The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science.
A swathe of seagrass in the Mediterranean could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Carlos Duarte of the University of Western Australia in Perth sequenced the DNA of Posidonia oceanica at 40 sites spanning 3500 kilometres of seafloor, from Spain to Cyprus. One patch off the island of Formentera was identical over 15…
Britain’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which examines ethical issues raised by new developments in biology and medicine, recently launched a consultation on the ethics of new technologies and devices that intervene in the human brain. The three main areas of the group’s focus are brain-computer interfaces, neurostimulation and neural stem cell therapy. Author Metanexus Editors
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has produced one of its most extraordinary views of the Universe to date. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, the picture captures a mass of galaxies stretching back almost to the time when the first stars began to shine. But this was no simple point and snap – some of the…
Much has been made of our ancestors “coming down out of the trees,” and many researchers view terrestrial bipedalism as the hallmark of “humanness.” After all, most of our living primate relatives—the great apes, specifically—still spend their time in the trees. Humans are the only member of the family devoted to the ground, living terrestrial…
The Hubble Space Telescope is taking advantage of a naturally occurring lens in space to extend its range even more. Scientists report this week that Hubble has found several bright quasars — galaxies that are home to supermassive black holes — which are strategically positioned so that that are warping the light from even more…
Information security experts believe the blurring of the boundaries between computer and biological viruses is not too far-fetched—and could have very real consequences. The origins of each virus are strikingly different: A computer virus is designed, whereas a biological virus evolves under pressure from natural selection. But what would happen if these origins are switched?…