The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science.
The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists. Not only did many of them contribute to mathematics, physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid theorists in the sciences of human nature. They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms of…
How many scientists does it take to author a study on the Higgs boson particle? Around 6,000. Two articles by the teams at CERN, about 30 pages each, include 19 pages of single-spaced text with roughly 6,000 names of researchers who peer-reviewed the results of the experiments, making the discovery of the elusive God particle…
A new study of giant viruses supports the idea that viruses are ancient living organisms and not inanimate molecular remnants run amok, as some scientists have argued. The study reshapes the universal family tree, adding a fourth major branch to the three that most scientists agree represent the fundamental domains of life. The new findings…
Researchers in China compared brain scans of young people with “internet addiction disorder” with their peers and found damage to the white matter fibres connecting emotional processing, attention and decision making parts. Similar impairments have been found in research into other addictions including alcohol and cocaine. This news comes after researchers at the University of…
Polar and brown bears diverged between 4 million and 5 million years ago, but they continued to interbreed when the climate warmed. Now, there is evidence that it is happening again.
Men are more likely than women to commit scientific fraud, a new analysis of misconduct convictions reveals. And the urge to cheat spans the entire range of academic careers, from students to seasoned professors. For the new study, published in the journal mBio, scientists examined 228 cases of misconduct in the records of the United…