Copenhagen Aims for Climate Neutrality By 2025
By investing in bike paths and energy-efficient buildings, the capital of Denmark aims to produce no more CO2 than it consumes by 2025
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Protein Knots Gain New Evolutionary Significance
A new study suggests that protein knots, a structure whose formation remains a mystery, may have specific functional advantages that depend on the nature of the protein’s architecture. Relatively little is known about protein folding, the process by which a polypeptide chain with a specific sequence of amino acid chains forms the three-dimensional structures —…
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Spy Telescopes Could Advance U.S. Dark Energy Mission
The two telescopes were designed to gaze down upon Earth from space to collect intelligence. Now, NASA hopes to repurpose the instruments to study dark energy, extrasolar planets, and a host of other questions in astronomy. The telescopes were originally supposed to be deployed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which manages the nation’s spy…
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Sustainability Hinges on Local Policies, not Global Goals
In the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil, much has been written about how to define sustainable development; the balance between environmental sustainability and human development; the kinds of goals and targets that might be adopted; and how these might then relate to goals that follow on from the Millennium Development…
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Lucid Dreaming: Rise of a Nocturnal Hobby
Lucid dreaming technically refers to any occasion when the sleeper is aware they are dreaming. But it is also used to describe the idea of being able to control those dreams. Once confined to a handful of niche groups, interest in lucid dreaming has grown in recent years, spurred on by a spate of innovations…
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Why Humans Prevailed Over Neanderthals
One hundred thousand years ago, several humanlike species walked the Earth. There were tribes of stocky Neanderthals eking out an existence in Europe and northwest Asia, and bands of cave-dwelling Denisovans in Asia. A diminutive, hobbitlike people called Homo floresiensis inhabited Indonesia. What were essentially modern humans roamed Africa. Then, about 60,000 years ago, a…
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South Korea Surrenders to Creationist Demands
Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science. A petition to remove references…
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Fossil Discovery Sheds New Light on Evolution of Higher Primates
A team of researchers has announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new fossil primate from Myanmar that illuminates a critical step in the evolution of early anthropoids — the group that includes humans, apes, and monkeys. The 37-million-year-old Afrasia closely resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age…
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How Infectious Disease May Have Shaped Human Origins
Roughly 100,000 years ago, human evolution reached a mysterious bottleneck: Our ancestors had been reduced to perhaps five to ten thousand individuals living in Africa. In time, “behaviorally modern” humans would emerge from this population, expanding dramatically in both number and range, and replacing all other co-existing evolutionary cousins, such as the Neanderthals. The cause…
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Supermassive Black Hole Ejected From Its Home Galaxy
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced that’s it has observed something unprcedented: a supermassive black hole being ejected from its own galaxy at speeds of millions of miles per hour. The evidence suggests that the ejection was caused, 4 billion years ago, when the black hole collided with the supermassive black hole of another galaxy, producing…