The same conditions that make the Atacama, Earth’s driest desert, so inhospitable make it beguiling for astronomy. In northern Chile, it is far from big cities, with little light pollution. Its arid climate prevents radio signals from being absorbed by water droplets. The altitude, as high as the Himalaya base camps for climbers preparing to…
Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery, according to the leading NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen. Hansen, will be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, and in his acceptance speech will call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions….
The discovery of a major gear in the biological clock that tells the body when to sleep and metabolize food may lead to new drugs to treat sleep problems and metabolic disorders, including diabetes. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies showed that two cellular switches found on the nucleus of mouse cells, known…
Fifty-five million years ago, the world abruptly warmed by a scorching 5 degrees Celsius, the oceans turned acidic, and life ran a gantlet of extinction. Sound familiar? That was the closest nature ever came to foreshadowing the fossil-fuel-fed warming that is just getting underway now. But for 15 years, climate scientists have puzzled over how…
New work suggests constructing novel particle opens the door to taming the mysteries of quantum tunnelling.
A hoax or a miracle? The Shroud of Turin has inspired this question for centuries. Now, an art historian says this piece of cloth, said to bear the imprint of the crucified body of Jesus Christ, may be something in between. According to Thomas de Wesselow, formerly of Cambridge University, the controversial shroud is no…
Particles in polluted air seed clouds and influence the temperatures of oceans, which could stir up severe weather phenomena.
Scientists have built a quantum computer in a diamond, the first of its kind to include protection against “decoherence” — noise that prevents the computer from functioning properly. The demonstration shows the viability of solid-state quantum computers, which – unlike earlier gas- and liquid-state systems – may represent the future of quantum computing because they…
Though scientists have suspected for a while that a giant black hole lurks at the center of our galaxy, they still can’t say for sure it’s the explanation for the strange behavior observed there. Now researchers are closer than ever to being able to image this region and probe the physics at work – potentially…
Extraterrestrial life in the solar system may be hiding beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, safe from blasts of radiation, U.S. researchers say. The frozen moon is subject to constant and significant blasts of radiation from Jupiter’s magnetic field that could annihilate life at shallow depths, so scientists are conducting an experiment to…