The empty set may seem a bit feeble, but appearances deceive; it provides a vital building block for the whole of mathematics.
The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics. The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include…
A pair of mathematicians have proposed a unified theory of dark matter and dark energy that alters Einstein’s equations describing the fundamentals of gravity. The researchers suggest the law of energy and momentum conservation in spacetime is valid only when normal matter, dark matter and dark energy are all taken into account. For normal matter…
According to Aristotelian philosophy, earth was eternal, a world without history and with no end. Only with the advent of religions based on the promise of a final salvation – supposedly after the end of time – it became of great interest for philosophers and scholars to calculate the age and understand the possible lifespan…
In many parts of Africa, people already scramble to obtain food, land, and water, and discontent provides fertile ground for extremism. So it is important to think carefully about the response to Africa’s exploding population. Early next year, researchers will publish findings that provide good, if surprising, news: relaxed, trusting, and frank conversations between men…
Steven Pinker’s latest work is called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and it combines science with history to conclude that, by many measures, we live in the best of times, not the worst. Author Metanexus Editors
You know we’ve found something new and interesting when scientists don’t really know how to classify it. Using the Subaru Telescope an international team of astronomers has discovered a “super-Jupiter” so massive that it seems they’re not quite sure whether to call it a planet or a low-mass brown dwarf (in other words, a star…