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.
Women cluster in certain fields, according to a study of millions of journal articles, while men get more credit
Jeremy Bentham, his disciple John Stuart Mill once wrote, would always ask of a proposition or belief, “Is it true?” By contrast, Bentham’s contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mill observed, thought “What is the meaning of it?” was a much more interesting question. Today’s New Atheists –Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher…
Millions of years ago, oversized insects like griffinflies boasting wingspans comparable to today’s hawks scuttled across (and fluttered above) the planet. But why these jumbo jets of the insect world shrunk to modern size has remained a mystery, until now. Turns out, as dinosaurs evolved flight and eventually took to the skies as birds, they…
You may have noticed that when you think positively, you tend to feel more relaxed and energetic. When you are upset, you are more likely to feel tired and lazy. These sensations are not coincidental. The way we think strongly affects our physical state. The endocrine system is the powerhouse that regulates our moods. The…
By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, a method that has yielded an unprecedented amount of data for such observations. The resolution at which they…
Review of Jeffery G. Sobosan, Romancing the Universe: Theology, Science, and Cosmology (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1999). Sobosan is a theologian and I a physicist, so I began with trepidation concerning the depth and accuracy of his scientific writing. Thankfully, my prejudice was baseless—Sobosan references current mainstream theories of quantum physics,…