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.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is investigating ways to store technology, including drones, on the ocean floor until needed by the U.S. Navy. An ongoing challenge for the Navy is anticipating where resources will be needed and distributing them accordingly, knowing it can take days or weeks for its ships to reach a…
Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But…
The EU’s debt crisis has sapped its ability to lead the way in ongoing global climate talks in Doha, and build on a fragile victory it clinched a year ago. The European Union is one of the few to have promised to sign up to a second emissions-cutting period under the Kyoto process, the only…
If the idea stands up, it is a bombshell. The universe is not the same wherever you look; it has special directions in which certain things occur and others do not. Parity is violated; the cosmological principle seems weakened. Author Metanexus Editors
Languages are like species. They evolve in mostly predictable ways, splitting into new species or dying out over time. Now, a group of linguists and computer scientists in the US and Canada have created a piece of software that can analyze enormous groups of languages to reconstruct what the earliest human languages might have sounded…
Giant dinosaurs could have warmed the planet with their flatulence, researchers said. British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus. By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs – as a whole – produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually. The…