Global Warming Felt By Space Junk, Satellites
Manmade increases in carbon dioxide might be having effects that are larger than expected
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Invisibility Cloaking in ‘Perfect’ Demonstration
Scientists have succeeded in “cloaking” an object perfectly for the first time, rendering a centimetre-scale cylinder invisible to microwaves. Many “invisibility cloak” efforts have been demonstrated, but all have reflected some of the incident light, making the illusion incomplete. A Nature Materials study has now shown how to pull off the trick flawlessly. However, the…
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Even Yeast Mothers Sacrifice All for Their Babies
A mother’s willingness to sacrifice her own health and safety for the sake of her children is a common narrative across cultures — and by no means unique to humans alone. Female polar bears starve, dolphin mothers stop sleeping and some spider moms give themselves as lunch for their crawly babies’ first meal. Now an…
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Intuition Alone Can Guide Right Choice
Decisions based on instinct can have surprisingly positive outcomes, according to new research. In a recent behavioral experiment, Marius Usher, of Tel Aviv University’s School of Psychological Sciences and his fellow researchers found that intuition was a powerful and accurate tool. When asked to choose between two options based on instinct alone, volunteers made the…
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Climate Catastrophe Nearer, Al Gore Gives Us About 90 More Years
Former vice president Al Gore posted on his webpage that scientific studies of clouds and atmospheric pressure suggests that, “more likely than not, our planet will experience cataclysmic warming by the end of the century.” That would take mankind to the year 2100 before all hell breaks loose. Gore, who taught the world about the…
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The Death of Natural Selection
Linton Weeks’s thought-provoking post on the right of plants to evolve reports on the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that helps communities develop laws that recognize ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. The CELDF’s work is not unprecedented; in 2008 Ecuador granted nature the constitutional right to the maintenance and regeneration of…
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Shaping the Future for Food Security
Climate change, population growth and competing demands for land and resources are putting great pressure on the world’s food systems. Smallholder farmers in the developing world, who produce much of the food for the poorest people, are threatened by devastating droughts and floods, food price spikes, and persistent poverty. Scientific advances have greatly alleviated hunger…
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Consciousness and the Internet
From Massimo Pigliucci’s Rationally Speaking blog: Here is an interesting statistic: if we multiply the (approximate) number of computers currently present on planet Earth by the (approximate) number of transistors contained in those computers we get 10^18, which is three orders of magnitude larger than the number of synapses in a typical human brain. Which…
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NASA Testing Interplanetary Internet System
The Internet has become an integral part of people’s lives around the globe, but could the Web exist in space? Researchers at NASA, not content to remain fixed to an Earth-bound system, are pushing the boundaries of network communications by testing what could one day amount to an interplanetary Internet. Working in tandem with the…
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Seaweed-Threatened Corals Send Chemical SOS to Fish
When a killer seaweed touches a kind of spiky coral, the coral pushes a chemical panic button that brings small resident fish to the rescue. Unchecked, seaweed algae can overrun a coral reef, as the community dwindles in “a descent into slime,” says marine ecologist Mark Hay of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta….