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.
The towering redwood forests along California’s coast are known for the clammy fog that rolls in from the ocean almost every night. Now scientists have discovered an unwelcome stowaway in these cloud banks: mercury. Previous research had shown that fog sampled in and around Santa Cruz, California, contained the heavy metal mercury but no one…
One place you don’t expect to see waves lapping against the shore is in the middle of a desert. But that’s exactly what’s happening deep inside the United Arab Emirates, where a recently formed lake is nestled into the sand dunes, and a new ecosystem is emerging. Dave Clark, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological…
The drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world. The price surge, the third major international food price spike in the last five years, casts more doubt on the assumption that widespread economic development leads to corresponding gains in agriculture. The green revolution has…
Welcome to Animation Domination, Stone Age style. By about 30,000 years ago, Europeans were using cartoon-like techniques to give observers the impression that lions and other wild beasts were charging across cave walls, two French investigators find. Ancient artists created graphic stories in caves and illusions of moving animals on rotating bone disks, say archaeologist…
The early Earth flipped back and forth between a hydrocarbon-free atmosphere and a hydrocarbon-rich one similar to that of Saturn’s moon, Titan. This ‘see-sawing’ atmosphere over 2.5 billion years ago was the result of intense microbial activity, say Newcastle University scientists, and would have had a profound effect on the climate of the Earth system….
Scientists can’t travel deep space the way Columbus sailed and charted the New World or Lewis and Clark mapped the west. But, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and two partnering institutions have found a possible way to map the spread and structure of the universe, guided by the light of quasars. The technique, combined…