Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?
Researchers genetically modified E. coli bacteria to convert sugar into an oil that is almost identical to conventional diesel. If the process could be scaled up, this synthetic fuel could be a viable alternative to the fossil fuel, the team said. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor…
Two diamonds as wide as earring studs have been made to share the spooky quantum state known as entanglement. The feat, performed at room temperature, blurs the divide between the classical and quantum worlds, since typically the quantum link has been made with much smaller particles at low temperatures. Author Metanexus Editors
A study of rhesus macaque monkeys may have solved a long-standing puzzle on a link between social rank and health. A study of 10 social groups of macaque females showed that the activity level of an individual’s immune genes was an accurate predictor of her social rank. In a paper in Proceedings of the National…
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently observed two clusters full of massive stars that appear to be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are located some 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way. What at first was thought to be only one cluster in…
In his most recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks laments the results of a study led by Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, which demonstrate an “inequality of opportunity” between rich and poor children in America. The children of the rich and poor, we’re told, are raised “in starkly different ways and…
Changes in the brain linked to childhood abuse and maltreatment may prime a child for future mental health problems, new research finds. The study, which compared the brains of teenagers who had been abused as children with those of very similar teens who had not experienced any mistreatment, is one of the first to follow…