Is our universe just one of many? The idea may sound a bit bizarre, but it could be a reality, scientists say.
The most precise measurement ever made of the speed of the universe’s expansion is in, thanks to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and it’s a doozy. Space itself is pulling apart at the seams, expanding at a rate of 46.2 plus or minus 1.3 miles per second per megaparsec (a megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years)….
Any kind of underwater diving involves process for that very reason. There’s the early-morning wake-up, the weather check, the gear check (masks, fins, regulators … check). And then there’s the dive site approach – whether you’re walking in from the shore or taking a boat to some far forgotten reef. Diving Lake Untersee is just…
In a recent paper written specifically with social scientists in mind, Stuart West, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, lays down the power of the selfish gene. It’s a great paper that takes a look at why so many misconceptions have taken hold and lays out, in nonspecialist language, the reasons why most criticisms of…
The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. How hot was it? The temperature differences between…
An essay in Science magazine by Andrew Hodges, the dean of Wadham College at Oxford University, suggests that Alan Turing’s greatest contribution was defining the limits of what computers can “know”—that is, what is computable. By formalizing the computability question in 1936, Turing illuminated the deeper issue of what humans could know: Is our knowledge…
One of the most remarkable discoveries about exoplanets—planets that exist outside of our solar system—is that some of them appear to be flying through interstellar space on their own. They’re not orbiting a star, nor are they tied to any other obvious companion. The precise number of these planets—alternately called “free-floating,” “Steppenwolf,” “unbound,” or “rogue”…