It’s a tantalizing find in a Biblical mystery — Oxford University researchers have concluded that a set of skeletal remains which many Bulgarians attribute to John the Baptist probably belonged to a first century male from the Middle East. While that doesn’t prove that the bones belonged to the man revered by Christians as the…
John Wiley has reached an agreement with TED, the nonprofit specializing in spreading discussions on technology, entertainment, design and other subjects, to produce instructional material for TED Studies, 21 collections of curated discussions aimed at the school market and organized under academic subject categories. The Wiley/TED instructional content will be offered for free along with…
In The Better Angels of our Nature, published last month, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that we have misread the evidence, which in fact shows we are becoming less violent as time moves on, due largely to the forces of modernity, or civilization. In The End of War, science writer John Horgan also challenges our…
An entirely new type of particle has been discovered by scientists using the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland. The discovery of the new particle, called “neutral Xi_b^star baryon,” was made by the CMS experiment, one of six separate particle physics experiments running at the LHC….
Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy. That’s the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in a commentary in the journal Nature that the economic pain of a…
The announcement that astronomers have found a potential alien world that could be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet is raising a big question: How will scientists confirm the existence of a true alien Earth? While NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which discovered the newfound Earth-like planet candidate KOI 172.2, is great for finding large numbers…