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.
New research indicates that life might be able to survive on some of the odder exoplanets discovered so far – from scorching hot worlds with molten surfaces to freezing balls of ice. Habitable planets are usually defined as those where liquid water can exist. But not all exoplanets orbit, like Earth, at a fairly constant…
While innocently surveying the Cosmos, astronomers serendipitously stumbled across a particularly uncouth galaxy. NGC 660 unleashed an epic belch, an event that we could see 44 million light-years distant. This event emanated from the galaxy’s core, around the likely location of a supermassive black hole. Why did the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s core…
A drought that gripped western North America from 2000 to 2004 was the worst since the Middle Ages, but such extreme conditions may become normal during the next 100 years, finds a new study. During the drought that started at the turn of the century, forests withered, river basins were depleted, crop productivity dropped and…
Until about 8500 years ago, Europe was populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers who hunted, fished, and ate wild plants. Then, the farming way of life swept into the continent from its origins in the Near East, including modern-day Turkey. Within 3000 years most of the hunter-gatherers had disappeared. Little is known about these early Europeans. But…
Andy Murray’s unexpectedly strong start against Roger Federer in the Wimbledon 2012 final put the Daily Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in a science-fiction mood. ‘It seemed we’d been transported to one of those parallel universes into which Doctor Who likes to slip with insouciant ease,’ he commented. A year later, that alternative world became reality,…
A University of Delaware-led research team reports an advance in the journal Science that may help astrophysicists more accurately analyze the vast molecular clouds of gas and dust where stars are born. Krzysztof Szalewicz, professor of physics and astronomy, was the principal investigator on the National Science Foundation funded research project, which solved equations of…