Taking a picture of a black hole, an object so gravitationally bound that not even photons of light can escape, sounds like an oxymoron, but astronomers are attempting to do just that. What they’re hoping to glimpse is something called the “event horizon” — the swirl of matter and energy that are visible around the…
One reason No Child Left Behind is all but a failed initiative, is that one of its main metrics, Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), is a horrendous measure of educational progress. With AYP, each state sets its own goals and assesses progress with its own metric. If one state meets AYP and another one does not,…
The evidence is clear, as in a February 2009 Gallup Poll, taken on the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday, that reported only 39 percent of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36 percent don’t have…
Might the miserly use of neural resources be one of the essential keys to understanding how brains make sense of the world? Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains…
Whether we are exploring our family genealogy or the genetic tree of our primate ancestors, all of us have a common yearning to know from whence we came. Origin stories captivate our imagination and offer a narrative structure for better understanding where we are today. The reality is that a knowledge of the history of…
Flu pandemics have been linked to fluctuations in climate, and new research connects the world’s four most recent pandemics to the cyclical cooling of the Pacific Ocean near the equator. The connection? Changes in ocean temperature affect migrating birds, which are major contributors to the spread and mixing of flu viruses. An earlier study had…
A national organization best known for its defense of teaching evolution has added climate change to its agenda in a move that highlights a brewing controversy inside the classroom. Across the country, teachers and schools boards are being pressured to teach that the science of climate change is controversial when, in fact, it is not,…
A hail of Martian meteorites crashed to Earth last July, and collectors and scientists around the world are snapping up the ultra-rare rocks for display and study. The meteorites fell in the Moroccan desert in July and were recovered a few months later. Scientists confirmed that the rocks are Martian, presumably blasted off the Red…
An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days. Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life’s progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn’t duplicate prehistoric transitions,…
CodeHeart, a mobile application to speed diagnosis of heart attacks, has been under development in the Washington DC area for two years, but it’s still struggling to enlist emergency medical crews’ participation for a pilot project. The slow going reflects the complicated nature of mobile solutions for the health-care-provider market, which has generally taken a…