Two studies shed additional light on a murky question: How did the cosmic fog that enveloped the universe in its early days dissipate?
Manmade increases in carbon dioxide might be having effects that are larger than expected
Researchers have encoded a form of rewritable memory into DNA. The arduous work involved in building the system is almost as notable as the achievement itself, says Drew Endy of Stanford University in California who led the work, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Synthetic biologists have long sought to…
The Defense Department recently announced new policies that ease restrictions on jobs women can do in the military, opening up more than 14,000 positions to women and allowing them closer than ever to the front lines. But embedded in that news was a long list of positions that are still closed to women, including infantry…
Speculation is an essential part of science, but how does it fit in? Two recent publications, both about the misty depths of canine and human history, suggest some answers. In one, an international team of scientists concludes that we really don’t know when and where dogs were domesticated. Greger Larson of the University of Durham,…
By using novel methods developed for tracing the origins of virus outbreaks, researchers say they have identified present-day Turkey as the homeland of the Indo-European language family. The international team used computational methods analyzing words from more than 100 ancient and contemporary languages, as well as geographical and historical data. By doing so, the scientists…
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet. The major EU-funded initiative will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory…