An influential group of geologists, ecologists, and biologists argue that humans have so changed the planet that it is entering another phase of geological time, called the Anthropocene, “the Age of Man.”
The electric snail is here. There’s an electric cockroach too. Both are early experimental forays in a new line of research aimed at creating tiny, self-powered animal/machine hybrids as an alternative to tiny robots. Instead of starting from scratch and having to solve all those pesky movement problems that plague roboticists, some researchers have asked,…
When you think of a brain, you might imagine a flashing chain of neurons beaming messages to one another. But a new paper suggests that’s not the whole story, and they found this out by PUTTING HUMAN BRAIN CELLS IN MICE AND MAKING THEM SMARTER. The non-neural brain cells they used are known as “glia”–like…
When human ancestors began scavenging for meat regularly on the open plains of Africa about 2.5 million years ago, they apparently took more than their fair share of flesh. Within a million years, most of the large carnivores in the region—from saber-toothed cats to bear-size otters—had gone extinct, leaving just a few “hypercarnivores” alive, according…
Big science, big history, big story. This one-of-a-kind film was written by Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker.
Despite lengthy discussions of tribal social organization as well as “archaic” societies like ancient Egypt, Religion in Human Evolution, the magnum opus that the sociologist Robert N. Bellah has just published, is primarily concerned with what, following the philosopher Karl Jaspers, can be called religion’s “axial age.” Author Metanexus Editors
The atmosphere of Mars is less than 1% the density of Earth’s. It’s one of the reasons liquid water covers much of our planet but cannot exist on the Red Planet. As more research points toward the possibility of water on early Mars, scientists have increased their studies on the density of its atmosphere billions…