New Year, New Science
Nature looks ahead to the key findings and events that may emerge in 2013.
New Year, New Science
Nature looks ahead to the key findings and events that may emerge in 2013.
Similar Posts
To Teach Evolution, You Have to Understand Creationists
If we hope to understand creationism, we need to abandon the trope that only the ignorant can oppose mainstream evolutionary science. It is a comfortable delusion, a head-in-the-sand approach to improving evolution education in the United States. In the end, it stems from a shocking ignorance among evolutionists about the nature of creationist beliefs. Author…
Brains: Humanity’s Quest to Understand What’s Inside Our Skulls
A new exhibition in London is putting the brain under a microscope — literally. “Brains: The Mind as Matter” asks not what brains have done for us but what, in the name of science, we have done to brains. The brain has fascinated and baffled scientists for centuries. The exhibition, which opens Thursday at the…
Global Warming Would Harm Some Areas, Help Others
“Global warming” and “climate change” succinctly describe a complicated phenomenon, and in just a few decades they have become common descriptors. But while global warming would be bad for the Earth as a whole, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would affect different areas in different ways, and local climate change is what…
“New” Genes May Have Played a Role in Human Brain Evolution
When an international team of researchers scanned the human genome for “de novo” genes, they putatively uncovered 60, three times more than once estimated. More surprising, many of these genes are active in the cerebral cortex, suggesting that de novo genes might have played a key role in the evolution of the human mind. Author…
Beijing’s Pollution, Seen From Space in Before and After Photos
The stifling pollution in Beijing is being called “airpocalypse” by some. According to an air monitoring station located at the U.S. Embassy there, particulate pollution was literally off the charts — with readings well into the 700s on a 0-500 scale. To see how the pollution over much of China increased from Jan. 3 to…
Is There Enough Wind to Power Global Energy Demand?
There is enough energy available in winds to meet all of the world’s demand. Atmospheric turbines that convert steadier and faster high-altitude winds into energy could generate even more power than ground- and ocean-based units. New research from Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira examines the limits of the amount of power that could be harvested from winds,…