In American political life it is obviously unhelpful to be viewed as the party of godlessness—everyone gets that. But it’s the how of appealing to the godly that ought to compel a bit more scrutiny, because how these appeals are being conducted now, and by both parties, does not make for an edifying spectacle. It’s…
Researchers in China compared brain scans of young people with “internet addiction disorder” with their peers and found damage to the white matter fibres connecting emotional processing, attention and decision making parts. Similar impairments have been found in research into other addictions including alcohol and cocaine. This news comes after researchers at the University of…
Most people learn to count when they are children. Yet surprisingly, not all languages have words for numbers. A recent study shows that a few tongues lack number words and as a result, people in these cultures have a difficult time performing common quantitative tasks. The findings add new insight to the way people acquire…
Although the world produces enough food to feed everyone, two million children die of malnutrition every year. Food insecurity has become a symbol of inequity and remains the most crippling consequence of poverty. Campaigners for food security must include science in their goals — and in return scientists need to heed wider concerns around solutions….
Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK. The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that…
In surprising numbers, people posted, viewed and searched for science-related topics last year — sharing news from space and undersea, commenting on new discoveries and uploading photos and video in a full-out embrace of the ability to communicate with thousands of others about global subjects in real time. The trend is, in some ways, self-fulfilling….