Our ability to find and share information today is potentially limitless. But how did we get here? From cave paintings to the iPad—how does human innovation bring us here?
Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation’s top scientific research group said in a new report. The group, the National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other…
Traditional methods of fMRI analysis systematically skew which regions of the brain appear to be activating, potentially invalidating hundreds of papers that use the technique, according to Stanford School of Medicine researchers. Pictures of brain regions “activating” are by now a familiar accompaniment to any neurological news story (including some in KurzweilAI — see Editor’s…
The Cretaceous Period of Earth history ended with a mass extinction that wiped out numerous species, most famously the dinosaurs. A new study now finds that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Researchers published their findings online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The…
In this lecture, William Grassie proposes that we focus science education more on what happened when than on how and why evolution occurs.
The expansion of European settlement in Australia triggered a massive coral collapse at the Great Barrier Reef more than 50 years ago, according to a new study. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that runoff from farms clouded the pristine waters off the Queensland coast and killed the natural…
NASA scientists say they’ve made a discovery in the Arctic Ocean ‘as dramatic and unexpected as finding a rainforest in the middle of a desert’. When its Icescape expedition punched through three-foot thick sea ice, the team found waters richer in the microscopic marine plants known as phytoplankton than any other ocean region on Earth….