The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science.
Egypt’s Antiquities Minister says Italian archaeologists have unearthed tombs over 3000 years old in the ancient city of Luxor. Mohammed Ibrahim says the discovery was made beneath the mortuary temple of King Amenhotep II, seventh Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty who reigned from 1427 to 1401 B.C. The temple is located on the western bank…
ANALOGIES change. Once, it was fashionable to describe the brain as being like the hydraulic systems employed to create pleasing fountains for 17th-century aristocrats’ gardens. As technology moved on, first the telegraph network and then the telephone exchange became the metaphor of choice. Now it is the turn of the computer. But though the brain-as-computer…
Social media was a major force behind last year’s Arab Spring, after communities organized and overthrew tyrannical dictators, as well as last month’s riots across the Muslim world, after the trailer for The Innocence of Muslims circulated on the Internet. Like most technologies, social media can promote the good or accentuate the bad. But does…
Fifty-five million years ago, the world abruptly warmed by a scorching 5 degrees Celsius, the oceans turned acidic, and life ran a gantlet of extinction. Sound familiar? That was the closest nature ever came to foreshadowing the fossil-fuel-fed warming that is just getting underway now. But for 15 years, climate scientists have puzzled over how…
Because nature does not present the world in the form we would like, we must reorder it. To create this new order, we need information about what that order is supposed to look like, knowledge about how to build it and energy to get it into shape. Many technological revolutions of the past have focused…
British and American scientists have discovered a previously unknown sub-glacial basin nearly the size of New Jersey beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) – and say it puts this area of the ice sheet at risk of collapse. The team discovered the basin Using ice-penetrating radar instruments flown on aircraft, and say its location,…