Over the next few months, chlorine will ensure that countless swimming pools don’t turn into microbe-choked petri dishes. That’s only one of many uses we’ve found for the element. We sprinkle it on our food as table salt — a k a sodium chloride. We pump water through pipes made of polyvinyl chloride. Perchlorate, a…
It is in our nature to fit nature to us. We are best at it, but other species do it. This obvious but overlooked factor contradicts the dominant one-way-street gene-centric view of adaptation. A better framework for evolution is needed. Its shape isn’t clear, but it must incorporate: extracorporeal gene effects, “gene-culture coevolution,” “niche construction,”…
An enormous ribbon of gas that threads through the thinner gas of the Milky Way’s halo is the result of a gravitational tug-of-war between the two Magellanic clouds1, 2, the brightest satellite galaxies orbiting our own. The Magellanic Stream, as the ribbon is known, stretches for hundreds of thousands of light years, with a small…
Human-level AI (HLAI) appears to be the topic of the week. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones thinks AIs will be as smart as humans by 2040. Karl Smith at Forbes and “M.S.” at The Economist seem to roughly concur with Drum on this timeline. Moshe Vardi, the editor-in-chief of the world’s most-read computer science magazine,…
The average mammalian species lifespan is a million years. But Homo sapiens only evolved about 100 thousand years ago. So we’ve got a long road ahead of us. The chart below explores where we’ve been, and where we might be headed. Though some futurists say the future is accelerating, there is plenty of evidence that…
In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two friends, Vladimir and Estragon, endlessly wait by a tree in the moonlight for the arrival of someone they both claim to know but neither would recognize – someone named Godot. While they wait, they talk about the Gospels, suicide, the past and the future. They exchange shoes and…
Researchers from the University of Chicago and several international institutions found that several groups of genes in humans and dogs—including those related to diet and digestion, neurological processes, and disease—have been evolving in parallel for thousands of years. This parallel evolution was likely driven by the shared environments of humans and dogs, wrote the authors…
According to data being gathered at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has been monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958, the CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere officially exceeded the 400 parts per million mark last week, a value not attained on Earth since humans were first human. This ominous milestone comes at a…
A few recent events, including the launch of Nautilus and this interesting thread on Brian Leiter’s blog, have brought the John Templeton Foundation back into the spotlight. As probably everybody knows, the JTF is a philanthropic organization that supports research into the “Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality,” encourages “dialogue among scientists, philosophers,…
Humans have created some pretty ingenious myths to explain the world around us: the sun and the moon chase each other across the sky because of an ancient disagreement or lustful encounter; a strangely shaped Hawaiian mountain called Nounou is a sleeping giant; the ostrich’s long neck is the result of straining to keep an…