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.
Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP, according to a new study. The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries, according to the research, where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather…
Most cultural institutions and research laboratories still rely on magnetic tape to archive their collections. Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast not only this old-school format but also CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s. The electronics giant partnered with Kyoto University’s Kiyotaka Miura to develop “semiperpetual” slivers of quartz…
A foot buried beneath Scottish soil for at least 345 million years pushes back the timeline for the appearance of the first four-legged creatures that spent their lives on dry land. The specimen, 20 million years older than any known five-toed fossil, is just 10 millimeters across and comes from an unknown species. It’s one…
This fall, science writers have made sport of yet another instance of bad neuroscience. The culprit this time is Naomi Wolf; her new book, “Vagina,” has been roundly drubbed for misrepresenting the brain and neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin. Earlier in the year, Chris Mooney raised similar ire with the book “The Republican Brain,” which…
Biology is making it clearer by the day that a man’s health and well-being have a measurable impact on his future children’s health and happiness. This is not because a strong, resilient man has a greater likelihood of being a fabulous dad — or not only for that reason — or because he’s probably got…
Humans could be the only animals that are sensitive to fairness, suggests a new Royal Society Biology Letters study. It’s not that other animals are unfair. They just don’t seem to care as much about fairness as we do, or so this and other research concludes. Ingrid Kaiser of the University of Heidelberg and colleagues…