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.
Barbara King interviewed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a meeting that was suggested by the American arm of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in the wake of a February blog post King wrote at 13:7, questioning whether Dawkins was the best choice to be headline speaker at the March 24 Reason Rally in Washington,…
The vast majority of the radioactive plutonium on the planet is man-made—roughly 500 metric tons, or enough to make 100,000 nuclear weapons by the calculations of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. Much of it is the legacy of the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia in the latter decades of the 20th…
Swedish explorers have put to rest speculation of a spaceship at the bottom of the Baltic — but they’re adding fuel to the ‘what is it’ mystery of this deep-sea object anyway. Digital pictures FoxNews.com has obtained from the team show that the object, located beneath the waves of the Baltic between Sweden and Finland,…
Researchers announced they have found that a starvation hormone markedly extends life span in mice without the need for calorie restriction. “Restricting food intake has been shown to extend lifespan in several different kinds of animals. In our study, we found transgenic mice that produced more of the hormone fibroblast growth factor-21 (FGF21) got the…
An incoming asteroid may benefit microbes living deep underground, according to a recent study of an ancient impact in the United States’ Chesapeake Bay. A biological census of the subsurface life forms suggests that impacts create new niches for these deep dwellers to spread into. In the last couple of decades, biologists have come to…
Neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani recorded dream appearances of 20 key objects, such as “male” or “room,” and used a machine-learning algorithm to correlate those concepts with fMRI images to find patterns that could be used to predict what people were dreaming about without having to wake them. Such information could help inform the study of why…