Astronomers may have, for the first time, directly imaged a planet still in the process of formation, gathering material from a debris disk surrounding its parent star.
If you have an iPad, you can take a closer look at one of history’s greatest minds. The National Museum of Health & Medicine, Chicago released an app that displays slides of Albert Einstein’s brain. The app is for sale to researchers and curious iPad users alike, and all profits are going to the Chicago…
American denial of climate change hit bottom this month. Hurricane Sandy was the most powerful instance yet of mundane weather trumping abstract science to make people face the truth. “It’s Global Warming, Stupid!” screeched the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek, above a photo of a flooded street. Rising sea levels just moved from future threat to…
Researchers have identified what they say are the oldest musical instruments in the world. The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, were found in a cave in southern Germany. Carbon dating revealed the flutes to be between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. Scientists think the musical instruments may have been used for religious…
Microbes that convert electricity into methane gas could become an important source of renewable energy, according to scientists from Stanford and Pennsylvania State universities. Researchers at both campuses are raising colonies of microorganisms, called methanogens, which have the remarkable ability to turn electrical energy into pure methane—the key ingredient in natural gas. The scientists’ goal…
Previous attempts to reform our education system in America have only piled more money on the heap of a broken system. We need transformative changes, not additive ones.There are three big culprits in American education policy that are crippling the ability of our schools to respond to today’s challenges: 1. Our policy of “buying reform”…
A second term frees the President to end his climate change silence and perhaps spur on a global deal, but he still needs to win Republican support on Capitol Hill