The first truly Earth-like alien planet is likely to be spotted next year, an epic discovery that would cause humanity to reassess its place in the universe. While astronomers have found a number of exoplanets over the last few years that share one or two key traits with our own world — such as size…
With each day, the so-called fiscal cliff looms larger as Congress and President Obama work to come to agreement on a federal-deficit compromise, which so far has proven elusive. Absent such an agreement by year’s end, far-reaching spending cuts will be triggered as result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, through a mechanism called…
Just outside of Jerusalem, archaeologists have discovered a cache of vessels and figurines inside a 2,750-year-old temple that could provide a rare window into religious rituals of the period, the Israeli Antiquities Authority announced. The finds were uncovered at Tel Motza, an archaeological site being excavated ahead of the expansion of Highway 1, the main…
The primates have an altruistic ‘tally chart’ that keeps track of social rewards and gifts.
In the period just before they went extinct, the American lions and saber-toothed cats that roamed North America in the late Pleistocene were living well off the fat of the land. That is the conclusion of the latest study of the microscopic wear patterns on the teeth of these great cats recovered from the La…
You’ve heard the hype a hundred times: Physicists hope to someday build a whiz-bang quantum computer that can solve problems that would overwhelm an ordinary computer. Now, four separate teams have taken a step toward achieving such “quantum speed-up” by demonstrating a simpler, more limited form of quantum computing that, if it can be improved,…
A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience. “We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and…
Lack of rain has left many rivers at low levels unseen for decades, and while this creates problems for river commerce, it also offers an occasional treasure trove of history. For example, a rock containing what is believed to be an ancient map has emerged in the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri, with etchings that may be 1,200 years old.
To be sure, there were calls in the days after the mass murder in Newtown for a deep and meaningful silence. But what bothered me were the attempts to find space for a loving God in the context of this misery. I don’t mean the ridiculous and easily dismissed attempt to use this tragedy as…
This year has been a spectacular one for exoplanets. New discoveries and new insights have truly pushed the gateway to other worlds even further open. In the past 12 months we’ve gained increasingly good statistics on the incredible abundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity. We also finally seem to have evidence that…