We know we got here from somewhere, but who would have suspected it was by way of a fish that used electrical currents to hunt and communicate and locate itself?
An unprecedented project that will attempt to unravel the ways our biological clocks tick is underway by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. No one really knows the details of how our body clocks work. But when the rhythms get messed up, the results can be horrendous. Accidents, loss of productivity, disease, including…
It’s thirty-five times heavier than other quarks, and as heavy as the nucleus of an atom of gold. The top quark is the elephant-in-the-room of the standard model. Its lifetime in particle detectors is so short that we can only infer its existence by sifting through vast quantities of data produced by smashing together subatomic…
Scientists from CERN will announce on July 4 whether the tantalizing “hints” of the Higgs Boson which they presented in December have been strengthened or grown weaker over the past six months. Although the results may not be strong enough to declare an official discovery, they are rumored to show very similar signals to those…
After an eight-year analysis, an international team of scientists has announced a breakthrough in the understanding of how algae and iron interact to sequester atmospheric carbon. By adding iron to the ocean, the researchers induced a massive algal bloom. A significant portion died and sank to the ocean floor, carrying its sequestered carbon along with…
Some college students facing exams used to try to study by sleeping with earphones on while playing a recording of material they had not managed to cover. It was regarded as a waste of time. Now, however, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot believe sleeplearning of new things may be possible –…
Ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge. Scientists and laypeople alike would agree that for all we have come to know, there is far more we don’t know. More important, everyday there is far more we know we don’t know. One crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being…