The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science.
Until this week climate change was sadly absent from the presidential election discourse, even though scientific reports have linked the increasingly extreme events experienced recently in the US and elsewhere – the drought and heatwaves, deluges and blizzards that some call “weather weirding” – to systemic change rather than coincidental natural fluctuations. Sandy has forced…
Scientists have discovered that a space inside a special type of carbon molecule can be used to imprison other smaller molecules such as hydrogen or water. The nano-metre sized cavity of the hollow spherical C60 Buckminsterfullerene — or bucky ball — effectively creates a ‘nanolaboratory’, allowing detailed study of the quantum mechanical principles that determine…
The Defense Department recently announced new policies that ease restrictions on jobs women can do in the military, opening up more than 14,000 positions to women and allowing them closer than ever to the front lines. But embedded in that news was a long list of positions that are still closed to women, including infantry…
The mysterious fall of the largest of the world’s earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the…
A duo of planets some 1,200 light years from earth have been spotted passing within 1.2 million miles of each other, closer than any other known pair of planets, a new study has found.
When well-meaning campaigners want us to pay attention to global warming, they often end up pitching beyond the facts. And, while this may seem justified by a noble goal, such “policy by panic” tactics rarely work, and often backfire. Remember how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore (and many others) claimed…