The empty set may seem a bit feeble, but appearances deceive; it provides a vital building block for the whole of mathematics.
Last April the scientific journal Nature published a series of articles on the overproduction of Ph.D.’s in the sciences. In particular, the journal singled out doctoral education in the United States for its imbalanced Ph.D.-to-job ratio, citing some stunning statistics: From 1973 to 2006, for example, the number of biological-sciences Ph.D. recipients in tenure-track positions…
Worried that public schools are failing to prepare students for a complex and changing world, educators unveiled new guidelines Tuesday that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the United States, emphasizing hands-on learning and critical scrutiny of scientific evidence. Among many other changes, the guidelines call for introducing climate science…
Taking a picture of a black hole, an object so gravitationally bound that not even photons of light can escape, sounds like an oxymoron, but astronomers are attempting to do just that. What they’re hoping to glimpse is something called the “event horizon” — the swirl of matter and energy that are visible around the…
We cannot say for sure what kind of a home Earth will offer in 2080, but averages made across thousands of model runs help paint a picture of what a 2 degrees Celsius warmer world would look like. Author Metanexus Editors
The living slime that may have been the muse for the 1958 science-fiction film The Blob just got creepier: Evidence has emerged that slime mold, a brainless single-celled organism, has a form of memory. In experiments with the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, scientists at the University of Sydney noticed that the life-form avoided retracing its…
E.O. Wilson reflects on evolution and the human condition over at the New York Times blog The Stone: Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good? Are we built to pledge our lives to a group, even to the…