In an effort to better understand how life started on Earth, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are cooking up icy concoctions of organisms (carbon-bearing molecules) then zapping them with lasers. The JPL crew’s experiments also provide the first direct look at the organic chemistry that takes place in the chilly regions of our solar…
A newly discovered fragment of Coptic writing suggests some early Christians believed Jesus was married. In a paper presented at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Harvard Divinity School historian Karen L. King notes that the papyrus is the “only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does…
The Dark Energy Camera, a $40-million piece of equipment that represents a pinnacle of astronomical research, is now peering into the reddest reaches of the universe from its new home in Chile, and has seen “first light,” said Joshua Frieman, director of the survey. “That’s a major milestone,” Frieman told the Los Angeles Times in…
Mitt Romney’s remarks on NBC’s Meet the Press in early September rankled environmental activists hoping for a bipartisan approach to climate change. “I’m not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet,” the Republican presidential nominee told David Gregory. “I’m in this race to help the American people.”…
One of the world’s leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years. In what he calls a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of…
The MIT Museum has opened the new Kurtz Gallery for Photography with an inaugural exhibition featuring over seventy images by Berenice Abbott taken while working at MIT. Renowned for her early to mid-century photography in Paris and New York, Abbott also spent time at MIT during the late 1950’s when she was hired to create…
Researchers said a new computerized model of part of a rat’s cortex predicts connections between neurons, which could help explain how the brains of mammals — including humans — work. “This is a major breakthrough because it would otherwise take decades, if not centuries, to map the location of each synapse in the brain,” said…
The highest-resolution camera ever built has begun its quest to pin down the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly three-quarters of our Universe. The Dark Energy Survey’s 570-million-pixel camera will scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years. The goal is to discover the nature of dark energy, which is theorized to be…
A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television’s Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light….
Archaeologists have discovered eight extremely well-preserved spears that are an astonishing 300,000 years old, making them the oldest known weapons ever found. They probably belonged to members of the species homo heidelbergensis, although no human remains have yet been found at the site. Homo heidelbergensis lived throughout the Old World between 600,000 and 300,000 years…