A mock debate on time with British physicist and science writer Julian Barbour and NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, reposted from FQXi’s Setting Time Aright conference in Copenhagen.
Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe are closing in on the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to have been key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life, scientists said. Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are using their large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s…
From the 2009 Terry Lectures at Yale University by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack. Author Metanexus Editors
Ray Kurzweil’s dream of internal nanobots floating around our bloodstream making us immortal by eradicating diseases and slowing down the aging process may actually be a reality sooner than any of us ever thought. Nick Bilton of the New York Times recently reported on two different companies – Proteus Digital Health and HQ – that…
When ancestral humans walked out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies came along with them. Now the fruit flies, widely used for genetics research, are returning to Africa and establishing new populations alongside flies that never left — offering new insights into the forces that shape genetic variation. That’s…
Light from the very first stars in the universe has been measured – and there is less of it than previously thought. The discovery should help us better understand how the hot haze of hydrogen that existed shortly after the big bang transformed into the complex web of stars and galaxies we see today. Although…
Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest laws continue to shape human evolution in the modern age, research has shown.