SciDev.Net brings you the most commented on articles in 2012, including news, editorials and opinions, spanning topics as diverse as wind energy, access to weather data and communicating science.
Richard Pell, who teaches electronic media at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has a new museum, the Center for PostNatural History. With it, Pell endeavors to create a curiosity cabinet from the Anthropocene period – the age of man. The only criteria for inclusion in Pell’s Wunderkammer are that the organisms have been intentionally altered…
Research projects investigating the “miracle material” graphene and the human brain have won unprecedented funding of up to 1 billion euros each. Under the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme, the backing is designed to give Europe an edge in key areas of research. Graphene – a single-layer of carbon atoms – has extraordinary…
Roughly 230 million years ago, two mites and a midge got stuck in oozing resin from a now-extinct species of conifer tree in the mountains of northeastern Italy. They never moved again. Despite their ignoble deaths, the insects have now earned the distinction of being the oldest arthropods — invertebrates that include insects, arachnids, and…
Information technology that helps doctors and patients make decisions has been around for a long time. Crude online tools like WebMD get millions of visitors a day. But Watson is a different beast. According to IBM, it can digest information and make recommendations much more quickly, and more intelligently, than perhaps any machine before it—processing…
Initial readings of cosmic ray radiation on Mars suggest it’s about the same as on the International Space Station. Now we just need a spaceship.
Creativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found. They were almost twice as likely as the general…