The empty set may seem a bit feeble, but appearances deceive; it provides a vital building block for the whole of mathematics.
Lack of understanding of environmental issues is an education problem and requires an education solution. So do we need more science education? Not necessarily, because understanding environmental issues requires some familiarity with the social sciences and humanities as well as the natural sciences; it requires a global perspective and also a sense of how the…
Disgust is the subject of numerous recent works in widely different areas of philosophy, including moral and legal philosophy, aesthetics, and the new iteration of what is being called “experimental philosophy.” Perhaps because disgust is a focused passion, the most fruitful recent work on it has come from the sort of research that is of…
As the planet warms, the Arctic is feeling the heat. Trees and shrubs are taking hold on what was once tundra, like this young pine and surrounding shrubs in Norway’s Arctic Finnmark. A new international study of the satellite record of greening landscape shows that the places which were firmly Arctic in climate during the…
Frank Sinatra would have been happy to learn that a U.K. company called Excalibur Almaz wants to literally fly folks to the Moon and back again. The catch—it’ll cost a cool $150 million per ticket for a trip around Earth’s satellite and you’ll be flying in refurbished Soviet-era spacecraft built back in the 1970s. The…
Setting annual meetings in massive convention centers, plus the cumulative effect of well-intentioned policies for promoting young academics, have effectively sabotaged the intergenerational culture essential for a rich sense of intellectual identity. Because of the physical restraints they impose, convention centers have conspired to stifle the informal gatherings that have always been one of the…
The purpose of the simulation is to reproduce the entire evolution of a universe made largely of cold dark matter to see whether it produces the same structures that we see in ours—from the galactic structures to galactic clusters, galactic superclusters, and beyond. Author Metanexus Editors