Welcome to Animation Domination, Stone Age style. By about 30,000 years ago, Europeans were using cartoon-like techniques to give observers the impression that lions and other wild beasts were charging across cave walls, two French investigators find. Ancient artists created graphic stories in caves and illusions of moving animals on rotating bone disks, say archaeologist…
There’s ample evidence that a more entrepreneurial approach to postsecondary education is overdue. While some pioneering ventures are under way, numerous barriers continue to slow innovation and thwart experimentation, both in traditional institutions and in startup ventures that aspire to disrupt the existing marketplace. Against this backdrop, the Kauffman Foundation convened a diverse group of…
They can “smell” chemicals and respond to light, but can plants hear sounds? It seems chilli seeds can sense neighboring plants even if those neighbors are sealed in a box, suggesting plants have an as yet unrecognized sense. Plants are known to have many of the senses we do: they can sense changes in light…
There is an understandable tendency to put problems of the ‘global commons’— climate change or biodiversity loss, for instance — in the hands of intergovernmental institutions. However, thus far these bodies have failed miserably. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), born at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20 years…
With simple arguments, researchers show that nature is complicated! Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have made a simple experiment that demonstrates that nature violates common sense — the world is different than most people believe. The experiment illustrates that light does not behave according to the principles of classical physics, but that light has…
The latest draft text that 180 governments are expected to sign up to at the end of the Rio+20 Earth summit has been leaked to the Guardian. According to the UN, only about 20% of the wording has been agreed, so with just three days formal negotiating time before world leaders arrive in Brazil, and…
NASA scientists say they’ve made a discovery in the Arctic Ocean ‘as dramatic and unexpected as finding a rainforest in the middle of a desert’. When its Icescape expedition punched through three-foot thick sea ice, the team found waters richer in the microscopic marine plants known as phytoplankton than any other ocean region on Earth….
The Spitzer Space Telescope has looked back in time to see what scientists called the “faint, lumpy glow” given off by the very first objects in the Universe, and these ancient objects obviously provided some early cosmic fireworks. While they are too faint and distant to figure out what the individual objects are – they…
It’s long been known that children in poorer neighborhoods are more likely to be exposed to lead, industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust and other contaminants. Now, scientists are beginning to suspect that low-income children aren’t just more exposed – they actually may be more biologically susceptible to them, even at low levels. A growing body of…
Scientists who reprogrammed skin cells into brain cells say their research could lay the groundwork for new ways to treat Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. The team at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco transferred a gene called Sox2 into both mouse and human skin cells. Within days, the skin cells transformed into early-stage brain…