A long, long time ago, massive, super-bright galaxies known as starburst galaxies were churning out new stars at a frantic pace. Astronomers would like to study their frenetic star-formation physics and compare them to the relatively slow star factories of the modern era, but this is very hard to do. Starburst galaxies are shrouded from…
In 1992, Martin Chalfie made a spectacularly useful discovery, which I like to think of as perhaps the greatest use of cut-and-paste. Chalfie began with the fact that every gene has two parts: an encoding sequence that, using RNA as an intermediate, specifies a set of amino acids from which a cell can synthesize a…
Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter. —The Editors The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion…
A group of Tier 1 research universities — the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world – will join the White House-led effort to train 100,000 new math and science teachers by the year 2022. A $22.5 million gift from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), announced by the White House Monday morning, will make…
Earthquakes have the Midas touch, a new study claims. Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing gold, according to a model published in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The model provides a quantitative mechanism for the link between gold and quartz seen in many of the world’s gold deposits, said…
THE heavens do not lend themselves to poking and prodding. Astronomers therefore have no choice but to rely on whatever data the cosmos deigns to throw at them. And they have learnt a lot this way. Thus you can even (see article) study chemistry in space that would be impossible in a laboratory. Some astronomers,…
Perhaps you’ve always been curious: What is it like on top of the world? But as for going yourself, well, you’ll leave that to the adventurers. Fortunately for you, one of those adventurers is Dan Fredinburg. And he’s not just your regular run-of-the-mill adventurer, but a professional one at Google. In fact, Fredinburg’s official title…
Ready for some good news about the environment? Emissions of carbon dioxide in the United States are declining. But don’t celebrate just yet. A major side effect of that cleaner air in the U.S. has been the further darkening of skies over Europe and Asia. The United States essentially is exporting a share of its…
Deep beneath the ocean floor off the Pacific Northwest coast, scientists have described the existence of a potentially vast realm of life, one almost completely disconnected from the world above. Persisting in microscopic cracks in the basalt rocks of Earth’s oceanic crust is a complex microbial ecosystem fueled entirely by chemical reactions with rocks and…
The Higgs Boson really, really is the Higgs Boson. At first, testing at the Large Hadron Collider revealed a particle that was likely the Higgs Boson, the theorized particle that gives the universe its mass. Then, more tests confirmed we were even more sure about it–there was a one-in-550 million chance it wasn’t the Higgs….