The Space Shuttle may have taken its final, valedictory tour across the United States, but that’s no reason to think that our exploration of the heavens is over. The Space Race — both in terms of manned travel and remote sensing expeditions — is as competitive now as during the days of Sputnik. Some new…
Andrew Revkin reflects on the end of the “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in his Dot Earth blog from the New York Times. Ilan Safit, a colleague of mine at Pace University who teaches philosophy and religious studies with a focus on the environment, sees the focus of Rio and related discussions as…
International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline when it comes to scientific discovery
Move forward. High-five your neighbor. Turn around. Repeat. That’s the winning formula of one of the world’s smallest predators, the soil bacteria Myxococcus xanthus, and a new study by scientists at Rice University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School shows how Myxococcus xanthus uses the formula to spread,…
In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution. The Volunteer State has now given us both the Monkey Trial and the Monkey Bill. But it’s not just one state. Polls show that fewer than half of Americans accept evolution. Most of us still…
Japan is moving away from reliance on nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster, and plans to plans to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm. Officials say the proposal calls for construction of 143 wind turbines on platforms 10 miles off the coast of Fukushima, where the Daiichi nuclear power plant was damaged in…