What Should We Be Worried About?
We worry because we are built to anticipate the future. Nothing can stop us from worrying, but science can teach us how to worry better, and when to stop worrying.
-
-
An Alarm in the Offing on Climate Change
The natural conservatism of science has often led climatologists to be cautious in their pronouncements about global warming. Indeed, more than once they have drawn criticism for burying their fundamental message – that society is running some huge risks — in caveats and cavils. To judge from the draft of a new report issued by…
-
Greens to President Obama: Act Now on Climate
Green groups are amping up the pressure on President Barack Obama to make good on his promises to address climate change — even if Congress fails to act. By refocusing their efforts on the White House, environmentalists are bypassing the all-but-paralyzed legislative branch, appealing to Obama’s desire for a legacy and operating in an arena…
-
The Biggest Thing in the Universe Is Really, Really Big
A newly discovered galactic structure is so large that it means one of our basic assumptions about the nature of the universe could be wrong.
-
The Oldest Rock in the World Tells Us a Story
It’s hard to imagine how this teeny little rock — it’s not even a whole rock, it’s just a grain, a miniscule droplet of mineral barely the thickness of a human hair — could rewrite the history of our planet. But that’s what seems to be happening. This piece of Zircon, an extremely durable mineral…
-
Pollution Highlights the Price China Is Paying for Rapid Development
Beijing has developed into an impressive modern city over the past two decades. But a tourist visiting the Chinese capital over the past four days would have difficulty seeing many of its ancient and modern landmarks because of the horrendous pollution hanging over the city. An editorial in The China Daily warned the country had…
-
Claims of Fairness in Apes Have Critics Crying Foul
Chimpanzees often share and share alike when cooperating in pairs, suggesting that these apes come close to a human sense of fairness, a controversial new study finds. Like people, chimps tend to fork over half of a valuable windfall to a comrade in situations where the recipient can choose to accept the deal or turn…
-
On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human
Click-click-click: This is what you hear when having a conversation with Stephen Hawking. No voice, no other sounds, no facial expressions. For those who know him, Hawking may be able to communicate through his eyes; but for the rest of us, his sole means of communicating is through infrared connection to his computer. January 8…
-
Mystery Cloud at Milky Way’s Center May Hold Clues to Star Birth
Near the crowded center of a mysteriously dense galactic cloud, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun — a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second — one…
-
Anatomy ‘Wrong’ in Early Animals
Textbooks might have to be re-written when it comes to some of the earliest creatures, a study suggests. Researchers have found that our understanding of the anatomy of the first four-legged animals is wrong. New 3D models of fossil remains show that previous renderings of the position of the beasts’ backbones were actually back-to-front. The…