Two studies shed additional light on a murky question: How did the cosmic fog that enveloped the universe in its early days dissipate?
Bumblebees will buzz around flowers throughout the day in a seemingly random manner. But a recent study, published in PLOS Biology, has discovered that in fact bees are constantly working out the quickest route to collect the most amount of food. Despite having brains the “size of grass seeds”, bumblebees are able to calculate the…
Every historian knows about the Rosetta Stone, which had an ancient Egyptian text carved on it in three different scripts, two of which had long resisted translation. The ability to cross-correlate the scripts—to calibrate their alphabets—opened up a huge body of knowledge to scholars. Climate researchers, as well as archaeologists and geologists, look for similar…
Are hardbound textbooks going the way of slide rules and typewriters in schools? Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students’ hands within five years. The Obama administration’s push comes weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions…
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced that’s it has observed something unprcedented: a supermassive black hole being ejected from its own galaxy at speeds of millions of miles per hour. The evidence suggests that the ejection was caused, 4 billion years ago, when the black hole collided with the supermassive black hole of another galaxy, producing…
Many space scientists, engineers and politicians argue that virtually anything a human can do on another planet, a robot can do, only cheaper and without the risk of losing a life. But the battle between humans and robots for the starring role in the next chapter of space exploration is not yet settled. Robots have…
In the debate over gun control sparked by the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, most gun-rights advocates have been conspicuously silent. Not John Lott. Quite the opposite, he has been the loudest conservative voice publicly defending firearms. Mere hours after the massacre, he tweeted, “The most consistent feature of these attacks are that…