Professor of psychology Michael Gazzaniga is spelling out a cautionary tale about the uses of neuroscience in society.
The carbon footprint of the science community is tiny by comparison with the rest of society. Yet changes will not happen if nobody takes the lead. And people who have benefited from a great education and earn by comparison a very good income should surely be well positioned to take on some ethical leadership. Perhaps…
The Amazon rainforest is in flux, thanks to agricultural expansion and climate change. In other words, humans have “become important agents of disturbance in the Amazon Basin,” as an international consortium of scientists wrote in a review of the state of the science on the world’s largest rainforest published in the journal Nature. The dry…
Physicists have proposed an experiment that could force us to make a choice between extremes to describe the behavior of the Universe. The proposal comes from an international team of researchers from Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Singapore, and is published in Nature Physics. It is based on what the researchers call a ‘hidden influence inequality.’…
Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change stated. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming. The link between…
With big brains comes big intelligence, or so the hypothesis goes. But there may be trade-offs as well. Humans and other creatures with large brains relative to their body size tend to have smaller guts and possibly fewer offspring. Scientists have debated for decades whether the two phenomena are related. Now a team of researchers…
Researchers from the University of Chicago and several international institutions found that several groups of genes in humans and dogs—including those related to diet and digestion, neurological processes, and disease—have been evolving in parallel for thousands of years. This parallel evolution was likely driven by the shared environments of humans and dogs, wrote the authors…