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.
The sandy dunes of the Sahara may seem an unlikely place for a dairy farm, but about 7,000 years ago, herders tended and milked cattle in what is now desolate desert, new research shows. About 10,000 years ago, the Sahara desert went through a phase called the Holocene African Humid Period. Fossilized bones show that…
Radiation in space might harm the brains of astronauts in deep space by accelerating the development of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study on mice suggests. The research reveals another risk that manned deep-space missions to places such as Mars or the asteroids could pose, scientists added. “This study shows for the first time that exposure…
Even if you think your voting decisions emerge from thoughtful considerations about each candidate’s strengths, studies show that superficial traits have powerful influences on us, too. From their height to the attractiveness of their facial features to the pitch of their voices, according to accumulating evidence, candidates win or lose based on far more than…
An epic battle between paintballs and a giant asteroid could one day save the Earth from an apocalyptic space rock impact. The novel asteroid-deflecting scheme proposes that a cloud of paintballs shot into space could knock a dangerous asteroid off a collision course with Earth. Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft…
In the book Theoretical Morphology, George McGhee examines why living things look the way they do. He explores the space of the potential shapes of organisms, or their morphology, and compares that to what we find in Nature, finding that the actual morphologies are often a subset of those potential shapes, due to chance and…
A prevalent understanding, particularly in the 1980s, was that boys and girls are born cognitively the same. It was the way parents and society treated them that made them different. Since then, a preponderance of research has called this belief into question. The majority of today’s psychologists agree that some of the differences exhibited by…