If there was a tougher moment over the last 40 years to be a leader in the American environmental movement, it would be hard to put your finger on it.
In a lab at Harvard Medical School, a man is using his mind to wag a rat’s tail. To send his command, he merely glances at a strobe light flickering on a computer screen, and a set of electrodes stuck to his scalp detects the activity triggered in his brain. A computer processes and relays…
A new exhibition in London is putting the brain under a microscope — literally. “Brains: The Mind as Matter” asks not what brains have done for us but what, in the name of science, we have done to brains. The brain has fascinated and baffled scientists for centuries. The exhibition, which opens Thursday at the…
UN climate talks in Doha are lurching to a close with key issues unresolved. There are outstanding disputes on finance, compensation for climate change damages and allocations of carbon permits – so-called hot air. Developing countries are furious at what they say is a lack of ambition among richer countries to tackle climate change. And…
Climate change has shrunk Andean glaciers between 30 and 50% since the 1970s and could melt many of them away altogether in coming years, according to a study published in the journal Cryosphere. Andean glaciers, a vital source of fresh water for tens of millions of South Americans, are retreating at their fastest rates in…
Researchers from China’s Fudan University have found major prehistoric human population expansions may have begun before the Neolithic period, which probably led to the introduction of agriculture. Major prehistoric human population expansions in three continents may have begun before the Neolithic period — around 15-11,000 years ago in Africa, from around 13,000 years ago in…
“Titan provides an extraordinary environment to better understand some of the chemical processes that led to the appearance of life on Earth,” said Josep M. Trigo-Rodriguez, of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. “Titan’s atmosphere is a natural laboratory that, in many aspects, seems to have a strong similitude with our current picture…