The single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
In recent years astronomers have extended their view almost to the very edge of the observable universe. With the venerable Hubble Space Telescope researchers have spotted a handful of galaxies so faraway that we see them as they appeared just 400 million years or so after the big bang. But even as astronomers peer ever…
Americans are less likely to believe in man-made climate change as economic conditions get tougher, new research shows. Lyle Scruggs, associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, says the public’s belief in climate change dropped significantly as the economy dipped and unemployment climbed in the late 2000s. And the suddenness and timing…
The world’s largest particle accelerator is roaring along at an unprecedented pace, delivering torrents of data to its physicist handlers. But the hundreds of millions of collisions happening inside the machine every second are now growing into a thick fog that, paradoxically, threatens to obscure a fabled quarry: the Higgs boson. The problem is known…
A new study finds that activity in distinct parts of the brain can predict whether a person will remain cool or crumble under pressure. The results, presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, offer some great new clues that may help scientists understand how the brain copes with stressful situations, Activity in…
Grand theories of social evolution have, in the past, proved to be useless as guides to events, but that has in no way dented the popularity of such theories. These theories show the continuing appeal of scientism—the modern belief that scientific inquiry can enable us to resolve conflicts and dilemmas in contexts where traditional sources…
When discussing magnetic fields, images of the sun’s coronal loops or simulations of Earth’s magnetosphere may come to mind. But now, astronomers have observed the effects of a supersized magnetic field extending tens of thousands of light-years inside the two huge gamma-ray ‘bubbles’ that were discovered projecting from the top and bottom of the Milky…