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.
A new University of Florida study that determined the age of skeletal remains provides evidence humans reached the Western Hemisphere during the last ice age and lived alongside giant extinct mammals. The study published online in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology addresses the century-long debate among scientists about whether human and mammal remains found at…
The unbalanced orbit of a so-called “zombie planet” in a dusty star system has astronomers struggling to explain the exoplanet’s behavior. New observations of the planet Fomalhaut b by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the oddball orbit, which has wild extremes between its closest and farthest points from the parent star and appears to cross…
Science writer Connie Barlow provides insightful resources for ritually celebrating Big History.
Fossil foot hints that tree-dwellers lived alongside species built for walking.
Parag Khanna and David Skilling: Global governance doesn’t suffer for lack of competitive groups and agendas, but there is an urgent need for groups focused on generating breakthrough ideas. The G20 is needed, but it is not enough. It is in this spirit that the “g-20” should convene to provide a platform for small states…
Archaeologists have uncovered two 9,500-year-old cultic figurines in excavations just outside of Jerusalem, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) reported. Found at the Tel Moza archaeological site, one of the Neolithic figures is a limestone ram with precisely carved spiral horns. “The sculpting is extraordinary and precisely depicts details of the anima’s image,” the IAA excavators…