Welcome to the warm Anthropocene. The growing volume of global temperature data adds to the evidence that we have left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch dominated by human activities.
Ships’ propellers emit sound in the same frequency range that some whales use for communicating, and previous studies have shown the whales change their calling patterns in noisy places. Now, researchers have measured stress hormones in the faeces of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, and found they rose with the density of shipping. Ocean…
Just in time for the Christmas holiday, Vatican Radio announced that Pope Benedict XVI will be launching a new digital ministry (of sorts) through a Twitter feed with the handle @Pontifex. With the encouragement of Twitter director of social innovation, Claire Diaz Ortiz, Il Papa will extend this engagement into digital space, broadcasting 140-character messages…
The four dimensions in the Great Matrix of Being give us four ways of measuring reality — by time, by scale, by energy density flow, and by thresholds of emergent complexity. All phenomena can be located within this Matrix.
Researchers from King’s College London have provided the first experimental evidence confirming a great British mathematician’s theory of how biological patterns such as tiger stripes or leopard spots are formed. The study not only demonstrates a mechanism which is likely to be widely relevant in vertebrate development, but also provides confidence that chemicals called morphogens,…
A common and ancient plant dye could replace cobalt and help deliver greener lithium-ion batteries, according to an American study. Purpurin, an extract of the common Madder plant, turns out to have the right characteristics to use as a cathode, according to research led by The City College of New York (along with Rice University…
Until this week climate change was sadly absent from the presidential election discourse, even though scientific reports have linked the increasingly extreme events experienced recently in the US and elsewhere – the drought and heatwaves, deluges and blizzards that some call “weather weirding” – to systemic change rather than coincidental natural fluctuations. Sandy has forced…