Adam Frank: Looking back 100, 1000 or 10,000 years, it became clear to me that time in cosmology (be it of the scientific or mytho-religious variety) has always been tightly braided with the human experience of time.
The living slime that may have been the muse for the 1958 science-fiction film The Blob just got creepier: Evidence has emerged that slime mold, a brainless single-celled organism, has a form of memory. In experiments with the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, scientists at the University of Sydney noticed that the life-form avoided retracing its…
Scientists believe they may have found the ‘strongest evidence yet’ that Mars may have supported life, but it’s unlikely in the form most people would recognize. New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests a team of scientists could have discovered the ingredients of life in a huge crater up to 5km below the…
Our paper discusses three very old “cosmologies” in Western thought, how these play out in economic theory, and how evolutionary biology can help evaluate their validity and policy relevance. These cosmologies are: (1) “natural man” as a rational, self-sufficient, egotistical individual, (2) competition among individuals can lead to a well-functioning society, and (3) there exists…
Asteroids hold a great deal of scientific potential, but with our limitations on space travel, it’s exceedingly difficult to reach them and complete the necessary research. What’s a rocket scientist to do? There’s one surprisingly sensible solution: if NASA can’t get to the mountain, bring the mountain to NASA. Or more specifically, drag it into…
Street lighting is changing bug communities and that is affecting everything from the songs birds sing to the makeup of people. A new study found that scavenger and predator insects both collect near the lights. It also shows for the first time that their composition is affected by the lighting. The study is published in…
Global warming may cause more extinctions than predicted if scientists fail to account for interactions among species in their models, Yale and UConn researchers argue in Science. Phoebe Zarnetske, the study’s primary author, said the complexity of “species interaction networks” discourages their inclusion in models predicting the effects of climate change. Using the single-species, or…