Is a Global Climate Treaty Still Worth Fighting For?
Governments, businesses and civil society have much to gain from a spirit of determination within the international community
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Nature of Conscious Thought May Be Rhythmic
One of the biggest puzzles in neuroscience is how our brains encode thoughts, such as perceptions and memories, at the cellular level. Some evidence suggests that ensembles of neurons represent each unique piece of information, but no one knows just what these ensembles look like, or how they form. A new study from researchers at…
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The Evolutionary Mystery of Homosexuality
Critics claim that evolutionary biology is, at best, guesswork. The reality is otherwise. Evolutionists have nailed down how an enormous number of previously unexplained phenomena—in anatomy, physiology, embryology, behavior—have evolved. There are still mysteries, however, and one of the most prominent is the origins of homosexuality. The mystery is simple enough. Its solution, however, has…
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The Worldwide Vulnerability of Forests
One of the great scientific tasks of the day is to understand how and why trees die. It may seem like a question that would have been answered many decades ago, but it was not — at least not at a detailed physiological level. Now, amid growing signs worldwide that forests are at risk as…
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Scientists Discover New Smell: Olfactory White
Scientists have discovered a new smell, but you may have to go to a laboratory to experience it yourself. The smell is dubbed “olfactory white,” because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise, researchers reported recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just as white noise is a mixture of…
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Birds Descended From Gliding Dinosaurs
Evidence is mounting that modern birds descended from gliding, feathered non-avian dinosaurs. Two dinosaurs could be candidates for the bottom of the bird family tree, and each helps to reveal how feathers first evolved. “The oldest known feathered dinosaurs would be Anchiornis (155 million years ago) and Epidexipteryx (between 152 million and 168 million years…
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Super-Earths Get Magnetic ‘Shield’ From Liquid Metal
Within supersized alien versions of Earth, a common transparent ceramic may become a flowing liquid metal, perhaps granting those distant worlds magnetic fields to shield life from harmful radiation, researchers say. Among the hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that astronomers have discovered in recent years are so-called “super-Earths,” which are rocky planets like Earth…
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Scientists Get a New Look at Einstein’s Brain
What made Einstein a genius? Maybe his weirdly curvy brain had something to do with it. Scientists have recently analyzed photos from the 1950s to try to figure out what made the genius tick.
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Dogs Learn Language Differently Than Humans
While many dog-owners may marvel at their pet’s human-like ability to understand new words; research by scientists at the University of Lincoln, UK, suggests that dogs learn words in a fundamentally different way to us. Dogs have long been thought to learn new words in a similar way to humans; using an object’s shape such…
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The Thanksgiving Myth: Not a Bad Start
The first feast related to our current national holiday, which we call Thanksgiving, was celebrated in either October or November of 1621. The feast included around 50 English Separatists (of Mayflower fame) held at their Plymouth Plantation, and nearly 100 Wampanoag Indians. In addition to Wampanoag oral history, there are just a few original sources…