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.
For the first time, scientists have caught a glimpse of a comet’s final minutes before it was vaporized by the sun. The comet was flying at about 1.4 million miles an hour.
A meteorite that fell in Morocco last year might contain the freshest evidence for water on Mars, according to a study published in Science. The meteorite, named Tissint after the town nearest its landing site, was identified as a Mars rock in January. Now, Hasnaa Chennaoui Aoudjehane and her colleagues report that Tissint contains evidence…
Georgia Tech researchers say they’ve resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The resurrected bacterium has been growing for more than 1,000 generations, providing scientists a chance to observe evolution in action, the university announced. “This is as close as we can get to rewinding and…
We are complex animals with complex, multifaceted thought processes. The Darwinian approach to religion is only beginning to scratch the surface here, and adaptive religions like adaptive individuals are complex.
The awe-inspiring Grand Canyon was probably carved about 70 million years ago, much earlier than thought, a provocative new study suggests — so early that dinosaurs might have roamed near this natural wonder. Using a new dating tool, a team of scientists came up with a different age for the gorge’s western section, challenging conventional…
A dark lump of rock found in the Moroccan desert in 2011 is a new type of Martian meteorite, say scientists. Weighing 320g, the stone has been given the name Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034. Its texture and chemistry set it apart from all previous objects picked up off the surface of Earth but known to…