can’t see carbon dioxide piling up on the street; you can only see the disasters that happen in the wake of climate change. A project from Carbon Visuals and the Environmental Defense Fund imbues…
As far back in time as astronomers have been able to see, the universe has had some trace of heavy elements, such as carbon and oxygen. These elements, originally churned from the explosion of massive stars, formed the building blocks for planetary bodies, and eventually for life on Earth. Now researchers have peered far back…
U.S. astronomers say they’ve observed a young star with a rotating dust disk considered the youngest still-forming planetary system ever found. The infant star surrounded by a swirling disk of dust and gas is more than 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory reported. While just one-fifth the mass…
Palaeontologists have found what is likely to be the oldest known dinosaur, filling in a yawning evolutionary gap. A study in Biology Letters describes Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a new species from 10-15 million years before the previous earliest dinosaur specimens. It walked on two legs, measured 2-3m in length with a large tail and weighed between…
Astronomers have found a galaxy that represents a new type, and falls within the range of active galaxies known as Seyfert galaxies. It glows green because of X-rays spewing from a gigantic black hole at its center that weighs several million to billion times more than the sun. Dubbed a “green bean” galaxy, it appears…
On January 1, 2013, the world can go back to emitting greenhouse gases with abandon. The pollution-reduction commitments that nations made as part of the Kyoto Protocol will expire, leaving the planet without any international climate regulation and uncertain prospects for a future treaty. Nature explores the options for limiting — and living with —…
The Dalai Lama recommends a radical new approach: a religionless religion, if you will, stripped of myth, superstition, and narrow dogmatism, and focused on the practical work of transforming human behavior. He wants to incorporate the insights of the hard sciences as well as psychology, philosophy, and sociology into a broad-based new discipline to address…
Political leaders haven’t moved on global warming because they’re not feeling widespread public pressure to do so. And the public isn’t putting that pressure on their leaders in part because many people still don’t believe that climate change is a real, or all that dangerous. The vast, vast majority of climate scientists know that global…