George Dyson talks with Martin Eiermann about the definition of life, human progress, and the importance of cognitive autarchy.
Green technology is proving lucrative in India, clean energy investments here were worth $10.3 billion, a growth of 52% on 2011, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This means that India had the highest rate of growth in green technologies of any other major world economy, with wind and solar areas being where most money…
Newfound pieces of human skull from “the Cave of the Monkeys” in Laos are the earliest skeletal evidence yet that humans once had an ancient, rapid migration to Asia. Anatomically modern humans first arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa. When and how our lineage then dispersed out of Africa has long proven controversial. Archaeological…
Atmospheric volumes of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change hit a new record in 2011, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported. The volume of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, grew at a similar rate to the previous decade and reached 390.9 parts per million (ppm), 40% above the pre-industrial level,…
Most primates make rudimentary calls that consist of one or two syllables. But the gelada—native only to the grasslands of the Ethiopian plateau—displays “rapid fluctuations in pitch and volume” akin to human speech. The similarity has researchers’ tongues wagging. “Our finding provides support for the lip-smacking origins of [human] speech, because it shows that this…
Potentially huge news published today in the journal Cell is the result of two years of collaboration between teams lead by Jay Bradner of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Martin Matzuk Baylor College of Medicine. Bradner, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explains the origins of this research as…
The Dalai Lama recommends a radical new approach: a religionless religion, if you will, stripped of myth, superstition, and narrow dogmatism, and focused on the practical work of transforming human behavior. He wants to incorporate the insights of the hard sciences as well as psychology, philosophy, and sociology into a broad-based new discipline to address…