Two studies shed additional light on a murky question: How did the cosmic fog that enveloped the universe in its early days dissipate?
Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought. Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to…
Lack of sleep has been blamed for everything from poor driving to memory problems. Now, researchers think they’ve started to pinpoint why: week-long sleep studies of people resting for 10 hours a night vs. six hours showed significant changes in gene activity. When sleep was restricted to under six hours a night, researchers noted that…
Neanderthals in Western Europe started disappearing long before Homo sapiens showed up, suggesting that cold weather, and not cold-hearted humans, might have been responsible for the species’ ultimate demise. The findings, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, suggest that at least one population of Neanderthals was vulnerable to climate change. The researchers found…
While we have a supremely accurate theory of what happened after our universe started in its super-hot, super-dense childhood, we are still in the dark about its birth. But after more than a half century of work scientists are, perhaps, finally ready to go before and beyond the big bang. Author Metanexus Editors
The so-called shale revolution is re-drawing the energy landscape in the United States and beyond. While the Obama administration is still trying to craft a strategy to manage this energy windfall, more than twenty liquefied natural gas (LNG) export applications are awaiting approval to ship U.S. gas abroad. If all were to be given the…
Traditional methods of fMRI analysis systematically skew which regions of the brain appear to be activating, potentially invalidating hundreds of papers that use the technique, according to Stanford School of Medicine researchers. Pictures of brain regions “activating” are by now a familiar accompaniment to any neurological news story (including some in KurzweilAI — see Editor’s…