The empty set may seem a bit feeble, but appearances deceive; it provides a vital building block for the whole of mathematics.
Two international teams of physicists have found subtle hints of what could be the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would help explain why other particles have mass. The researchers today announced that they may have uncovered a whiff of the Higgs in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator outside…
Several recent thought-provoking papers from the Future Visions group have inspired me to offer some thoughts from a "female perspective". As an observational astronomer and a Christian, I found myself in consonance with many views expressed in Bernard Haisch’s contribution "Freeing the Scientific Imagination from Fundamentalist Scientism" (although I disagree that strident debunking is exclusively…
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…
Quantum entanglement is such a mainstay of modern physics that it is worth reflecting on how long it took to emerge. What began as a perceptive but vague insight by Albert Einstein languished for decades before becoming a branch of experimental physics and, increasingly, modern technology. In 1964 John Bell figured out how to convert…
Archaeologists have uncovered two 9,500-year-old cultic figurines in excavations just outside of Jerusalem, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) reported. Found at the Tel Moza archaeological site, one of the Neolithic figures is a limestone ram with precisely carved spiral horns. “The sculpting is extraordinary and precisely depicts details of the anima’s image,” the IAA excavators…
Crop diseases could be detected earlier and more easily if a new method that stamps a leaf with a colour-changing biosensor is successful. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $100,000 to Hideaki Tsutsui of the University of California, Riverside, to develop the early warning system for crop diseases. Tsutsui’s idea is to print biosensors…