Genomics: The Single Life
Sequencing DNA from individual cells is changing the way that researchers think of humans as a whole.
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Trigger for Earth’s Last Big Freeze Identified
For more than 30 years, climate scientists have debated whether flood waters from melting of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet, which ushered in the last major cold episode on Earth about 12,900 years ago, flowed northwest into the Arctic first, or east via the Gulf of St.Lawrence, to weaken ocean thermohaline circulation and have a…
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Time to Bail-out Models on Sea Level Rise
As everyone along the northeastern US coast knows, sea level ain’t what it used to be. It’s getting higher and higher and made it a lot easier for storm surges to flood low-lying cities. This is not just something figured out in the last few days. Sea level has been getting higher at an accelerating…
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Cockatoo Shows Tool-Making Skills
A captive-bred Goffin’s cockatoo has surprised researchers by spontaneously making and using “tools” to reach food. The species is not known to use tools in the wild. Researchers in Austria recorded the cockatoo – named Figaro – repeatedly breaking off splinters from a wooden beam and using them to reach nuts on the other side…
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Super-Fast Space Travel Would Kill You in Minutes
Everyone thinks it would be cool to travel at the speed of light, which is why scientists devote their lives to working out if it would be possible and NASA is trying to develop its own warp drive. But easy, tiger: turns out super-fast space travel would be fatal. A paper published in Natural Science…
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Humans Think Like Quantum Particles
Quantum physicists have discovered that quantum mechanics enlarges our capacity to reason in unexpected ways. The notorious Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the rational choice is the wrong choice, can be eliminated by quantum entanglement. A more recent (and still unproved) claim is that a quantum system of voting could avoid the inconsistencies of ordinary voting….
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Should Science Majors Pay Less for College Than Art Majors?
Philosophy lovers, prepare to be outraged. Down in Florida, a task force commissioned by Governor Rick Scott is putting the finishing touches on a proposal that would allow the state’s public universities to start charging undergraduates different tuition rates depending on their major. Students would get discounts for studying topics thought to be in high…
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3-D Maps Pictured Sandy’s Devastation–Five Years Ago
Five years ago, a report called “Nation Under Siege” illustrated the vulnerability of 31 U.S. coastal cities to flooding. But not just to any kind of flooding—to the flooding of a permanent kind from sea level rise. What will happen to these cities, the report asked, as sea levels continue to increase from global warming?…
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Empathy Represses Analytic Thought, and Vice Versa
New research shows a simple reason why even the most intelligent, complex brains can be taken by a swindler’s story — one that upon a second look offers clues it was false. When the brain fires up the network of neurons that allows us to empathize, it suppresses the network used for analysis, a pivotal…
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New Theory on Formation of Solar System’s First Stuff
A new view of the solar system’s early days proposes that the first two kinds of solid materials — the precursors of space rocks and ultimately planets — both formed at the same time. When the sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago, it was surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust that…