Scientists have succeeded in “cloaking” an object perfectly for the first time, rendering a centimetre-scale cylinder invisible to microwaves. Many “invisibility cloak” efforts have been demonstrated, but all have reflected some of the incident light, making the illusion incomplete. A Nature Materials study has now shown how to pull off the trick flawlessly. However, the…
A mother’s willingness to sacrifice her own health and safety for the sake of her children is a common narrative across cultures — and by no means unique to humans alone. Female polar bears starve, dolphin mothers stop sleeping and some spider moms give themselves as lunch for their crawly babies’ first meal. Now an…
Decisions based on instinct can have surprisingly positive outcomes, according to new research. In a recent behavioral experiment, Marius Usher, of Tel Aviv University’s School of Psychological Sciences and his fellow researchers found that intuition was a powerful and accurate tool. When asked to choose between two options based on instinct alone, volunteers made the…
Former vice president Al Gore posted on his webpage that scientific studies of clouds and atmospheric pressure suggests that, “more likely than not, our planet will experience cataclysmic warming by the end of the century.” That would take mankind to the year 2100 before all hell breaks loose. Gore, who taught the world about the…
Linton Weeks’s thought-provoking post on the right of plants to evolve reports on the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that helps communities develop laws that recognize ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. The CELDF’s work is not unprecedented; in 2008 Ecuador granted nature the constitutional right to the maintenance and regeneration of…
Climate change, population growth and competing demands for land and resources are putting great pressure on the world’s food systems. Smallholder farmers in the developing world, who produce much of the food for the poorest people, are threatened by devastating droughts and floods, food price spikes, and persistent poverty. Scientific advances have greatly alleviated hunger…
From Massimo Pigliucci’s Rationally Speaking blog: Here is an interesting statistic: if we multiply the (approximate) number of computers currently present on planet Earth by the (approximate) number of transistors contained in those computers we get 10^18, which is three orders of magnitude larger than the number of synapses in a typical human brain. Which…
The Internet has become an integral part of people’s lives around the globe, but could the Web exist in space? Researchers at NASA, not content to remain fixed to an Earth-bound system, are pushing the boundaries of network communications by testing what could one day amount to an interplanetary Internet. Working in tandem with the…
When a killer seaweed touches a kind of spiky coral, the coral pushes a chemical panic button that brings small resident fish to the rescue. Unchecked, seaweed algae can overrun a coral reef, as the community dwindles in “a descent into slime,” says marine ecologist Mark Hay of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta….
Archaeologists argue that drought caused by climate variation played a major role in the decline and fall of Mayan civilization.