Sequencing DNA from individual cells is changing the way that researchers think of humans as a whole.
At first glance, CS 22892-052 looks like a run-of-the-mill old star. Born about 13 billion years ago, only 700 million years after the big bang, it is lacking in many of the shinier, more interesting elements. But look closer, and you’ll see that this stellar granny is adorned with gold. Now Terese Hansen of the…
Babies learn to speak months after they begin to understand language. As they are learning to talk, they babble, repeating the same syllable (“da-da-da”) or combining syllables into a string (“da-do-da-do”). But when babies babble, what are they actually doing? And why does it take them so long to begin speaking? Insights into these mysteries…
Overwhelmingly, people who’ve had so-called near-death symptoms report a calmness, lack of fear, and feeling of being one with the universe. A relatively simple explanation of the near-death experience requires little scientific reasoning and absolutely no measurable evidence. If someone is on death’s door and then suddenly pulled back into the realm of the living,…
The hiding spots for the particles making up dark matter are narrowing, and the answer to this cosmic mystery could come within the next three or four years, scientists say. Dark matter is an elusive substance that is invisible and almost never detected, except by its gravitational pull. Yet astronomers say it likely makes up…
When I was growing up in New York City, a high point of my calendar was the annual arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — ‘the greatest show on earth’. My parents endured the green-haired clowns, sequinned acrobats and festooned elephants as a kind of garish pageantry. For me, though, it…
A new analysis of complex interactions between humans and the environment preceding the 9th century collapse and abandonment of the Central Maya Lowlands in the Yucatán Peninsula points to a series of events — some natural, like climate change; some human-made, including large-scale landscape alterations and shifts in trade routes — that have lessons for…